Since 2024, Kou Records, a label co-run by experimental vocalist Charmaine Lee and sought-after producer and composer Randall Dunn, has been “dedicated to artists who have built their own musical language”. A listen to their small but potent roster bears this out. From Lee’s processed, often violent vocal contortions to Aliya Ultan‘s foreboding song cycle for cello, these are serious artists with daunting resumes. These musicians have often grounded themselves in classical forms, so they know exactly what rules they are breaking.
Taiga Ultan, a classically trained flautist who now creates her own tight constrictions only to break free of them constantly, creates music perfect for the Kou label. With her debut, Shade Zero, she makes a strong argument for conscious banishment only bringing the thing supposedly in need of banishment into closer proximity. It’s a concept George Clinton turned on its head on an early Funkadelic record: “Freedom is [to be] free of the need to be free,” he mutters in stoned awareness.
Ultan begins by hovering close to what we might think of as form. The opener “Adagio” takes the flute back to the forest, or perhaps the sky. Here, she uses it as a gentle wake-up, conjuring images of deer drinking from streams or golden eagles soaring. There’s a certain meditative, new-age connection to Joanna Brouk’s Maggi’s Flute suite, or Marshall Allen’s hesitant woodwind whispering on any number of versions of Sun Ra’s “Pleiades”. Yet, even here, there is something off. She ends phrases with dips into the flute’s lower range, suggesting a soundtrack for someone receiving truly terrible news, and the pauses between these phrases begin to feel suffocatingly long.
For the next few tracks, however, things trundle along with titles such as “Allegro Moderato”, “Largo”, “Andante”. By and large, this is tonal, virtuoso, solo classical flute. Yet, its inclusion on a record released by the Kou label, with an album cover depicting the facial close-up of a Creature from the Black Lagoon-type man-lizardsurrounded by a bright pink, suggests something is up here.
The record’s second part, with titles such as “Act 1” and “Act 2”, begins to chip away at tonality as the flute is pushed to its edges. You can hear Ultan’s breath as she creates a series of anguished screams that sound more like amplified feedback or metal being stripped at a construction site. It’s the sound of Roland Kirk being tormented by devils.
Finally, Ultan puts the flute down for a series of poems. Hiding from others becomes hiding from oneself. The paralyzing fear of failing to communicate becomes its own communication. In the track “God”, in a voice filled with exhaustion and fury, as if it’s being recited while jogging up a mountain, Ultan repeats “get gone, God” so often that it becomes clear God isn’t going anywhere. The frustration with God’s absence becomes God’s unwanted permanent presence.
Taiga Ultan’s Shade Zero demonstrates that conscious music-making never fully abandons rules, even if those rules arenottohave rules. Her music is less about casting off any self-imposed structure than about reshaping it, sometimes hideously, sometimes unobtrusively, all the while opening new paths as she goes.