SML

The longer SML exists, the further they get from identifiable forms. The band was launched out of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s roundtable of improvisers, scratching out discordant jazz that often times hinted at a less terrestrial existence. With the advent of How You Been, the band severs the anchor chain, levitating above the vortex of jazz, electronic, psychedelic, No Wave, and German Progressive that they’ve been surfing over the past few years. The band is now fully entrenched in the cosmic core, slicing into something that’s in thrum with the offbeat blink of quasars, the rapid fire of neurons, the disjointed dance of circuitry. Film composers spend years trying to envision what ‘future music’ might entail, but SML have tripped through the seer’s sphere to drag the details back home and hammered them into the wax.

The record thrives on disjointed rhythms, blending Booker Stardrum’s live drums with an array of electronic pulses that perforate Jeremiah Chiu’s synths and Gregory Uhlman’s slinking, stalking guitars. While genre purists are always gonna lob jazz over psychedelia at the record, the band’s compositions have their own disorienting effect, an aural equivalent of phosphenes that seek to untether the listener from their circadian stagnation. A headphone record of the highest order, the album plunges the listener into turbulent textures that grind the ego into a fine paste. How You Been poses the question at the start, but once through the wringer of SML that answer’s bound to be different by the time the album kicks to a close.

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