New/Sealed
SML is the quintet of bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. Their second album, How You Been, finds the supergroup of prolific composer/producers pushing ever further into the hyperrealist, collectivist approach to music creation nascently explored on their debut Small Medium Large, which was lauded as “awe-inspiring” by Glide, “exuberant” by the Los Angeles Times, and “an exciting milestone” by Pitchfork. At inception the band inspired disparate but distinctive artist comparisons like Essential Logic, Oval, Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, and electric Miles Davis, as well as assorted genre touchpoints like Afrobeat, kosmiche, proto-techno and new-jazz. With How You Been their work manages to both collapse and explode such derivatives, displaying a new, high resolution version of SML, fully-flowered into a new strain of sound, bound to incite its own copycats in due time. “SML might signal a new iteration of jazz, or it might not be jazz at all, or it might not matter.” - Pitchfork It’s important to note that SML’s sound wasn’t created in a vacuum. The band is part of an extensive community of creative musicians who collaborate in a multitude of ways. Los Angeles in the 2020s is a musical Petri dish in the same way that Cologne & Dusseldorf were for the birth of Krautrock; Canterbury for progressive rock in late-60s; NYC for No Wave & the Downtown sound in the late 70s and 80s; Chicago for genreless, Tortoise-adjacent sounds in the 90s. The musicians of SML represent the core of a new school within the Los Angeles jazz and improvised music scene that seems to breed infinitely overlapping combinations, including Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, the Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes trio, Anna Butterss’s own band, and various other projects encompassing every single member of the SML, respectively.
 
Tracks    
 
Title
 
1
Gutteral Utterance
2
Chicago Four
3
Taking out the Trash
4
Plankton
5
Chicago Three
6
Daves
7
Old Mytth
8
Stepping In / The Loop
9
Brood Board SHROOM
10
Odd Evens
11
How You Been
12
Moving Walkway
13
Mouth Words
 
SML is Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, Gregory Uhlmann. "Small Medium Large" was engineered and recorded in stereo direct to Nagra by Bryce Gonzales at ETA, Los Angeles, CA and compiled, arranged and edited with additional production recording and studio composition by Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann at home studios in Los Angeles, CA and Kingston, NY.
 
Track
Title
1
Rubber Tree Dance
2
Industry
3
Herbie for Commercials
4
Search Bar Hi Hat
5
Window Sill Song
6
Switchboard Operations
7
Soft Sand
8
Three Over Steel
9
Chasing Brain
10
History of Communication
11
Feed The Birds
12
Greg’s Melody
13
Dolphin Language