Audiopile Review: Big week for the ambient crowd! Shop faves Ulla & Perila drop a 2xLP set that is also the first album that the long-time collaborators have recorded together while in the same space (imagine that!) after years of digital-only correspondence. Jazz Plates is the duo’s intimate take on ambient-jazz that finds a sweet-spot between the impressionistic end of the ECM catalog (think Eberhard Weber’s cryptic run of albums in the ‘70s) and the breathy vocal exhalations of early Julianna Barwick/Grouper. Dealt incredibly close to the chest, the duo take the expanded space provided by four sides of vinyl for an unstructured, improvised nod to spiritual heavyweights like Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, stripping their heavenly jazz odes down to a threadbare webbing. Echoed vocals wrap their way around the soft squeal of a clarinet, a stark piano hangs in the air amidst the gentle sound of rain, and the slow plodding percussion trickles underneath the resigned sigh of a saxophone. It’s hard not to imagine the duo in a low-lit room filled with instruments, eyes half shut as they unhurriedly grab whatever’s at hand, intuitively ascending their way towards white light ethereality. A perfect companion piece to this week’s highlighted album from Malibu. Edition of 500.

After many years drifting in and out of each-other’s orbit, ‘Jazz Plates’ finds Ulla and Perila making music in the same room for the first time, exhaling a double album’s worth of gorgeously evocative mood music, 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 hushed permutations. ‘Jazz Plates’ catches the mutual spirits measuredly channelling their shared love of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, making use of voice, clarinet, guitar, piano, vocals and various non-musical objets – logs, leaves, an aquarium – until they hit their emotional core. Previously separated by an ocean, their first recording sessions in person find 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 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. A gentle, beautiful thing, highly recommended if yr into anything from Loren Connors to Laila Sakini.