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Visit product page →Ulrika Spacek is a British experimental rock band formed in Berlin by Rhys Edwards and Rhys Williams, relocated to Homerton, London.
Work on debut album The Album Paranoia'began in the summer of 2014 in the band's shared house KEN, and was finished there last month.
In conjunction to the making of The Album Paranoia', the band has curated a number of nights under the name Oysterland'combining their first live performances with a series of exhibitions.
The band's music has drawn various interpretations, a cross pollination of hypnotic fuzz, Verlain-Malkmus guitar idiosyncrasies and intertwining feelings of both angst and melancholia.
Tracklisting:
1. I Don't Know
2. Porcelain
3. Circa 1954
4. Strawberry Glue
5. Beta Male
6. NK
7. Ultra Vivid
8. She's A Cult
9. There's A Little Passing Cloud in You
10. Airportism -
Ulrika Spacek return on June 2nd with the release of their second album, Modern English Decoration. Much like their debut album released in early 2016, the band chose to record, produce and mix the entirety of the record in their shared house - a former art gallery called KEN', so named because of a cryptic inscription found above the front door.Visit product page →
The relatively short amount of time between their first and second albums is testament to the band's self-contained creative environment and the productivity it encourages. There's a tendency to label this degree of self-reliant creativity DIY'- and the band do certainly feel emboldened by that ethos - yet to consider Modern English Decoration solely in these terms is a disservice.
Their craft is considered and purposeful, the means of its production reflecting the band's overall vision rather than the value system of an often haphazard and accidental DIY culture. 'We enjoy listening to music through the album format and want our records to reflect that', says Rhys Edwards (guitars, vocals, synthesiser).
Ulrika Spacek formed in Berlin in one night, when 14-year-long friends Rhys Edwards and Rhys Williams conceptualised Ulrika Spacek'and came up with The Album Paranoia as their debut album title. Moving back to London with the intention to record it, they were joined by Joseph Stone (guitars, organ, synths, violin), Ben White (bass) and Callum Brown (drums, percussion), ossifying into the five-piece they are now. The album was released soon after with little forewarning and was accompanied by a year long, near-monthly club night called Oysterland.
Given the lyrics often favour abstraction and the vocals can be more impressionistic than declarative, the album title itself offers perhaps the most telling entry point to the record. In part, it's a self-effacing play on an interior design cliché that references the meticulous creative processes the band adheres to. There's also a nod towards the environment in which it was created - a Victorian house turned art gallery turned home studio
Unsurprisingly given the context of its creation, Modern English Decoration might be considered a companion piece of sorts to The Album Paranoia.But there are crucial differences. Most notably, this isn't the work of the Ulrika Spacek conceptualised by Edwards and Williams in Berlin - Modern English Decoration is the band as five rather than two people, and it shows.
Those who have witnessed the intensity of their live show will instantly recognise the merits in this. The bass and drums provide a versatile anchor, at once soft, then aggressive, while the vocals drift woozily in and out, like druggy hindsight or skewed premonition. With three guitarists in the band guitars were always going to be central to the music, but what is less expected is the dynamic interplay between the trio that suggests a three-headed version of the Verlaine-Lloyd axis at the heart of Television.
What's more, the absence of reverb is integral, in part attributable to the ambience of the studio, but also a conscious decision in order to add focus. And focus is the abiding term: this is an album designed to be just so - a 45 minute commitment, a surrender. - ¨
Tracklisting:
1. Mimi Pretend
2. Silvertonic
3. Dead Museum
4. Ziggy
5. Everything, all the time
6. Modern English Decoration
7. Full of Men
8. Saw A Habit Forming
9. Victorian Acid
10. Protestant Work Slump -
Close to 5 years on from their last transmission, Ulrika Spacek resurface from self-imposed exile with their 3rd album, Compact Trauma, a collection of songs that function as a chance treatise of sorts for our current collective condition.Visit product page →
With a title like that arriving at this point in time, it’s tempting to interpret the record solely in the context of the global events of the past few years, but the roots of these 10 songs arc back much further in time, charged with their own personalised internal damage.
Mid 2018, approaching exhaustion and feeling increasingly fragile from the stresses of itinerant road life, the 5 piece of Rhys Edwards, Rhys Williams, Joseph Stone, Syd Kemp and Callum Brown began work in earnest on the follow up to their 2nd album.
Released less than a year earlier and having promoted it constantly in the months that followed, now might have represented a fine moment for the band to take a breath. Yet Ulrika Spacek were not familiar with the concept of slowing down, conditioned by a strong work ethnic and the demands of capricious touring cycles that necessitated more content and at speed.
The band’s previous albums had both been recorded in KEN, a studio and rehearsal space that also doubled as their shared home. As writing for album 3 began, KEN suddenly became another victim to the indiscriminate violence of gentrification. Writing and recording was then abruptly shifted to a professional studio in Hackney. Tensions and logistical difficulties soon became apparent.
The enforced switch to an unfamiliar locale would have been discomforting enough, but when allied with the fractures already beginning to splinter through the band, made for an especially frazzled experience. Somehow, a record began to emerge though it was one obviously infected with its circumstances. In its first phase of life, Compact Trauma was a document of a band striving to perfect an idea while the universe around them seemed to want to shut down.
And then, at an impasse of sorts and with a record halfway complete, it suddenly did. If Ulrika Spacek were a band in need of the breaks applying, it was the force of a global pandemic that made it happen. As the world stood still, Compact Trauma was filed away, unfinished and unheard by the wider world. The prolonged break enforced by myriad lockdowns may have separated the group but it also afforded the 5 time to reflect on what had already been committed to tape... As the lights came back on and the shutters up, they found themselves drawn back towards Compact Trauma.
What they rediscovered was a record that seemed to pre-empt the shared grief of a global pandemic. Addressing existential freak out, displacement, substance reliance and encroaching self-doubt, these highly personalised songs suddenly took on a wider significance, speaking in part to a bigger narrative.
Opening track, ‘The Sheer Drop’, begins with the line “Homerton is caving in”; ‘It Will Come Sometime’ describes a “liver like a lightbulb and swelling”; and Lounge Angst (an almost perfect description of those maddening lockdown days indoors) laments, ‘seems my friends grew up or left’.
The fear and panic is palpable. The lyrics are matched to a soundtrack that oscillates between the febrile and the off-kilter, unconventional song structures and knotty arrangements either spinning the listener in unexpected directions or offering some kind of cathartic release. Take, as example, the aforementioned opener, ‘The Sheer Drop’. A wire-taut exercise in tension-and-release rendered in 3 parts, a whimsical synth opening giving way to characteristic chiming guitars before a nail biting coda sets its controls for the heart of the sun or the end of the world, whichever comes first.
Either way, it’s a hell of a way to reintroduce yourself after a 5 year absence. ‘If The Wheels Are Coming Off, The Wheels Are Coming Off’ is equally instructive, a lacerating exposition of self-doubt that bursts into ecstatic release at its climax, demanding repeat listens, while ‘Stuck At The Door’ is an 11-minute Pacific North West-style epic that threatens, ‘the worst of it’s to come’. But it’s the title track that might be the true heartbeat of the record.
Either addressing itself or some unknown assailant, it begins by demanding that they “take your hands and your head off the table”, while spiralling around a breathless riff fuelled by an infectious anxious energy, before changing tact completely and shifting to a lullaby-like finale, concluding with the ominous thought, “compact trauma? Or full blown disaster? I'll be back in an hour (Or so i think)”. It’s a fitting encapsulation of a highly complex record. They could have left it alone, but in coming back to what they knew, Ulrika Spacek found their best work yet.
Tracklisting:
1. The Sheer Drop
2. Accidental Momentary Blur
3. It Will Come Sometime
4. Lounge Angst
5. Diskbänksrealism
6. Through France With Snow
7. If The Wheels Are Coming Off, The Wheels Are Coming Off
8. Compact Trauma
9. Stuck At The Door
10. No Design
