ORCHESTRA OF THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE
Sheffield collective pull out all the stops with psych-tinged improvisations.
DON’T YOU JUST love it when a plan comes together? In 2010 Sheffield-based instrumentalist Martin Archer and a few mates wanted to create some brand new sounds. Coming from diverse musical backgrounds, including jazz, folk, rock, and electronic music, the collective pooled all of their talents and interests into something deliberately large-scale and ambitious. Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere, or the OUA, as they refer to it, released their self-titled double CD set in 2012 (sometimes referred to as Theta One), fulfilling their original brief with a cosmic mix that included a string quartet, a 25-piece choir and a horn section.
“It took about two years to make that album,” admits Archer, describing their painstaking approach. “I wanted something where the scale of it was an integral part of it, and by scale I mean I wanted it to include improvisation, repetition, a choir – the Juxtavoices choir was formed to sing on that album – and I wanted to write for strings and create a large horn section. Really, I just wanted to see if we were capable of doing it.”
Since then, another four albums have emerged, all with different characteristics although the latest, Theta Five, may well be their most accessible yet.
At a little over 42 minutes, Pillared Space is undoubtedly the album’s centrepiece. Emerging from grinding, monumental forms, skittering frequencies, and troublesome dissonance, order from chaos is established in the pounding rhythms and otherworldly vocalising. Like all their pieces, it carries a sense of constant evolution as resonant keyboard tones, swirling minimalist patterns, random Morse codestyle signals and ethereal sax all coalesce into a mighty sound.
“That track was the first thing we did out of the two-day session in the studio and quite unusually for us, it came out as quite a complete piece,” he explains.“What you hear on the album is largely the way it was played in the studio.”
There’s no getting away from the ambitious and often epic sonic architecture that the band creates. Over the years they’ve been compared to some heavyweight names operating in electronic music, jazz, and progressive rock including Terry Riley,
Alice Coltrane, as well as Can. While some musicians bristle when their work receives comparisons to others, Archer argues that such references are in fact a useful tool: “Especially when people don’t know who you are,” he laughs.
His work in the past with other projects has been compared to big canvas pieces such as Centipede’s Septober Energy and Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill. He says, “I’m not sure that those comparisons are accurate but when we started OUA we wanted to create music that had repetition at its core with that kind of scale. So comparisons to Magma or Sun Ra are exactly ones we had in mind when we began.”
Work is already underway on the OUA’s next album and it’s likely to be different again: “If nothing changes we’d all get bored and what would be the point of that?”
“IF NOTHING CHANGES WE’D ALL GET BORED AND WHAT WOULD BE THE POINT OF THAT?”