The music of UI is instrumental music that has little of rock�s drive, and perhaps more of Cubist art. It connects back to the �no-wave� experiments of Contortions and Material, and indirectly to those of Can and Faust. It incorporates dub, electronic, hip-hop, and especially jazz elements.

Formed in New York by bassist Sasha Frere-Jones, UI were an unusual trio consisting of two basses (the other played by Wilbo Wright) and drums (Clem Waldmann). They debuted with 2-Sided EP (Hemiola, 1993), which includes the excellent Horn Crown Label. Six pieces from their repertoire are transformed into avant-garde instrumental compositions on the EP Unlike Remixes vol. 1 (Lunamoth, 1995). Their third EP, Sharpie (Soul Static Sound, 1996), contains Skeletons, which by comparison is almost a children�s round, and above all the long title track, suspended between post-rock and acid-rock. Two EPs were later compiled on 2-Sided EP/ Sharpie (Southern, 1998).

Their main career, however, begins with Sidelong (Southern, 1995), and compositions such as August Song, Piano, and especially Johnny, which ooze tension from their seemingly geometric and mechanical structures. UI favor abstraction, but their harmonies rarely fall apart (a notable exception being the anemic and disjointed Top Requests).
In fact, the abstraction is more concrete than it appears. Almost novelty-like are Long Egg, which applies Duane Eddy�style twang to a driving jazz-rock harmony, and Drive Towards The Smoke, with its grotesque tribalism. The only �song,� Golden Child, is a distorted blues-rock piece warped by sound effects. In short, a record that is always alert, full of surprises, and rich in unusual harmonies.

Several tracks from the album were reworked in a futuristic style on the EP Dropplike (Southern, 1996).

The EP Fires (Duophonic, 1998), credited to Uilab, a joint venture between Ui and Stereolab, is mainly a series of remixes of a Brian Eno's song.

On the other hand, the sound on Ui's second album, Lifelike (Southern, 1998), is almost too smooth and laid-back for its own good. Heavier doses of jazz glue all the pieces together, but the focus is really on the... glue. The band has painstakingly manipulated the material (often harking back four or five years), and brought in new acoustic and electronic instruments, to produce a very artificial funk-like sound. Drive Until He Sleeps boasts a catchy theme that twines around funk bass lines and muscular drumming. Other "melodic" vignettes display the same art of sophisticated counterpoint: Digame and Laceria build the mirage of the melody like a cubist painting, via discrete guitar phrases, and over mechanical beats, that well complement the robotic guitar work.
Blood In The Air is a quintessential example of the album's focus on texture: electronic noise, tribal beat, and shrill guitar patterns are fused in one slick package. Undersided mixes jazzy horns and Neu-like polyrhythms. Green Of The Melon is a jam for bluesy harmonica, bass rumble and free-form rattling of sticks. Molloy's March only hints at a melody and a structure, without ever closing the circle of its various elements. Acer Rubrum lacks a center of mass: dub ambience, aquatic tones, and frantic strumming. Exeunt is only the skeleton of the music that was supposed to be, a plantation spiritual after a nuclear explosion.
Ui's postmodernist ambitions are evident in pieces such as The Fortune One Knows No Anxiety, that inbreeds jazz, blues and rock, almost implodes and then comes back alive with a simple riff.
The whole album is a cerebral exercise that is only superficially related to the very spontaneous sound of the first album. The album is still intriguing because of Ui's knack for building songs that are contradictions in terms, but an intellectual energy has taken over the muscular energy of their early days. Lifelike takes all the "life" out of the previous album.

Standing Upright On A Curve (Subrosa, 1998) is a collaboration between Sasha Frere-Jones and Loren Mazzacane.

Ui resurfaced after a few years of silence with the EP The Iron Apple (Southern, 1999). It is a very minor work within their repertory, but Mrs Lady Lady is still a valid demonstration of their cyber-funk style.