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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
Ultramarine, i.e. Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper, laid an unlikely bridge between Canterbury's prog-rock of the 1970s and ambient house. Their ethereal, pastoral vision begin to form on Every Man And Woman Is A Star (1992), which was virtually a collection of chamber pieces for flutes, trumpets, pianos, string section, samples and electronic machines, and blossomed on United Kingdom (1993), which added stronger dub and jazz ambience and Robert Wyatt's divine vocals.
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
The British band Ultramarine were the natural link between the Canterbury school of the 1970s and the ambient house of the 1990s. Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper had been members, from 1984 (when they were seventeen) to 1987, of the industrial ensemble A Primary Industry, producing only the singles At Gun Point (Les Temps Moderns) and Seven Hertz (Sweatbox), an album titled Ultramarine (Sweatbox), and a tribute to the writer Wyndham Lewis (an EP released years later on Les Disques Du Crepuscule). After that experience ended, Hammond and Cooper formed Ultramarine and released the album Folk (Les Disques Du Crepuscule, 1990), laying the foundations for a psychedelic dance music consistent with what 808 State and KLF were theorizing, sharing the same pastoral spirit but also a more surreal vein. The promises of this gentle and effervescent prog-techno-pop were fulfilled by the second album, Every Man And Woman Is A Star (Dali, 1992). Two of the oldest tracks in their repertoire, Stella and British Summertime, lead into a sequence of chamber pieces for flutes, trumpet, piano, string section, samples, rhythm machine and sequencer, with a range of moods spanning from the martial Pansy to the ethereal Honey (both built on continuous transformations of orchestration), and an almost infinite reservoir of styles (Saratoga, with funky accents; the jazzy Nova Scotia; Geezer, with a strong reggae cadence; the driving South American dance of Panther, and so on); although in some cases it is difficult to distinguish them from Spyrogyra (the unlikely fusion with cocktail jazz in Weird Gear), and although in the muzak of Lights In My Brain they awkwardly exploit a sample of Robert Wyatt. United Kingdoms (Blanco Y Negro, 1993) is even closer to 1970s progressive rock. The album resonates with jazz and dub sonorities perfectly assimilated into the mix (as well as the divine singing of Robert Wyatt). The instrumental Source blends jazz and folk sources in a rousing jig that would have fit nicely on Mike Oldfields Tubular Bells. The influence of the dadaist jazz-rock of Soft Machine, Gong and Caravan is evident in Prince Rock and Urf, while Kingdom and Happy Land set proletarian chants to music. Queen Of The Moon and Dizzy Fox let Wyatts syllables float over a confused magma of effervescent sounds. With rhythms that rarely sail beyond 80 beats per minute and meticulous arrangements of acoustic instruments, Hammond and Cooper place themselves a step above the mass of techno auteurs. Variety and fragmentation somewhat harm cohesion on the subsequent Bel Air (Blanco Y Negro, 1995), which nevertheless contains the enchanting Buena Vista, echoed around the same time by the single Hymn. A User's Guide (New Electronica, 1998) is a less flashy but more substantial album, bolstered by long hypnotic tracks such as All Of A Sudden, What Machines Want, Ambush, Surfacing, On The Brink, Zombie, Ghost Routine, which effectively summarize their fusion of progressive rock and techno while at the same time pushing it toward even more experimental shores, in the name of an abstract, subdued and austere funk-jazz. Companion (LTM, 2003) is a poor career retrospective.
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