Don’t miss Ulla performing live this Thursday at In Sheep’s Clothing HQ.

The term glitch was coined sometime in the 1990s to describe an emergent movement of artists manipulating electronic tones and textures to create subtle and often unnerving tracks that sounded like they were malfunctioning in rhythm, with melodies that seemed to jitter with electrical energy.

The best of them were digital mechanics who treated computers like cars. Eager to explore the engines driving the tones, artists such as Nobukazu Takemura, Stefan Betke (aka Pole) and Autechre disassembled coding and hard drives as if they were in a garage transforming Fords into Ferraris.

This isn’t about them though. Foam is the new record from Philadelphia artist-composer ulla, who dropped her Straus surname with this album as if deleting old data. Tapping ideas and techniques drawn from glitch, on her 10th record in five years she seems to have further formalized her creations to fit into sturdier structures.

A former Kansan and Californian, across the past four years ulla has issued work in labels including West Mineral, Quiet Time, Boomkat, and Experiences Ltd. Her previous full-length, Limitless Frame, came out in 2021 on Motion Ward.

That combined output is breathtaking, ranging from the sound-collage piece 40th and Spruce to her breakthrough release, Tumbling Towards a Wall. The title was prescient. The artist released it in January 2020, just as the coronavirus was spreading. Tumbling Towards a Wall seemed built for the moment, filled with melancholy labyrinths that drew you away from the here and now and into a timeless, virus-free abyss.

Critic Joshua Minsoo Kim amplified the work in a review for Pitchfork, describing tracks that “emanate serenity, and like all of Ulla’s best works … seem like they’re doing nothing but simply existing.”

Not only do they exist on foam, but they seem to glow like plutonium. Each of the fourteen pieces are brief. Tonally, none sound like the others. “Gloss” is a kaleidoscopic exploration featuring ulla’s cut-up voice that suggests a more sophisticated evolution of Marcus Popp’s software-driven experiments as Oval. “Marina” harnesses a series of strummed, undistorted jazz guitar chords and notes that stutter as they flow like a malfunctioning android trying to work out a Pat Methany solo. Think Fennesz minus the distortion.

Teeming with textures, foam also uses as source material piano, voice, echoed percussion and synth, and many of them resist set, timed rhythms for quiet beat bursts and more liquified time markers. The gestalt suggests Portuguese composer Nuno Canavaro’s 1988 masterpiece Plux Quba. “Indoor Type” sounds like ulla was performing it from a far side of a vast cavern.

The most striking piece, “Scrubby,” sounds beamed from another planet, a Satie-esque series of melodic ideas that meander as if purposeless, but combine to create something real and true.

We’ve got copies incoming in the shop. Highly recommended.

++ Ulla will be making her Los Angeles live debut this Thursday for our Motion Ward showcase. Tickets available here: https://link.dice.fm/v50a04d55451