SML – How You Been – LP – ‘Plankton’ Colour Vinyl [NOV 7]

LP – Indies Exclusive Limited Edition 140g ‘Plankton’ Colour Vinyl inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with IARC OBI strip and poly-lined innersleeve. Pressed at Pallas in Germany with lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST.

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.

How You Been represents a breakthrough in the musical language of the group. This new work was crafted via extensive post-production of recordings from a handful of shows in a similar fashion to their debut, but whereas Small Medium Large was constructed from analog tapes of the bands very first (and very modest) shows at bygone Highland Park LA venue ETA, How You Been was built with a higher level of self-awareness and a far deeper pool of source material.

Behind the thrust of the first albums success, the band approached every performance in late 2024 and early 2025 as a generative opportunity to hone their sound and document their expansion across a new landscape of audiences, venues, and cities. Despite the premeditation driving their commitment to record every moment, the band started every show without musical direction, improvising intuitively, completely. Within every performance is an impressive display of the bands total trust in one another and confidence in their own instincts.

As SML has evolved and spread out in space-time, their fluencies, both as an improvising unit in performance and as a production team in the studio, have sharpened. At inception the band inspired disparate but distinctive artist comparisons like Essential Logic, Oval, Herbie Hancocks 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

Its important to note that SMLs sound wasnt created in a vacuum. The band is part of an extensive community of creative musicians who collaborate in a multitude of ways, and that community has proven to be essential to a growing family tree of innovative, genre-expanding music. 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 the 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 Parkers ETA IVtet and Expansion Trio, the Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes trio, Anna Buttersss own band (as heard on 2024s Mighty Vertebrate), and various other solo and ensemble projects encompassing every single member of the SML, respectively.

On How You Been the curatorial challenge of the capture-cut production employed by SML is met by the delightful happenstance of each member being a seasoned producer on their own merit. Accordingly, SMLs perspective on what is a moment to expand upon with the post-producers knife and glue is five-strong. Each members proclivities, penchants, and predelections get their chance to filter the always-evolving elements of the group concept.

Chicago Four uses a live recording from treasured Chicago haunt The Empty Bottle as its foundation. It begins with interlocking synth and percussion loops before the entry of Uhlmanns wobble-effected electric guitar melody and Buttersss picked bass counterpoint. Stardrums swinging traps slide in, catching up to a couple of added percussion layers, before Johnson adds distorted chordal hits that sound like hard horn samples from a golden era Bomb Squad or Rakim beat. It all intertwines perfectly and makes an otherworldly vehicle for Johnson and Chius cascading keyed melody, which soars above and between, complimenting either side of a hypnotically shifting, infectiously repeating modulation.

Brood Board SHROOM is a temporary touchdown on an alien planet where rhythm moves in timeless, breath-like undulations, with repetitions cut from a very different cloth than the lock-step polyrhythmic grooves of Chicago Four. The tracks opening lines evoke the soft throbs of the beloved ambient works of Aphex Twin (or perhaps a Robitussen-drenched take on Steve Reichs Different Trains), before frothy curtains of textured sound drape into the mix, overlaying like distant, minimalist symphonies in a gentle, synthetic recreation of free time slackening and accelerating as each layer of tonal pulses hovers to front-and-center or retreats into the distance. Its a gut feeling rather than an academic exercise, and its all in the service of forward motion. Plankton occupies a similar space albeit in bite-sized form, centering Butersss low end melodicism and high-string visitations surrounded by skittering tonal chatter from their bandmates.

Of course, SMLs experiments with this kind of pulsating freedom are heavily balanced by muscular turns and body mechanics fit for the dancefloor. Taking Out the Trash is a perfect pace-setter for How You Been, a punchy nugget encapsulating the essence of SML. Chius percussion synth establishes the groove before Stardrum and Butterss drop in on a heavy breakbeat. Uhlmann comes in with a searing, plucked staccato funk line on his guitar that would give Glenn Branca and Larry Coryell something to high five about. Things eventually trip into a total breakdown, with only the perc synth still looping. When the band explodes back in, the key has changed, and Johnson is letting loose on a wailing, distorted saxophone solo.

Is there a way to dim the lights a little more? Chiu asks at the start of the albums closer Mouth Words. Moments later SML takes us out with a mid-tempo 4/4 groover dressed in swelling glissandos and punctuated by insistent, rapid-fire phrases from Johnsons alto. As the final tune dissolves into a layer of arpeggiated chirps and sampled crowd sounds, Chius voice is back again to say what were all thinking: Very good. Thank you.

Tracklist:

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