Ulaan Khol – II

Ulaan Khol marks but yet another recording title for noise/drone/ambient/folk/whatever behemoth Stephen R. Smith. Smith, on top of recording under his own name, has also done solo work as Hala Strana, is a member of Thuja, performed with Glenn Donaldson in Mirza, and is involved the Jewelled Antler musical collective, an assemblage of all kinds of spacey and visionary characters. The first Ulaan Khol album, I, was released in March of last year and II hit shelves the following December. III is set for release sometime in 2009. Guilt for your own inactivity should’ve kicked in somewhere halfway through his pedigree, but if that didn’t do the job, it’ll hurt to know that this new record, like so many that have preceded it, is absolute quality, to boot.

Smith has dabbled with more genres than I care to name, but the game on II, an untitled eight-song cycle, is primarily drone, falling somewhere between a thicker Flying Saucer Attack and a thinned out, bite-size Earth 2. Chief instruments are guitar and organ. The latter swells with a marked funereal vibe often redolent of death while the former sprawls throughout the soundscape like interstellar kudzu, coming – for me, at least – to symbolize life, thus transforming this 40-minute long-player into something of a dialectic on mortality, sited on an epic stage. That’s my reading of the sludgey cataclysm, though for each unique listener there’s undoubtedly a unique interpretation waiting to be mined – consider this a Rorschach test through speakers.

If I sound a bit overanalytical, it can be only because II’s playing lends itself well to embellishment. Smith harbors a fixation for the temporal and spatial properties of sound, each track then a miniature meditation on aural growth and recession. He often plays best when he doesn’t play at all, so to say, instead allowing indescript feedback to flood the abundant chasms of his creations that organ, percussion (which makes rare appearances), and more conventional guitar can’t always fill. There’s gloom and foreboding in II, but it’s approached with a contemplative quality more often found in heady psychedelic tunes than amorphous drone fests.

It’s tempting to call Smith’s works here “jams,” especially given influences such as Ash Ra Tempel, but there’s less interest in the capacity of instruments themselves and more on the spaces they occupy. No matter the designation, though, II is necessary listening, further cementing Stephen R. Smith as a treasure of the American underground. Listen loudly and with an open (altered?) mind.