ITUNES INDIE SPOTLIGHT

 Anyone who follows electronic music knows that the true innovators, the hottest producers, and the best DJs are 
 all working on the independent level. Electronic music, as well as the history of dance music, has always sprung 
 up from the underground. The innovations tend to become standard practice in the mainstream, but it all starts here
 - with the music put out on independent labels. We'll be using this space to track the latest releases and 
 developments in electronic music as well as giving a little extra love to one album we think stands out.

 Ultre is the alter-ego of Finn McNicholas, A UK based experimentalist who works in the electro-acoustic realm of 
 composition. That might sound a bit to left-field in theory, but Ultre's The Nest & The Skull is a twisted and joyful 
 journey with layers of stuttering electronics and finger plucked melodies. Sublime and yet consistently engaging, 
 Ultre is the right combination of Boards of Canada's blissful sides and Mouse on Mars jumpy eclecticism.

 IODA TIP-SHEET

 Organic and painstakingly original, Ultre's new album The Nest and the Skull is a fantastic and engaging album that
 plays like nothing you've ever heard before. Imagine an Aphex Twin record made from guitar, piano, hitting 
 random things, finger snaps, and even beating on your chest. This doesn't feel like a cyber-apocalypse or what 
 robots should be listening too; Ultre's album still feels like humans rather than computers made it.

 WHITE_LINE

 To say that the Audiobulb label is eclectic would be the mother of all understatements, with a bewildering array of
 releases that pretty much cover all of the leftfield sub-categories, and then some – the label is garnering interest
 from all corners of the globe. Ultre is a name totally unfamiliar to me, and on presentation of this collection entitled 
 “The Nest & The Skull”, I am plunged into their strange, eerily oblique sound world.

 Opening piece, Favourite Mammal, comes across like Boards of Canada with an acoustic guitarist, a gristly, grainy
 sedimental affair, with melodies and rhythms poised amongst gently picked guitars. I must confess to you now - 
 this is unfamiliar territory for me, but I like this... I love the delightfully obscure, and surreal titling, (Museum of Air, 
 Peace Corpse, A House Under Your Head) and I love the energetic, pulsating rhythms, that don’t quite seem at 
 home with the music, yet somehow meet and fuse in unlikely locations, and on occasion, are epic and spiritually 
 uplifting. This collection doesn’t quite fit the “ambient” tag, nor minimalism, nor modern composition, or anything 
 else I’ve come across, so references and similarities here are pretty unworthy. All I will say is that Ultre have 
 carved themselves a unique position on a unique label..this is good... and with 13 tracks to choose from, there is 
 barely a duffer or filler here..so what are you waiting for? 

 Check this out now.

 THE MILK FACTORY

 It would be easy to dismiss Finn McNicholas, the man being Ultre, as just another soldier of the folktronica army. 
 While his music certainly feeds on acoustic, electric and electronic instrumentation, McNicholas is something of 
 an all-rounder, busying himself with making music not just for himself, but also to serve as soundtrack for films, 
 and regularly ventures into various visual art forms.

 The Nest And The Skull follows a first album, All The Darkness Has Gone To Details, released in 2006 on the 
 excellent Sheffiled-based Audiobulb, a record which quietly established Ultre as an artist to watch. Combining 
 delicate brushes of acoustic guitar, piano and violin with electronics into hearty patchwork of sounds laid over 
 organic beats, McNicholas create here a series of rich textural pieces which, despite their often chaotic 
 appearance, often harbour wonderful moments where melodies sprout out of complex formations to surf the 
 crest of deconstructed rhythmic waves or rise high above the thick clouds of sounds to take on altogether lighter 
 shades. All along the thirteen tracks of this album, McNicholas appears in playful mood and constantly defies 
 expectation to pull out unexpected rabbits out of his hat. How he does it is not entirely original: rhythms stutter 
 and hiccup, sounds are distressed and erased in parts, overexposed and magnified in others, melodies fail to 
 take shape or become recurring little volutes… The way it all hangs precariously together is no mean feat though. 
 There is an undeniable touch of elegance and finesse running through the forty three minutes that this album 
 lasts, and when it all comes to an end, it feels as if the story has only been partly told.

 The Smirks or Ridicule Or Self Ridicule evoke the better moments of Four Tet, while Peace Corpse or Ties could 
 almost pass for some weird post-electronic Aphex experiment and the delicate folk hues of Museum Of Air or 
 Struggle And Nothing show McNicholas at his most refined. The album concludes with a salvo of three rather 
 beautiful pieces. With Takas, To All The Laughing You Will Never Do and A House Under Your Head, McNicholas 
 crafts some truly exquisite moments where his soundscapes take on a whole new, much more ambitious, 
 dimension.

 With his second album as Ultre, Finn McNicholas expands his sonic palette and finds his way through more 
 complex and expressionist compositions to give his delicate sonic textures the sheen they deserve.

 TEXTURA

 Audiobulb seems to get progressively stronger with every release and certainly The Nest and the Skull does 
 nothing to reverse the trend. Finn McNicholas's sophomore release under the Ultre name is a fresh fusion of 
 acoustic folk elements and crisp boom-bap, rather like a much more perfectly realized version of the Prefuse 
 73 Reads The Books E.P.  that surfaced in 2005 (speaking of which, one alternately could hear Ultre's work 
 as a carefully-handled fusion of Savath Y Savalas and Prefuse 73). If there's a difference between the new 
 release and its predecessor, All The Darkness Has Gone To Details, it's a shift in emphasis from piano to guitar 
 but what impresses most is Ultre's arresting fusion of electronic elements and acoustic instruments.

 What begins in “Favourite Moment” as an exercise in acoustic head-nod quickly morphs into a master class in 
 electronic shredding. Handclaps keep time as dizzying swirls of violins, cellos, and acoustic guitars collide and 
 hammering percussive treatments stutter. “Dead Words” and “To All the Laughing You Will Never Do,” head-
 spinning forays into electro-acoustic funk powered by thrumming beats, may be even better, while the equally 
 funky “Peace Corpse” merges Spanish guitar filigrees with splashes of sparkling acoustic strums and snapping 
 beats. A dust-covered piano and violin are juxtaposed with more contemporary electronic materials during “Tics” 
 and “Takas” respectively while the closer “A House Under Your Head” appears to bring an entire string orchestra 
 aboard.

 An occasional beatless setting (e.g., the organ-heavy meditation “Lingers”) offers respite from the bold beat-
 based cuts but, in truth, it's the latter that make the strongest impression. Accompanying info intimates that Ultre 
 creates his beats by hitting objects around his home, and by clapping, finger-clicking, and chest-beating, and 
 furthermore the music eschews Digital Signal Processing for sounds created live during the recording and often 
 using a homemade microphone (McNicholas himself asserts that's he's never used a single sample or preset). 
 Regardless of the production methodology adopted, Ultre packs a remarkable amount of detail and activity into 
 tracks that are rarely more than four minutes long (“Struggle and Nothing” even makes its mark in little more than 
 two minutes) and the album weighs in at an attractively svelte forty-four minutes.

 SOUND PROECTOR

 Album of Finn McNicholas released recently on Audiobulb Records became the second one in his solo creative 
 work after All The Darkness Has Gone To Details in 2006. Of no doubt, the new work is the continuation of 
 creative line started in the first album. Even not just continuation but development of the own musician's theme. 
 Acoustic guitar, strings, piano, electronic drums and mosaics of "home percussion" - claps, rustles, some other
 clanking recorded at home. Bright and sappy IDM, lively, streaming to all sides sound. Guitar plays simple and 
 beautiful melodious loops or its samples are cut into parts coming deep into drums' parts. In the middle of the 
 album one can absolutely unexpectedly meet the ambient track "Lingers" which suddenly gives a respite and 
 understanding of the fact that previous six tracks were heard tracks were heard without a pause as if we 
 were travelling somewhere on an electric train deepening into thoughts, pondering and it suddenly made a 
 stop. After the next part of the album started I caught myself at the thought that tracks a little bit pad out the 
 impression from each of them. Sometimes they are very similar to each other and that's why I compare The 
 Nest And The Skull to a trip on electric train with a stop in the middle of the way. And it's unimportant that 
 landscapes-melodies change themselves and their mood changes too. All the same the sound of banging 
 wheels as the rhythmical component of music seems to be similar and boring. At the same time the album 
 doesn't go without true pearls such as track "Takas". It's peculiar thanks to its mood, it's a little bit more sad 
 than the rest of the tracks and it perfectly widens the emotional musical spectrum. 

 One of the main shortcomings of the album is that music is very much spoiled by post-production. I would like 
 many moments to be more intimate and mysterious and there are enough details in Utre's creative work, 
 though in The Nest And The Skull each of these details thrust out to the foreground sets against the ceiling of 
 the sound section. May be some people will like it, though as for me, such attitude spoils the impression a little 
 bit. While listening to this "ultra-brightness" you get tired though nevertheless this CD still remains for me one 
 of the interesting discoveries of this year.

 VITAL WEEKLY

 Finn McNicholas is the man behind Ultre, whom we met in Vital Weekly 550, when we reviewed his 'All The 
 Darkness Has Gone To Details', which I believe was his debut as Ultre. Now he returns with 'The Nest And 
 The Skull' and again he returns to the piano and the guitar to start his electronic songs in which beats play 
 an all important role. Not as a dominant feature, banging away, but they are the cement that hold these pieces
 together. Broken up, torn down, but always rhythmic, in the way of IDM, of Expanding Records or Highpoint 
 Lowlife, but what makes Ultre different and thus quite nice is what he does on top of those beats. His guitar
 playing is quite nice. Creating odd combinations, real time playing versus chopped up collage like sounds, such
 as exemplified in 'Peace Corpse'. I think this album is quite a step forward from its predecessor, because its 
 more balanced with the beats and the real time instruments. Apparently this was recorded mostly live with a 
 'homemade' microphone and whether that is true I don't know, but the whole album indeed has a nice somewhat
 raw character. Maybe all thirteen tracks are a bit much and the lack of variation starts to notice, but at forty-
 three minutes it makes a nice pop length album. Fine one.

 ALT SOUNDS

 Electro-acoustic composition is a very hard genre to get into. The songs are filled with an abundance of complex
 layers and rhythms that make your brain hurt. Take Autechre and Aphex twin as an example. Songs such as 
 'Window Licker' and 'Acroyear2' have a silly amount of complexity and rhythm, yet a few listens on and they are 
 very gripping. Finn McNicholas' (Ultre) album 'The Nest and the Skull' is no exception. With guitars, pianos, 
 electronics and homemade beats, each track is full of musical activity that tantalizes the ears. His composition is 
 something else, haunting guitar's, distant piano's and some very strange percussion, of which Finn samples hitting 
 objects round his home, clapping, finger clicking and in a gorrila'esq style of beating on his chest! The album is 
 definitely a grower, upon listening each time you find a new layer or new cool sample hidden within the tracks. 
 Ultre is brought to you by the Audiobulb label, a label that promotes some of the most underground sub genres in 
 the music industry. By selling out the first release 'All the darkness has gone to details' it's obvious that Ultre are 
 here to stay. The records is very good, although the quality doesn't outweigh the fact that this type of eccentric 
 music does not appeal to a mass audience.

 Track's such as 'Dead Words', 'Memory Lies', 'Ties', 'Peace Corpse' and 'Ridicule And Self Ridicule' have a heavy 
 similarity to New York electronic music duo Ratatat's work. They are full of harmony and chord cycles overlapping 
 one another into long drawn out synthesized samples. For a full audio exciting experience, the album should be 
 listened too in headphones, this enhances the stereo panning used on beats, individual guitar picks and crazy 
 synthesizers.

 Opening track 'Favourite Mammal' features a beat box style of beat enhanced by what sounds like a guitar 
 strumming sample repeated over and over. Just like a CD skipping. There is more to follow as individual plucks are 
 repeated. The production on the record is something to die for, the levels are perfect and everything sounds 
 brilliant. Other influences could be the likes of Boards of Canada and Thom Yorke, especially on the third track 
 'The Smirks'. Although there is a hell of alot of diversity in all the songs, you can still pin point Ultre's "sound". A 
 glitch-guitar-harmonic-boxy-distant sound. The room acoustics sound mighty fine, sometimes with an old school
 feel, a sort of grainy effect that works brilliantly. Surprisingly the whole album features no vocals, a purely 
 instrumental masterpiece.

 Is that a good thing in this day? .......... I say yes.

 The Nest and the Skull is definitely for fans of glitch artist such as Aphex Twin, Autechre & Mouse On Mars and 
 other artists such as Thom Yorke, Bjork and Boards Of Canada.

 Ultre - The Nest And The Skull is released on March 9th 2009.

 THE SILENT BALLET

 Thanks to countless technological advancement since the early 1990s, the electro-acoustic movement has 
 moved from an underground bedroom programming by the few, to a widely regarded musical genre practiced 
 by many. In essence, it is still the work of bedroom producers, but free programming software, file-sharing, 
 and of course, the internet, have left the market oversaturated with copyists and sub-standard products. 
 While this effect dilutes any genre, ridding it of its original essence and uniqueness, it also allows those artists 
 who truly master the genre to stand out of the crowd; it is at this point that we say hello to Ultre.

 The Nest and the Skull is the second album from Finn McNicholas, a producer and musician who fuses together 
 visual art, piano, guitar, electronics and anything else (normally homemade) he can use to make a sound, mainly, 
 but not exclusively, within the electro-acoustic environment. After his critically acclaimed debut focused on a 
 more piano-based approach, McNicholas has added more strings to his bow (literally in some cases) this time 
 around, with guitar as the central focus and a more organic composition is the result.

 Regardless of what instrument is being used, McNicholas is able to fuse various beats, glitches and clicks 
 together so that they both exist in mutual harmony, rather than as a disjointed, unnecessary mixture. Nothing 
 is overplayed or overstated, and both elements of the electro-acoustic composition are allowed to breathe and 
 have their own space, especially the guitar. Tracks like “Dead Words” and “Peace Corpse” exhibit this approach 
 quite wonderfully, with the processed beats and acoustic melodies acting first as a compliment to each other, 
 and then as a dual aural experience.

 Probably the biggest compliment that can be given to The Nest and the Skull is that it wouldn’t look out of place on 
 the early 90s Warp Records roster. The philosophy of music as an art form in itself, particularly within the more 
 experimental and exploratory genres, fits just as perfectly to Warp as it does with Ultre, and essentially 
 McNicholas is making intelligent dance music, just with slight variations from the early forces of IDM. The fractured 
 beats and filtered guitar harmonies of “Ridicule and Self-Ridicule” are reminiscent of Prefuse 73 while the slow  
 methodically stomp of “Ties” could easily be mistaken for Plaid. These comparisons may seem to hint at Ultre 
 sounding dated, but the matured production and appreciation of timbral space creates a fresh sound, with more 
 futurist than retro tendencies, and it is left to the ever excellent Audiobulb label to gain from this.

 The only stumbling block with The Nest and the Skull is that over the course of thirteen tracks, the beats, glitches, 
 clicks, and acoustic instruments begin to become slightly tiresome and overused. During the latter stages of the 
 album there are moments where the sounds seem to almost repeat themselves. After moving from (mainly) piano 
 to guitar in the space of two albums, it would be interesting to see McNicholas develop his sound further to add in 
 more than just one main acoustic element, expanding the sound to a wider range. However, the answer on that 
 can wait, as for now we can enjoy the seamless production, crafted melodies, and bright futures that Ultre has 
 bestowed upon us.

 IGLOO MAGAZINE

 Ultre is Finn McNicholas, UK experimental homespun electro-acoustic po-mo B-boy, and The Nest & The Skull is a 
 heady sound-trip on which grainy swirls of manipulated acoustic guitars consort with violins and cellos over 
 stuttering beats. Sheffield's Audiobulb label is nothing if not eclectic, and in this respect Ultre could be seen as its
 flagship act, drawing as it does on the strategies of diversification patented by the likes of MoM and Fourtet. 
 McNicholas, self-proclaimed abstainer from samples and presets, eschews DSP for live recording captures, 
 preferring to use homemade means to achieve ends similar to laptop-toting brothers, the result coming out with 
 a filmy scuzzed-up patina suggesting a vintage recording.

 "Favourite Mammal" sets the tone with a Mush-y kind of post-BoC folk-tinged hiphop-tronica (or is that hiphop-
 tinged folk-tronica?), guitar taking a funky-strummer lead, asissted by a scrunched up array of percussives 
 and beat boxisms. Thereafter the likes of "Dead Words" and "To All the Laughing You Will Never Do" are similarly
 whirling dervish electro-acoustic funk simulacra with thrumming beat-assists. A number of tracks, not least 
 "Ridicule and Self-Ridicule," suggest that the fractured beats and filtered guitar harmonies of Prefuse 73 as the 
 main influencing blueprint for Ultre's expansions, though the album takes something of a divergent turn with 
 some late-appearing grandiose compressed orchestrations ("To All The Laughing You Will Never Do" and the 
 closing "A House Under Your Head"). 

 This all works well enough in sequences of two or three tracks, especially on individual songs like "Peace 
 Corpse," with its flurry of half-erased melodies and visceral drums, Spanish guitar flourishes meshing with the
 fizz of his string-strums. Rhythms stagger and lurch, gather momentum, only to falter. Sounds are pre-stressed 
 and etiolated, bleached out here, over-amplified, zoomed-in there. Melodies appear to take shape then dissolve 
 or morph into recursive tropes. So while each track in isolation offers a distracting enough freeplay of gristly 
 acoustics and fluid electronics, the overall effect of the album's progression is somewhat cloying. With a parade
 of largely similar sound sets, the combo of fractured-beats+treated-acoustics begins to sound over-familiar, and
 the ear gets jaded. That said, McNicholas does create a series of fresh-sounding textural pieces which 
 interestingly juggle chaos and order, squeezing out diverting melodies from heaving texture weaves and kinetic 
 beats.

 BARCODE ZINE

 Sophomore release for Finn McNicholas Ultre project – The Nest And The Skull is a busy electro-acoustic album.
 Favourite Mammal kicks off proceedings well with McNicholas’ guitar controlling the proceedings, surrounded by 
 a cacophony of spliced and diced percussive sounds. Apparently, clapping, finger-clicking and even chest-
 beating are all used by McNicholas as sample sources to accompany his mutant guitar foundations.

 The problem with The Nest And The Skull is that whilst each track on its own provides an interesting combination 
 of acoustic and electronic compositional play, as a whole the record is starkly repetitive. Practically every track 
 features the same combination of sounds and furthermore there’s a lack of evolution within the tracks.

 The Nest And The Skull is not a particularly long album, at around 40 minutes, but it tends to drag on because of 
 the lack of variety mentioned above – and having listened to the record something like four times I can still barely 
 distinguish one track from another. The only exception to that rule being Memory Tics, and probably because it 
 employs humming male vocals throughout.

 Takas also stands out, as the production is stripped bare to modulated string guitars and violin, with an earthy, 
 granulated soup of percussive clangs in the background. Oddly effective it has to be said.

 Overall, however, The Nest And The Skull is what I would consider a fairly avant-garde record that employs a 
 clever yet extravagant use of organic and electronic sound samples. However, had McNicholas allowed the 
 emotive capabilities of his acoustic instruments to guide rather than the intricate technicalities of the production 
 to dominate, the album might have been far more consuming.