Ultra Audience is the sole document of ambient / noise group Ultra United, and thus evidently quite the labor of love.  There is a lot of passion in these 9 tracks, each which is accompanied by a  picture or short poem in the beautiful, colorful booklet, raising the question of whether the album is meant to follow some kind of vague, abstract concept.  The poems are often in stilted, cliched rhymes, but they lend a very personal air to the music and overall the packaging is undoubtedly marvellous.  I spotted a used copy in a local record store, having never heard of this group or album, instantly gravitated towards it and ended up buying it.  For something by a group so obscure and likely made on a low budget, it sure looks great.

Many groups that blend the genres of ambient and noise are jam bands of sorts, letting abrasive textures take over their music when it suits the flow of the improvisation.  This is where “Ultra Audience” differs…  it is obviously solitary, composed music, and is almost totally focused on textures of sound as expressors of emotions.  Which movements on the album should employ volume and harshness has been carefully chosen.  Accompanied by the poetry inside the booklet the message, the album seems to say, “This is how I have felt during my life.  Listen, and if it’s unpleasant…  Now you know how it was for me”.  So much ambient music focuses on the cosmic, but this musician is not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve.  The poems reference the happenings of a life we have no hope of further access to, but leave the music with this general sense of significance in the context of a life.  The unfortunate side effect is a certain angsty cheesiness in the vein of the woman sexily exhaling cigarette smoke on the cover, but this can be mostly avoided if you put the booklet down.

Each track is its own notably different textural realm, separated from the others by at least 10 seconds of silence. Some of the noise tracks simply rest in a suspended state, (”From Consciousness to Nowhere” and “The Volunteer”, accompanied in the booklet with the phrase ‘life in a locked groove’) mimicing the feeling of being stuck in a depressive rut.  These are the album at its most unpleasant.  One can feel they endure the noise, a humourless grey sheet that brings back every dismal rainy day, for a reason.  This is not a nihilistic album, as is obvious in the very dramatic synth pieces (similar in style to Vidna Obmana, vintage Steve Roach or even some old Skinny Puppy instrumentals), like “The Quiet Riot” and “Sunset”.  These tracks have wonderful, sensitive melodies, but are few and far between on this album.  “Physical Initiation”, with its abrupt lurch into static life, is a well placed opening gesture.  “Scrape the Sky” contains aggressive analog synth squalls that are like a storm.  Only “The Incendiary Lover”, led by a needlessly distorted synth line that makes the track sound incredibly cheap and sequenced, really gets any criticism from me.

The noise textures are not volatile bursts of furious feedback, rather they are cold digital distortion created through DSP.  They have less depth than analog noise often does, and on their own, the sounds are rather uninteresting, but by the end of each of the rather lengthy tracks they are densely intertwined in such a way as to be mesmerizing to me, although they may still be unlistenable to some people.  I feel the dullness of the textures reflects the stagnation of desensitization and apathy.  As Maurizio Bianchi said, sound “to work on complete realising of the modern decadence”.  The highlight of the album for me is the absolutely transcendent closer “Snow Muzak” which after beginning with 4 minutes of silence, uses its digital cleanliness to evoke an unnaturally simple, glistening surreal dimension not too far removed from the work of Gas or Oval.

“Ultra Audience” is a solid album that succeeds in bringing the genre of ambient to a more personal, immediate and narrative place, as well as integrating it with elements of digital noise.  It had to grow on me, as it’s very slow moving music.  Fans of minimal ambient music should pick this up if they see a copy.  4 stars.