Gregory Uhlmann has been involved in a lot of very good and very different music over the last couple of years. He’s like a human wrecking ball in reverse, swinging from studio to studio, band to band, gracing everything he touches with his exemplary guitar skills and adding his compositional nous to any number of stellar collaborations. Recently, he’s been garnering rave reviews as one fifth of psych-jazz improvisers SML, and his CV also includes work with Perfume Genius, Hand Habits, Tasha and Dustin Wong. Hailing from Chicago but currently working out of LA means he has one foot in each of America’s Jazz/improv strongholds, and much of his music has reached us via Chicago-based International Anthem.
That’s true of his collaborations and his prolific solo work, the latest example of which comes in the form of Extra Stars, thirteen brief, breezy, deceptively light tracks characterised by Uhlmann’s playful guitar and often idiosyncratic sense of composition. But to call this a guitar album is to understate Uhlmann’s talents: he also plays synths, recorder, percussion, piano, and as weightless as these tunes might sound, they are expertly layered. Lead track Lucia, which features Alabaster Deplume, starts off like some kind of cosmic anti-folk, before Deplume’s sax ushers in a naive lyricism, with a result that lies somewhere between Sun Ra and Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Opener Pocket Snail seems at first like a jazzier, freakier update of Prokofiev’s programmatic music, a beast that didn’t make the final cut of Peter and the Wolf. But it has a strange, slow swing to it, a gliding, synthy slither that is both wide-eyed and world-weary.
View Above’s minimal synth chirrups trade places with bright twinkles, drones and swampy croaks, which are amplified in its sister song View Below. It quickly becomes apparent that Extra Stars is an album obsessed with natural processes, some of them organic and even cellular, others more cosmic. Bristlecone (with an appearance from Anna Butterss on bass) sounds careful from its outset, but the melody slowly grows determined and inquisitive. By the end, it is gleeful and jumpy, sunlight through moving leaves. Worm’s Eye, too, has its home in the leaf mulch of a forest floor but its view fixed on the stars: the pointillist synths crawl and sparkle, aided by the production work of Uhlmann’s SML buddy Jeremiah Chiu. The synths take the lead in Dottie too: it’s like the soundtrack to an ancient video game, popping and bouncing in a way that sounds somehow full of life, a robot chatter filtered through a human brain.
Human emotion plays a bigger part than you might think. Like Tea has a warped music box quality to it, an otherworldly nostalgia you’d usually expect to find in hauntological music from Britain rather than the States. A similar mood pervades Days (at seven minutes, the longest thing here). It is a dusty piano piece enshrouded by the ghost of an organ melody, growing and clinging like ivy on a forgotten wall. Even the weird, synthesised bestial chattering that pervades closing track Sugar Water sounds full of heart and humanity.
Ever the experimenter, Uhlmann is a master of the sonic oddity, particularly where his guitar is concerned. On Burnt Toast, he makes it sound like a micro-symphony of plucked and bowed rubber bands. Imprint is a mutedly echoey advance followed by restless, percussive plucks and small wailing noises that shoot off in different directions like the sparks from a Catherine wheel. Back Scratch is one of the album’s most unexpected outliers: a collage of apparently random piano notes pasted over drummer Booker Stardrum’s clacking rhythms. It all fits together perfectly naturally, even when it sounds like it shouldn’t. Even more eccentric is Voice Exchange, an arrangement of technologically shifted syllables (Tasha Viets-Vanlear’s voice, with Chiu again on production duties). Its unlikely combinations of pitch and tone make it sound almost as if it were composed from multiple voices, like a hocket.
As varied as it is, Extra Stars is a fluent and fluid album, flowing over diverse territories while retaining its identity. For all of Uhlmann’s evident talent as a guitarist, arranger, composer and improviser, one of his most important skills is the way he lets his musical curiosity work in tandem with his expansive imagination. It makes for a consistently engaging, surprising and often joyful album.
Extra Stars (March 6th, 2026) International Anthem
Pre-Order/Save: https://international-anthem.lnk.to/ExtraStars
“Burnt Toast” (Live at International Anthem Studios, Chicago):