'Jazz Plates’ finds Ulla and Perila making music in the same room for the first time, exhaling an improvised ambient-jazz air gently crackling with a dream-textured haze for the ages. It’s remarkably intimate material, linking the duo’s own hypnagogic portrait of jazz, in all its most hushed permutations. ‘Jazz Plates’ catches the mutual spirits measuredly channelling their shared love of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders over three sessions, making use of voice, clarinet, guitar, piano, vocals and various non-musical objets - logs, leafs, an aquarium - until they hit their emotional core.
Previously separated by an ocean, their first recording sessions in person finds an intoxicating play of slow and atmospheric sounds porous to the shifting weather outside, with one plate subtly guided by the sun, and another by heavy rain. Unhurried, etheric, and wistful, the album’s 13 parts wash over the senses and comb frayed nerves with a soothingly meditative resonance that emerges from their “mutual dialogue of our instruments and souls”, as Perila puts it. Distant voices swirl around the duo’s dampened instrumentation on opener ‘lasting like a grass leaf’, as themes duck and dive over plangent ambience. It isn’t a capital A Ambient record, by any means, but Perila and Ulla’s approach is impressionistic rather than figurative. They form ghostly half songs around hollow trace rhythms on ‘a josh outside the window’, coating the breathy romance of modern jazz in a layer of dust, and let the clarinet do most of the work on ‘placing in shell parcels’ as it slow dances around a reverberant vocal.
More than anything, ‘Jazz Plates’ seems to highlight the sensuality of collaboration; you can almost hear the duo trading glances and allowing the mood to dictate the momentum. When they switch things up on the second disc, they pull their ideas more tightly together without losing any of the intimacy. Muffled electric guitar prangs punctuate woody rhythms on ‘messages from a floor’, as if the two are trying to rethink the logic of free jazz, and on the heart piercing ‘cheese homework’, blues-y guitar phrases are sunk under a powerful, loping bassline. Closing track ‘givegrade’ is the album’s straightest moment. With none of the emotional heft sacrificed; Perila’s bright, open vocals are suspended over a molasses slow thump and tweezed out bass plucks. If you listen closely, there’s jazz right there staring you in the face, with its edges smudged from an exercise into pure expression.
