Ulaan Khol — I
Steven R. Smith is Ulaan Khol, another in a series of his solo guises. He has worked extensively under his given name, as well as Hala Strana, and as a member of Thuja and Mirza. I is being billed as the first installment of the Ceremony trilogy, and it's a stunner, I'm happy to report. I'm most familiar with Smith's work as Hala Strana, which is multi-instrumentalist music performed at least in part within Eastern inflicted modes and scales. Hala Strana's recordings are usually relatively lo-fi and primitive in nature, and seemingly at least partly improvised. This first Ulaan Khol album is a bit of a departure from the Eastern inflected, more folky (for lack of a better term) sounds of Hala Strana.
These ten un-named tracks consist mainly of guitar, organ and drums. It's heavily psychedelic and terrifically fuzzed out at times. It's definitely free-form, and more than a little bit dark, yet it's also controlled. It's a visceral album that sucks you in, and takes you down the road like you made a wrong turn, and you can't find your way back. The heavy jams could be compared to Fushitsusha, High Rise, or Flying Saucer Attack, as the Soft Abuse website does, but this is really beyond all that. The comparison is only somewhat apt because those artists put across music that comes across as a pure distillation of "real" shit and not manufactured music put out there simply to impress. That spirituality shows through, and it takes this music to another level.
For a disc which comes across as an uncompromising piece of improvisation, I is surprisingly accessible. It sounds great, the production is warm and spacious. As far as the music goes, the organ sounds are calming, the guitar parts are barbed, startling and exploratory, and the percussion is tasteful. It's decidedly less lo-fi than one might expect. The sound is close to late sixties/early seventies analog production, which reminds a bit of anything from Quicksilver to Harmonia. It makes one look forward with great interest to the rest of the trilogy.