southern records

People can't seem to make up their minds about Ui. Maybe it's the beards or the bald patches that encourage charges of 'muso' of even more bewilderingly, 'Fog'. Whatever, the consensus here at Silencer is most definately in pieces, and the reason? Just don't take things so seriously.

Ui are primarily about grooves and shapes, rhythms and tones, moving and shaking. Despite Shasha Frere-Jones ability to wax Iyrical on musical trivia, or bass man Wilbo's knowledge of all things jazz/modern classical, or even Clem's complex cyclical drumming, Ui's essential 'aim' is to make you lose it on the dance floor.

"We want people to move," explains Wilbo, "it's a rhythmic thing. We're the bastard child of dance grooves but we find people come to see us to scratch their chins at us. The younger audience are better, they don't intellectualise us so much. In New York we're observed, but younger audiences move and that's the point."

So you're fuck art let's dance then?

"Right."

And yet there is so much more. Like all best music, Ui work on a number of levels and their blend of twin abstract bass and funky drums is far more intriguing than all this 'simplistic' talk suggests. Firstly the very notion of Ui as two basses, drums and samples/noises sets them apart from many of their redneck US contemporaries. Secondary Ui are very much into the remix thing with the 'Unlike' album and recent 'Dropplike' 12" offering disembodied versions of their dancefloor classics. Thirdly, and this is important given the groups' American setting, Ui are a white US band who appreciate, incorporate and are influenced by black music, be it free jazz, Hip Hop, Electro or Drum 'n' Bass. In this, Ui are pretty much the exception within the polarised US music world which seems to systematically separate Hip Hop and the white guitar kids into opposing corner. In reaction to this Frere-Jones refers back to those more palatable days in the late '70's/early '80's when Punk and Dub complimented each other, when the Bush Tetras played downtown with ESG or the Treacherous Three, and the No Wave FreePunkJazz combination sparked by Ornette Coleman and patronised by the likes of Lester Bowie momentarily set New York alight.

"The Reaganite '80's killed all that," says Frere-Jones, "Hip Hop emerged and became more defined while the white Sonic Youth thing splintered off and pulled people apart. The reasons are several, big things; Reagan, aids, economics... But Jungle might be changing all that." Indeed - Drum 'n' Bass. The Nineties' only truly 'new' music, the magic of which is slowly infiltrating all areas of music from Improv guitarist Derek Bailey to the coffee table muzak of Everything But the Girl, via adverts and remix cred-chasing. At a recent Trans Am/Tortoise gig splintered breakbeats filled the gaps between support and headline. Third Eye Foundation mesh feedback and breakbeats like My Bloody Valentine always promised, while the tune Ui are working on when I meet them is a wonderful hybrid of trademark Ui noise mixed with a rather fine programmed break.

"We'll want to bastardize drum 'n' bass to suit us," says Wilbo, "but when I first heard this stuff I was just 'wow', you know, but the thing was, I was craving composition. We'll use drum 'n' bass as a scape beneath our ideas, and in many ways this seems a natural thing to do given our own bass and drums format anyway."

This does make sense, given that the best Post Rock, like the best Drum 'n' Bass, is a splintered mirror held up to the world, a cut-up, fragmented hyper-reality, full of juxtapositions, contradictions and movements, at once the spawn of, and the offensive against, the fragmentation and differentiation of the social. The influence of Drum 'n' Bass's more tangible realisation of such an offenisve can, therefore, only be a positive influence, although the band play down any radical connotations emanating from their work; "It's just shit we do."

Thus, Ui offer something of a paradox - utilising radical musical ideas, while claiming to search for simple reactions; to dance. Yet wasn't Acid House such a paradox? Ui's impact however, is limited by the fact that they play exactly the kind of places where the chin-strokers hang out. What Ui do achieve, despite their modest claims, is a musical palette of sound, where dissonance and rhythms jar and distort, pulling structure towards the abstract and thereby unsettling the equilibrium. To move literally to Ui's sound would be almost grotesque (so do it), a parody of dance musics fluid movement. Opinions may differ but from here Ui seem very 'now', very fluxed up and wonderfully disconnected, so get awkward.