Ui and Uilab: Drums 'n' Basses

On stage, New York's Ui are a low-end trio, locked in and booming. Their two bassists, Wilbo Wright and frontguy Sasha Frere-Jones, loop deft, wobbly lines and thick chords into slowly vibrating knots. Clem Waldmann's drumming belongs to the '60s funk tradition, crisp and shifty, rock-steady but just off-center enough to nudge it from metronomic obviousness into grooveland.

That seems simple enough. When they embark on a recording session, though, Ui become unusually devoted conceptualists, heading off on a peculiar path for a groove band, one that only players with their considerable technical skill can navigate. Their procedures suggest jazz or classical composers and players rather than a funk band, idiosyncratic formal considerations taking precedence over pop hooks. It's an approach you'd expect from highbrow sound artists, not from a group who encourage people to dance, but Ui remain devoted to working on both sides of the theoretical divide. Many of their early songs were developed by collective jamming; others were composed outright by Frere-Jones. The studio has played a big role in opening up what they've done in terms of tape editing and creating parts that couldn't be played live -- it's significant that the first Ui album, 1995's Unlike (Lunamoth), was a disc of remixes.

Still, Ui are saved from coming off like ideologues or studio wonks by their willingness to ignore their own rules. Ui's songs are instrumental, except when they're not; they don't use guitars, except when they do; they favor patterns over melodies, except when they come up with an especially nice tune. And they've just released three CDs in the span of a few weeks, covering their earliest and most recent work, as well as an odd collaboration from the interim.

The Fires EP (Bingo), credited to Uilab, is a little charmer of a disc: recorded in 1996 with a few members of Stereolab (hence the name Uilab), it's centered on four mixes of a cover of Brian Eno's coolly elegant "St. Elmo's Fire" (from Another Green World) and filled out by an original piece and a variation on a Sun Ra theme ("Impulsed Rah!"). The theoretical focus here is on the art of the mix -- how a single source with a compositional base can be manipulated into multiple, drastically different forms. Meanwhile the voices of Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen obliterate conceptual distinctions with sheer nightingale loveliness.

Another new Ui CD -- The 2-Sided EP/The Sharpie (1993-1995), on Southern -- collects two early 12-inchers: their 1994 debut, The 2-Sided EP, and 1996's The Sharpie. The former is more like their live sets in its straight-up three-piece arrangements than any subsequent Ui release has been; the latter features a few extended tracks that stretch long arcs of cello and keyboard melodies over double-time beats. Visionary adapters that they are, Ui thought it would be a clever idea to incorporate some drum 'n' bass rhythms into The Sharpie when they recorded it at the end of '95. As it turned out, they were right -- though Waldmann's ability to play breakbeats in real time is also impressive on a purely technical level. Ui's live time-warping dynamics demonstrate more of an understanding of drum 'n' bass than almost anyone else from a rock background who's attempted it.

Lifelike (Southern), the new album proper, is a studio product all the way, heavy on the digital multi-tracking and sampling; a never-released single was cannibalized for parts of several pieces. Most of its tracks are audibly the result of specific studio processes -- "Laceria," for instance, is a set of contrapuntal bass parts contextualized by weird sampling and nailed down by a typically snappy drum pattern. The band concentrate on the possibilities of their bass/bass/drums line-up, but almost everything on Lifelike finds them dipping into the rest of their instrument bag, too -- electric guitar, piano, sequencers. It's as conceptually complicated an album as Ui have ever made; somehow it remains a dance record. The point of its experimentation is the pursuit of untapped grooves that engage the hips as well as the mind.

-- Douglas Wolk