Ulla Straus - Limitless Frame (2021) [Official Digital Download]

Ulla roots her style in improvised jazz and blues on a very welcome follow-up to her entry for our Documenting Sound series, and the sublime ‘Tumbling Towards A Wall’ LP.

Ulla offers more precious room to breathe and space to think on ‘Limitless Frame’, dispensing a broader palette of instrumentation to evoke finer, ephemeral feels with a more timeless appeal. Her sound appears more porous to influence from strains of wistful jazz and blues here, vacillating and morphing her dreamlike ambient purview between parts of signature, aleatoric ambient pads and rustling room recordings, along with more classicist or traditionalist turns of guitars, sax and keys that call to mind K. Leimer via The Remote Viewer. It’s a perhaps surprising change in the winds of her music, and one we’re very happy to follow.

In the artist’s own words “I made this music as a way to hug myself” and listeners can trust that hug will extend to them, too. She spends the first half of the record wrapping us up in clouds of pads, processed strums and fractured melodies, whisked to a gentle peak in the keening swoon of ‘Chest of Drawers’ around the middle, while the second half unravels into gorgeous loner arrangements. She captures the most wistful sensations akin to Annie Hogan’s parlour keys on ‘Something Inside My Body’, and crystalline trickles of guitars in ‘Clearly The Memory’, with the softly pealing wind of ‘Walk Alone’ calling to mind Loren Connors and Daniel Carter’s ‘The Departing of A Dream.’

Tracklist:
1. Aware Of Something (04:57)
2. Look Or Look Away (04:01)
3. Both Feelings (03:12)
4. Chest Of Drawers (03:03)
5. Shelter (03:53)
6. Something Inside My Body (08:32)
7. Clearly The Memory (04:08)
8. Far Away (05:42)
9. Somewhere Else (03:12)


Thanks to the Original customer!