One Umbrella, Solve

Having recently witnessed a One Umbrella performance in Austin, I can tell you the atmosphere they create is one of the world's great environments in which to take peyote with someone you love. Sarah Lipstate ("Novella") subjects her guitar to all manner of pedal effects, e-bowing, and ultimately a violent cello-bowing (I think it was a cello bow) that builds into glorious crescendos while Carlos Villarreal ("Quebron") works with tables full of gadgets, a turntable on the ground, and even a harmonium. They seem to bend the world around them into long, flowing waves of sound. It's the kind of music that should be played in outer space.

Solve (Tell-All, 2005) opens with three chilling minutes of increasing tension into a spaced-out harmonium atmosphere. The third track's beginning has such harsh high frequencies you feel as if you're being woken up with a meta-alarm clock which reduces what you previously thought was your usual waking-state into something more like your usual sleep-state, replacing the former waking-state with a new hyper-awareness that subsides temporarily until the high frequencies resume 2:20 into the track. I found it intense, challenging, and very unique.

Listen to One Umbrella in our compilation.

The fourth track, "8trs," was chosen for our Issue #1 compilation. I think it gives an idea of what One Umbrella is about in a quick snapshot. A piano drowned in reverb is accompanied by a reversed vocal which feels distant and fragmented, creating a language-effect which is quite alien. Later, in track seven, this voice resurfaces and you can hear it non-reversed and clearly speaking English. "After thousands of years of cultural and technical evolution, shouldn't we be spending more time reading poetry, contemplating the cosmos…?" Much like the effect of One Umbrella itself, the sound is made entirely of familiar elements: a male voice, English words, common sentence structure, reverb, but before it is isolated in track 7 you cannot recognize it as such. One Umbrella has created something new and deep out of seemingly familiar components in Solve; it continually reveals itself as a skilled experimental composition. Learn more about One Umbrella and find this record at Tell-All Records.

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