Love In Us All

Uffe “Love Is Everywhere”

I realized recently that one of the things I find off-putting about a lot of popular music from the recent past is there is often no natural reverb in the music at all. This is to be expected with electronic music – there’s often no microphones used except for recording voices, and live instrumentation is either highly processed or directly inputted to the board. I love a lot of music made this way, but too much of it is exhausting to my ears. Whether by nature or nurture, my ears favor a more natural sound – I want to hear impact and movement and physical space. I love recordings that give you a sense of the room, and the physicality of the players. There’s very little of this to be found in modern pop, and it’s part of why so much of it feels so flat and cold. Songs are relying entirely on the singer to project humanity, and those performances are often just as “corrected” and devoid of presence as the instrumentation. This isn’t always bad, and it makes sense for purely digital distribution, but the sameness grates on me. I’m at a point where all I hear is what is missing.

Uffe’s recording of Pharaoh Sanders’ composition “Love Is Everywhere” is the polar opposite end of the spectrum. The bulk of the music sounds like a field recording, like there’s just one microphone in a room picking up the piano and the vocals. It’s manipulated and layered with electronic percussion as it moves along, but the focus is always on Uffe’s piano playing, which is loose and lovely but often imprecise. Uffe is no Joe Bonner, but he’s obviously fine with it – the point of this interpretation of the song is in channeling some of the peace and optimism of Sanders’ original recording. When the other voices join in, you feel their relative proximity. They’re in the same place, singing the same thing, dreaming of the same thing, achieving the same thing. This recording is in some way about that human connection, and the belief that beautiful things happen when people come together.

Buy it from Bandcamp.