Between the title, one of the simplest and most universal phrases in the English language, and the cover art, a commonplace portrait of the planet Earth from outer space, Jason Urick’s latest album I Love You seems to be pursuing an aesthetic that’s as neutralized and devoid of detail or personality as possible. The only thing he could’ve done to make the exterior packaging of the album more generic would be to change his last name to Smith. But that’s not to say that I Love You suffers from a lack of ideas or creative expression. If anything, the album is a culmination of a running theme in Urick’s music, which often takes very specific source material, and stretches and manipulates the samples until they become abstract and ostensibly meaningless, sound for sound’s sake.

Although Urick, a longtime fixture of Baltimore underground music, recently located on Portland, Oregon, I Love You was partly recorded at Floristree, the Baltimore performance space he previously ran and lived in. Like the 2010 album Husbands and Urick’s other solo releases on Thrill Jockey Records since the breakup of his band Wzt Hearts, I Love You is a collection of a handful of lengthy tracks, mostly running from six to ten minutes, each with its own particular palette of sounds that slowly unfurl in subtle variations. It’s a headphone album in the classic sense, with the pure aural beauty of its best moments being derived primarily from the way the sounds drift from the left to right channel or vice versa.

[See post to listen to audio]

The most ear-catching overtly rhythmic track is “Ageless Isms,” which keeps a consistent groove even as its central loop is buried under more and more layers of echoing noise. “The Crying Song (Album Mix),” an alternate version of a track from the single that preceded I Love You, is at the other end of the spectrum as Urick at his most ethereal, with the kind of trebly, pixellated swirl of sound that might be compared to ’80s new age music but only could’ve been made in the 21st century era of laptop avant garde sound manipulation. In either case, Urick’s very individual aesthetics and ideas can’t help but shine through, as much as he may mask them in seemingly impersonal packaging.

Last month Mobtown and The Windup Space produced a week-long festival that highlighted (mostly) Baltimore instrumental bands. The festival was called NOVO (ie. No Vocals).

Russell (Windup’s owner and a generally swell guy who also makes a mean Jim and Coke) curated the shows (with a little help from us) and I recorded and mixed every night with Alex, with the plan to release the tracks on Aural States as an extension of the festival.

Some of the bands included Nathan Bell (Human Bell, Lungfish) featuring Ami Dang, Microkingdom, Jason Urick (WZT Hearts), Expanding Man, Yeveto, Insect Factory, Notendo, We Used To Be Family, JDay, Dustin Wong (Ponytail), The Water and members of the Out Of Your Head collective.

We had an awesome turnout and we’re already in the planning stages for 2011. Props to David at TeamAdelle for all the hard work on the visuals and design and Tedd Henn from HennPict for the wonderful photography. Here are some audio samples of my favorite performances. You can stream and download the entire festival over at Aural States.

Jason Urick is the kind of ubiquitous figure in Baltimore underground music that you’re bound to have tripped over at one point or another if you’ve spent any time in the scene, whether he was organizing the Once.Twice Festival, running the DIY venue Floristree, working at the record store the Sound Garden, or playing in the noise band Wzt Hearts. But it’s only now, a year after that group’s breakup, that Urick has issued his first solo album on Thrill Jockey.

The laptop experimentation of Urick’s solo debut Husbands, recorded at Floristree, is in many ways a logical progression from his previous band, and like Wzt Hearts’ Heat Chief, it’s comprised of four long tracks. But without percussion or an improvisation-driven band dynamic, the overall sound is far more sedate, almost ambient. In fact, the theme of the album, if any, seems to be taking one or two brief sounds and stretching and manipulating them into countless variations over a lengthy span of time. The opener “Strides” warps and distorts a harmonica played by Emma Walters into an ethereal soundscape, while “Let There Be Love” renders a Bee Gees sample unrecognizable with similar results.

[See post to listen to audio]

In fact, the last of the four tracks on Husbands, “The Eternal Return,” is the only one that comes anywhere near producing the ear-grinding noise of Wzt Hearts, or much of anything that couldn’t be mistaken for a somewhat offbeat meditation soundtrack. The garbled voices, percussive click clacks and roaring distorted tones don’t sound anything like what the sounds must have been when they were first captured by Urick’s microphone, but he twists them into something intriguing and new. And at only 6 minutes, “Eternal” is actually the most concise and accessible track on the album while at the same time its most abrasive.