Signals Into Space

"Signals Into Space, only their second album in two decades, distills elements that have always been present in Ultramarine's music into a potent new brew. Their sound is more refined than ever, but it's hard to put your finger on what, exactly, that sound is. Warm, liquid synths and gently pulsing grooves scan as ambient, but vintage drum machines add teeth. The tone of the electric bass, muscular but understated, flashes to Tortoise's spacious brand of post-rock. The watercolour wash of Ric Elsworth's vibraphone and the searching saxophone of Iain Ballamy (a member of the group Food, with multiple albums for ECM and Rune Grammofon to his name) nod to ethereal jazz. The most fitting tag might be 'Balearic,' given the album's drowsy drift; there's even a sample of a 1983 song by Orquesta de las Nubes, Suso Saiz's balmily experimental Spanish group. Ultramarine call Signals Into Space - composed in a small, windowless room in an industrial complex in their native Essex - 'an escapist record.' But it's no mere pastiche of palm trees and Mediterranean tides. Its effects are more complex, even contradictory - a picture of white-sand beaches superimposed on dull cement walls, a dream of summer bundled in heavy down. Atmospheric and skeletal, their music projects outward yet turns inward" (Pitchfork, 01/2019)