Ulver - The metamorphoses of the Norwegian wolves

The story of Ulver is the story of a journey. A journey with no fixed destination, bound to cross a variety of spaces and times, because the subject at the heart of their quest is itself complex, contradictory and ever-changing: mankind, with its instincts and its hopes, aware of its own mortality yet deluded into believing it can touch the infinite. The past, in symbiosis with and submission to a natural world that is the cradle of legends, dreams and fears; the present, alienation, rationality, the illusion of wellbeing; the future, wrapped in silence, in emptiness, in darkness. A journey that tells the story of all of us. A journey that begins in 1992, in Oslo.

Nature and mysticism: the black metal trilogy

In 1992 Norway is about to witness, powerless, the explosion of that second wave of black metal that would soon make headlines, between crimes and misdeeds and a flood of extraordinary albums: in that period many bands of very young musicians, destined to become genre touchstones, begin vying for the crown held by the genre's inspirers and prime movers, Mayhem. In the town of Bergen the scene finds its focal point, both musically and otherwise. Well-known acts of blood and fire will soon follow. But they don't concern us here, our gaze turns elsewhere, to the capital, Oslo. Here Kristoffer "Garm" Rygg, fifteen years old at the time, appoints himself charismatic leader of a gang of kids eager to make their mark in the crowded underground of metal. Alongside Garm stand out guitarist Haavard Jorgensen and drummer Carl Michael Eide, plus supporting members Reza, Malmberg and Grellmund. They choose to call themselves Ulver, "wolves", guided from their very first steps by a clearly defined concept, at the centre of which lies mankind, an animal capable of rising above nature itself, yet in reality always small and defenceless before nameless forces, far greater and more ancient than itself; it is these violent contrasts that Ulver want to underline and translate into music: harmony, majesty, beauty and brutality, feral instincts.

Vargnatt, the night of the wolf, is the fledgling band's first demo, dated 1993. Ideas still raw and undefined, of course, but original enough to stand out in the mare magnum of the black scene: Ulver share the spotlight with rising stars such as Emperor, Carpathian Forest, Satyricon, Enslaved and many others. But our kids from Oslo immediately seem different, starting with the literary sources that inspire them: while other bands play with satan and its offshoots, or with vikings, pagan deities and so on, Garm draws on "simple" folk legends rooted in the true soul of his land, on the 17th-century poet Thomas Kingo, on the visionary mysticism of William Blake, writing and singing his lyrics in Old Danish. A personality that, after a 7" split with Mysticum and a deal with the Head Not Found label, would lead the very young band to create, between 1994 and 1996, the so-called, fundamental black metal trilogy.

Bergtatt (1994) is its first, essential piece: with a line-up now settled at five members (Garm and Haavard plus second guitarist Aismal, bassist Hugh "Skoll" Mingay and new drummer Erik Lancelot), Ulver find their perfect balance, and the ability to express themselves at levels never reached by any other band in the scene. Bergtatt (roughly translatable as "taken by the mountain") is a concept album, a dark fairy tale in 5 chapters that tells of a girl lost in the forest, caught by nightfall, seduced by the spirits dwelling deep within the mountains, and taken by them, made to disappear forever. To best convey the allure of the concept, Ulver quite simply take black metal and disfigure it to their liking. Right from the start, with the first chapter, "I Troldskog Faren Vild", it's clear we're in the presence of something unprecedented. Garm's dreamy voice floats in a dense cloud of slowed-down, ethereal black metal, a cascade of atmospheres of unsettling wonder. From this very first track alone it's already clear what will set Ulver's path apart: total expressive freedom, above all; a harmonic and melodic sensibility able to emerge even from the most hostile premises, touching the soul's deepest chords; the epic, astral allure of Garm's eclectic voice. He is the soul of the group, and the musical forms to be adopted are whichever he deems most fitting to the purpose of each work: this one single rule will lead Ulver to take on, time and again, unpredictable and radical stylistic shifts.

But returning to follow the path of the young girl at the centre of Bergtatt, we find the second and third episodes, where into a more "canonical" black metal (with screamed vocals) are perfectly woven bold folk digressions. Harmonies and melodies that at every moment vibrate with a dreamlike, muffled, menacing enchantment. In the hands of these very young and brilliant newcomers, black metal discovers grace and fragility, realising that from its own icy skeleton an unimaginable warmth can also be born. It is precisely the warmth, the intensity, the evocative power, the sheer beauty of this album that immediately carve out a niche all of their own for Ulver, apart from the rest of the black-clad troop. And the acoustic coda that closes the final chapter — tragic, furious, overwhelming — is among the most beautiful and moving things ever heard.

Epic and human, tragic and majestic, simple and solemn, a blazing, unconventional masterpiece, in its mere 35 minutes Bergtatt revolutionises an entire genre, setting itself up as the benchmark for all those — and they would be legion — who later sought to develop its insights, particularly the role of folk music within the black metal imagination.

A role that Ulver push to its extreme consequences already on the following Kveldssanger (1995), the trilogy's second chapter. An album of pure folk, and nothing else. If Bergtatt was set in the black heart of the forest, now the music evokes serene images of simple folk, inhabitants of some village of modest wooden houses, by the edge of a stream, with majestic mountains reflected in its waters. Day draws to a close, it's sunset, and a few men strike up traditional songs. A handful of isolated men paying tribute to an imposing nature, both beautiful and frightening, to be loved and feared alike. But at sunset only peace reigns. The chorus of their voices and the spare acoustic guitar accompaniment carry with them the full flavour of wood, of fire, of cold. This is Kveldssanger, an album as raw as it is beguiling: the musical accompaniment is bare, understated, gentle; the songs are tiny fragments making up a single mosaic of ancestral sensations: among them stand out "Hoyfjeldsbilde", pure wonder made manifest; "Nattleite" and "Naturmystikk" would go on to become classics. Because despite its youthful simplicity, this album too would prove a decisive influence on the path of many extraordinary bands (Empyrium above all). Only Garm (vocals) and Haavard (guitar) are its protagonists, sporadically joined by cello and flute.

With the evening songs finished (= Kveldssanger), we see the men returning to their homes. The calm doesn't last long. Darkness falls. Within it a monstrous creature takes shape, its howl bursting forth sudden and harrowing, its desperate and bestial violence unleashed from the bowels of time. It takes the form of a (were)wolf; a free man, become one with his primal instincts. The wolf-man knows no restraint, no mercy, no pause in his hungry race through trees shrouded in darkness and frost. The moonlight is glacial. And the wolf-man's voice is an atavistic torment, cruel and harrowing. Nattens Madrigal, the final fresco of the trilogy, is its celebration.

Extreme, ferocious, it finds catharsis in its own desperate violence. An ancient treasure guarded by deadly traps: for its entire length this album is an unrelenting assault, music at ground zero, fired off at the peak of its murderous power. Garm's screaming is extraordinary in its ferocity and intensity, the true center around which everything else revolves. The production is, deliberately, nonexistent. Yet out of what on first listen sounds like nothing but unbearable noise, the band once again manages to draw epic, dramatic melodies, culminating in a track like "Wolf & Hatred," of overwhelming beauty.

Once you discover its true, and once again deeply human, nature, you won't be able to do without this pitch-black gem, the last and definitive masterpiece of black metal in its "pure" form, since by that time (we're in 1996), with the embers of burned churches, feuds and bloodshed dying down, and its foundational works already delivered, the genre was entering its more adult, mature phase, opening up to the most varied contaminations. Ulver, true to their style, would choose to make a clean break and suddenly turn their backs on a scene that had already crowned them living legends.

Metamorphosis, perdition, silence

Once the trilogy was finished, following friction with the powerful label Century Media, Garm opted for total independence and founded his own label, Jester Records, in 1998. Around the same time he fell in love with electronic music. Crucial for him was the discovery of bands such as Autechre and above all Coil. He thus severed ties with metal and charted a radically different new course for Ulver: the first step, a fundamental laboratory for what was to come, was a monumental double album setting to music The Marriage Of Heaven and Hell, William Blake's "visual" poem. Around two hours of music crowded with the most disparate genres, sometimes with neither head nor tail, other times with an effectiveness matched only by its beauty, words and music so distant yet so perfectly fused. The industrial-rock of "The Argument," for instance, and the propulsive "Proverbs Of Hell," almost like Depeche Mode on an amphetamine overdose.

But there are many beautiful moments, often just brief instrumental interludes or spoken passages from guest vocalist Stine Grytoyr: moments scattered throughout a work of boundless ambition, undoubtedly excessive for the limited experience of a still very young band. Garm displays an increasingly chameleonic, theatrical singing style; in those same years he also has fun singing with Borknagar (epic black metal) and with the cerebral Arcturus. "Song Of Liberty," absurd but great, a hybrid of techno and black metal, brings the kolossal to its best possible close and stands as a definitive farewell to the past: it's no coincidence that it's celebrated by none other than old "Black" friends Ihsahn and Samoth of Emperor, and Fenriz of Darkthrone.

But the band is no more: Haavard leaves, briefly joining Satyricon before moving on to his own projects; Skoll leaves too, joining Arcturus after also having served in the brilliant Ved Buens Ende, founded a few years earlier by Carl Michael Eide; for them the world of metal still offers plenty to explore. Not so for Garm, who refounds Ulver in tandem with producer Tore Ylwizaker, turning without hesitation toward electronic music. First with the uneven EP Metamorphosis, then with the masterpiece Perdition City (2000), crowded with ghosts of jazz, trip-hop and post-rock.

Ulver are now a different band altogether, with nothing to do with their past. Or so it seems. In fact, listen closely and the mood is still the same dense, fascinating one of their early works, only expressed through entirely different sounds, because the setting in which this new exploration takes shape is different: now the protagonist – anyone is invited to recognize themselves in it – is lost not in legends and forests, but in real, everyday life, in the modern city, in lights, in traffic, in loneliness. It's night in the city of perdition, traffic lights blink and traffic flows with inanimate presences. Orange, green, faded lights reflect on the wet asphalt; a lone man wandering through a crowd of his fellow men, indifferent shapes no different from the trees among which the girl of Bergtatt once roamed.

The songs are cold environments, wet car windows, deserted streets, subway stations at closing time: "Lost In Moments," "Hallways of Always," "Dead City Centres." They are dimly lit apartments, farewell messages on an answering machine: "Porn Piece, Or The Scars Of Cold Kisses," "Tomorrow Never Knows." Digital beats and synthesizer fantasies, and sudden percussive outbursts that come close to the emotional peaks of post-rock, like a burst of reaction against the alienating sameness of day after day: "The Future Sound of Music." And a final surrender into a nothingness that annihilates, yet consoles, because it leads somewhere else regardless: "Nowhere/Catastrophe."

An extraordinary album, Perdition City is the ideal soundtrack to an entire life, captured in its emblematic scenes, embodied in moods and emotions: everything that matters. "Music for an interior film" is its subtitle. Every detail of it is there to be discovered and savored, with the patience and dedication that any great work of art demands.

For his part, Garm, who has always described his metal albums as "simple stages necessary to our evolution," doesn't seem particularly bothered by the ritual accusations of "betrayal" leveled by the most hardline fans. In fact, a good portion of the metal audience keeps following and loving the band, happy to open up to new horizons alongside them. By now they're a cult band, cited even outside strictly musical circles, and each new album is awaited like a revelation. Perhaps that's exactly why Garm decides, right at this peak, to withdraw into the absolute incommunicability of minimal electronic music, this time influenced by his discovery of artists like Christian Fennesz. In 2001 two limited-edition EPs come out under the Ulver name, collected the following year on the album Teachings In Silence. Once again earlier experiments are pushed to their extreme consequences, in tracks of obscure, totally instrumental free-form electronica, often fascinating (especially "Speak Dead Speaker") but also rather inconclusive: these works, in which Garm and Tore play with ambient and glitch electronics, end up being little more than an appendix to the band's major albums. Meanwhile a third party has joined the duo, Jorn H. Svaeren, who had already worked with the band on the lyrics and translations for the Trilogy.

A remix album celebrating the group's tenth anniversary is even less convincing, despite boasting the presence of artists of the caliber of Fennesz, Merzbow, Stars Of The Lid and Third Eye Foundation. Meanwhile Garm continues to run his label, open to every kind of experimentation, and keeps his voice in shape by guesting on albums by various friends, from Norwegians Magenta and Star Of Ash to the magnificent Gathering. He also teams up with Portuguese musician Daniel Cardoso for the project Head Control System, whose debut album "Murder Nature" wouldn't see the light of day until 2006, offering an engaging rock/metal sound in the style of bands like A Perfect Circle.

Meanwhile soundtracks become new territory for the band to explore: Lyckantropen for the fine short film of the same name by Swedish director Steve Ericsson; Svidd Neger is instead the title of a Norwegian film for which Ulver create a soundtrack of great beauty. Another sudden change of course follows with the EP A Quick Fix Of Melancholy, in which vocals return to the fore, ruling over electronic songs in the shadow of the most sublime Coil; a memorable track is "Little Blue Birds"; Garm has gone back to singing for his main creative outlet at the strong request of his fans, and he does so with interest added: his performance is exuberant, heartfelt, perfect. As is his cover of "In The Kingdom Of The Blind The One-Eyed Are Kings," a Dead Can Dance classic reworked by Ulver for a tribute compilation.

Return, blood, shadows

"A Quick Fix..." served mainly as an appetizer for the real return to the light, the new album, the first in five years. Blood Inside (2005) is the result of long and complicated recording sessions. The album is essentially a return to the city of perdition, but compared to the previous album this time the perspective is completely different; the despondent tone of Perdition City is here replaced by a cynical, deviant mood bordering on the straitjacket: a humanity captured in the grip of collective madness, hurtling toward self-destruction, victim of false values, crushed by hypocrisies and religions that annihilate all hope instead of enriching the spirit.

Conceived as a "hospital" album about instability, illness and confusion, Blood Inside is, as a result, an overloaded and chaotic work: blood splatters flying across the walls, sarabands of deranged colours, an ultra-effected and layered voice, cumbersome production courtesy of Ronan Chris Murphy, previously with King Crimson. And indeed, we can speak here of genuine progressive music, destructured and schizophrenic. Certainly "Dressed In Black", "For The Love Of God", the sublime interlude "Blinded By Blood", the murderous anxiety of "Your Call" are unforgettable moments. The album as a whole, however, is their least accomplished work, perhaps an outlet for the stress of a band without peace, one that still finds time to collaborate with Sunn O))) on a brief episode of their "White Box".

In any case, once the turmoil has passed there is always room for calm; and if, in the wake of Bergtatt, that pause unfolded at dusk in the most serene and contemplative acoustic folk, the calm that now follows the storm of blood and madness manifests itself as a solar eclipse: Shadows Of The Sun (2007), their latest new masterpiece.

It's the most accessible Ulver album ever made, as well as the darkest and most subdued. An album in which humanity once again turns its attention to what looms above it, and, watching the eclipse for a brief moment, becomes aware again of its limits and of the imminence of the end, of death, of annihilation. Themes that have always run through the band's path, and now more than ever in these quiet elegies that bring back to memory sensations long buried in the recesses of the unconscious — nameless sensations that, precisely because unknown, are frightening, yet also grant an inexpressible sense of peace, serenity, harmony.

These are shivers beneath the skin that we feel in the presence of an unreal interlude. "Eos" — "All The Love" — "Like Music" make us feel them. At the height of the eclipse, between the waiting ("Vigil") and the evocation ("Let The Children Go") of the end, "Solitude", a classic Black Sabbath ballad, is recreated in a new, and already classic, form. And while in the depths of "Funebre" the darkness seems to win, consolation arrives swiftly; total darkness lasts but an instant, the shadows on the sun depart just as they came, growing dense and gentle once again. "What happened?" asks a stunned, tearful humanity. "What happened to us here?" — a question whose very simplicity makes it the only one worth asking.

In 2011, the Norwegian band shuffled the deck once again, drawing on the "ectoplasmic" experience of Aethenor — to use an expression of keyboardist Daniel O'Sullivan, who was involved alongside Rygg in that project — and settling with the increasingly prestigious Kscope Rec. (Anathema, Porcupine Tree and Blackfield, among the label's best-known names).

Dissonant, a-melodic and wavering: Wars Of The Roses represents a return to the chaotically destructured territories of Blood Inside, with the addition of a touch of self-indulgent post-modernism that never hurts. The mixing, handled by the celebrated John Fryer (Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, Swans, etc.) and the scattered collaborations with legends of pure improvisation such as Stephen Thrower (Coil, Cyclobe), Stian Westerhus, Steve Noble and Alex Ward, fuel Ulver's psychedelic verve, ensuring that the questionable choice to develop ideas without any real guiding lines brushes up against a world of dreamy yet, at the same time, autistic dark melodies.

Wars Of The Roses, in other words, seems to wink at a kind of sonic bipolarity, whose erratic emotional ups and downs are concealed only in the opening "February MMX", the most straightforwardly pop-rock track of Ulver's career, despite a psychedelic coda that hints clearly at the direction of the tracks to follow. A hallucinated painterly expressionism that, in "Norwegian Gothic" and "England", mockingly delights in pitting the nocturnal melancholy of O'Sullivan's keyboards against Rygg's harsh, off-key vocal lines. The former, misanthropic from its whispered incipit, explodes into an orgy of violins, sax and xylophones wholly devoted to dissonance. The latter, instead, pits the poignant emotion released by the almost classical piano notes against a vocal theatricality whose searing crescendo conjures in the listener's mind the curses of some latter-day Antigone.

The album disorients from one moment to the next. Proof of this is the sudden poetry of the romantic duet between Rygg and Siri Stranger, the hugely talented Norwegian R&B singer, in "Providence", a track vaguely comparable to "A Life All Mine" by The Gathering: sweet, full-moon-night violin, bashful keyboards, acoustic guitars, whose floating creations are interrupted by a central sax break wrapped in futuristic spirals. While the abstract, violent psychedelia of "September IV" catapults Ulver into a sort of hallucinated electronic post-prog so dear to Kscope, "Island" carries out its task in minimal fashion, letting itself be led by the hand by Rygg's voice over a backdrop of Pink Floyd-like guitars.

The album's emotional impenetrability reaches its most disorienting peak in the closing credits of the sprawling "Stone Angels": the intangible sacredness of the organ and the stretched-out sound of the sax form the backdrop to Daniel O'Sullivan's dreamlike narration, as he recites a text by the renowned contemporary American poet Keith Waldrop. Dissonance that, in the end, is transfigured into gentle poetry.

In 2012, Ulver celebrated 20 years of their career with the 16 reworkings featured on Childhood's End.

In 2009, however, the asceticism Ulver had imposed on themselves for roughly 15 years — holing up in the studio to give shape to unheard-of, hors catégorie sounds — was interrupted. It was an ever-evolving project carried out by a coterie of extraordinary musicians, who forged a thoroughly unique musical experience amid the clutter of the 2000s. The concert of 31 July 2010 at the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo bears witness to, and at the same time gauges the importance of, this unexpected return to the scene, which gathers up years upon years of work and organically condenses them into a show of enormous atmosphere and craft.

On The Norwegian National Opera (2013), Ulver force us to stand still and watch, to listen. They do so through the power of seduction and mystery, through the allure of a show that speaks directly to our most primal feelings. Ian Johnstone's quiet and unsettling performance art in the prologue and epilogue, underpinned by a minimal piano, frames the episodes of what ultimately comes across as a new, eclectic magnum opus made up of some of the most significant moments from their recent discography. Peaks of moving intensity follow one another, starting with the organ of "Eos" — the manifesto of the Shadows Of The Sun turning point and an absolute ecstasy, like music of the spheres — through to the earthly dance of "Let The Children Go".

The juxtaposition of intimacy and Kristoffer Rygg's solemn lyrics ("Little Blue Bird") finds its complement in the powerful visuals projected on the big screen — deliberately made more dynamic in the DVD's editing — ranging from the horror of the Nazi massacres and the atomic bomb to grand-guignol, proto-pornographic pastiches of almost Dadaist inspiration. Lights and pervasive electronics explode in the most futuristic moments (the "A Memorable Fancy/Hallways of Always" pairing), building up to the guest appearance of Fennesz's guitar on "Like Music" and finally to the long instrumental coda, an enchanting and definitive exercise in soundscaping.

Three years after it was recorded, Ulver hand us a meta-work capable of sealing their full artistic maturity, as well as another precious moment to stop and truly listen (the mea culpa starts with yours truly). Great music and visual art merge indissolubly thanks to direction and editing work fully devoted to the atmosphere conceived for the Wars Of The Roses tour, which has become the fitting celebration of the Norwegian legend.

The orchestral contamination acts as a half-hint toward the direction that, just a few months later, would come to define the band's new album. Made together with the Tromsø Chamber Orchestra and commissioned by the cultural centre of the same name, Messe I.X-VI.X is a ritual in six acts in which the imposing Gothic architectures sketched out by blankets of martial strings intersect with distorted, refracting guitars, moving electronic masses and arctic nebulae. A blend of exceptional pathos that picks up and brings to full fruition the language first sketched out in the little-known gem A Quick Fix Of Melancholy, then adapted to image in their cinematic experiences, and finally theorised in the splendid Shadow Of The Sun.

But where six years earlier a mystical, esoteric force animated the emotional structures, here we're faced with a new overflow of warped, unhealthy spirituality, lulling the listener even as it wounds with commendable delicacy. Echoes of the industrial esotericism of Coil, mixed with dissonances and a sample from a 1920s track, represent in "Noche oscura del alma" the climax of this progression: it's the one moment where terror materializes, tangible, from beyond the grave. For once, the true masterpiece isn't placed at the end but is found in the eleven minutes that open the ceremony, moving from the floating, meteor-like drones à-la-Sunn O))) of the opening to the orchestral suggestions of the central section, right up to the minimalism of the intimate farewell: "As Syrians Pour In, Lebanon Grapples With Ghosts Of A Bloody Past" lets the title speak for itself, scoring a psychodrama amid a bloody war. That same oppressive, uncontrollable force builds within the arches of "Glamour Box (Ostinati)", only to find an outlet in the sublunar chimes of the wonderful "Son Of Man". And the band's love of power-electronics excursions reaches its peak in the abstraction of "Shri Schneider", where the arpeggiators pay homage to Cluster and Tangerine Dream. Ultimate purification arrives in the closing "Mother Of Mercy", which starts out gently as a ballad before languidly spilling into a catharsis of dissonance, bringing to a close a ritual of extraordinary power.

This is yet another masterpiece, yet another demonstration of genius from a band whose evolutions have by now become pointless to count or catalogue. And yes, one that has gotten us so used to surprises that it no longer manages to surprise us at all.

In 2014 comes Terrestrials, a collaboration with drone-doom masters Sunn O))), led by Stephen O'Malley. As the press release suggests, the album is made of sonic movements flowing like roiling magma beneath the earth's crust. However, the first eight minutes of "Let There Be Light" let the instruments slide past each other without landing a real blow, only to resolve the mystery with a symphonic climax that is, all things considered, predictable and not especially "explosive". "Western Horn" essentially moves along the same lines, though the drone-doom element becomes more dominant, while the backdrop unleashes, in quick succession, a whole array of menacing sounds. Closing things out are the post-rock textures of "Eternal Return", where Kristoffer Rygg's voice, in the second half, evokes the ancient worlds of the Bible, Greece and Egypt in a slow, melancholic swirl of surrender that is undoubtedly the best moment on an otherwise disappointing record.

2014 also sees the release of Trolsk Sortmetall 1993-1997, an essential remastered box set celebrating the cult status of the band's historic black-metal trilogy, complete with period photographs and full translated lyrics.

The solemn, timeless sounds of this career-capping event, staged at the Norwegian National Opera, return in the meta-opera ATGCLVLSSCAP: a full-length in the truest sense of the word, 80 minutes almost entirely instrumental, whose tracks mark out stages of a selection later reworked in the studio by mastermind Daniel O'Sullivan from the sessions behind the February 2014 tour, where for the first time the Norwegian collective cautiously ventured into improvisation.

This complex body of work – whose title is the unpronounceable acronym of the zodiac signs – displays stylistic traits that, within such an eclectic and eccentric body of work, feel like sediment laid down over time, completing a line of thought clumsily introduced by Childhood's End (whose lineup remains intact here) and never before explored with due diligence; an undertaking that attempts to survey the sturdiest, most imperishable legacies of the 1970s – in the band's own words, the "magical mystery moments" that the twelve tracks represent – with an approach that is, therefore, far more rock-oriented than usual.

Wah-wah guitars, sci-fi keyboards and whirlwinds of tribal percussion chase each other through the driving rhythms of the first half, which openly and reverently looks to Amon Düül II, Neu! and other kraut outfits.

That lineage takes on a different but equally nostalgic form in the second half of the journey, opened by "Desert/Dawn", where the twin spirits of Kraftwerk and Klaus Schulze are perfectly distilled and cast their shadow all the way to the serene contemplation of "Gold Beach", and finally to the melancholic "Ecclesiastes", which draws on profound verses from the Hebrew Bible, leading the listener back to that indefinable, universal intimacy that defined the masterpiece Shadows Of The Sun.

Even if the patchwork-style experiment only partly succeeds, ATGCLVLSSCAP still marks, in its own way, a further step for Ulver towards a total, self-sufficient art, ever more solemn each time, to the point of raising fears that their heroic adventure might truly be nearing its end.

2016 instead closes with a return to service of the seventh art: the original soundtrack for Riverhead, the debut feature of young director Justin Oakey, which taps into the emerging docu-drama genre to tell the story of religious feuds in his native Newfoundland, the Canadian island historically settled by migrants from southeast Ireland. Ulver's score preceded the film's shoot, shaping its chilly atmospheres with equally spare touches where neoclassical language meets drone music.

As with Svidd Neger, the primary element here is strings, their registers explored across their full range, from the constant high pitch of the title track to the deep growl of an open-string cello, amid the screeches and creaks typical of contemporary classical vocabulary; some instruments from Norwegian folk tradition add a subtle fiddling color to the drones, echoing their Celtic roots.

The essential sonic thread carried by the core trio settles into the stable coordinates of a fairly conventional dark ambient, occasionally stirred by horns and percussion stripped down to the bare minimum, or by electronic keyboards recalling the recent exploits of Mogwai and the established Reznor/Ross duo.

Really not much on offer this time, for an entity that has always managed to stand out even in its less inspired moments.

The warning signs scattered across Wars Of The Roses and the ambitious neo-retro experiments of Childhood's End and ATGCLVLSSCAP are the only clues to understanding Ulver's latest turn, as with The Assassination Of Julius Caesar they prove themselves masters of electronic pop's tools without ever contradicting their elusive occult poetics. If the tormented spirituality of Messe I.X–VI.X, loosely inspired by Górecki's Third, sprang specifically from immersion in the mysterious darkness of a suffered faith, here instead we find ourselves facing a lavish pagan ceremony that keeps a watchful eye on the course of documented history, where each track marks a significant stop in the cyclical recurrence of dramatic episodes ("Tragedies repeat themselves in a perfect circle").

A sweeping overview of the West's temporal and spiritual history shapes a narrative built on logical and synesthetic connections, freely moving between the fall of the Roman Empire and the death of Lady Diana, the stone rolled away from Jesus's tomb and the retreat from Dunkirk during the Second World War, the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and the dazzling devotion of Saints Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux.

The dominance of dark, rumbling synths, of the kind we might find in Cold Cave or early iamamiwhoami, remains puzzling for a long while and almost fuels the suspicion of some eccentric artistic provocation. But it soon becomes clear how such a pervasive, insistent sound serves to convey extremely vivid imagery, weaving together epics already debated by countless generations of scholars and students, too focused on chronology to notice the tragic repetition of infamies and selfishness.

In the omniscient gaze that crowns the concept, history, myth and tradition coexist in a fresh and illuminating perspective, the mournful acknowledgment of an eschatological revelation that has long been slow to manifest. With the disruptive force of this statement, Rygg and co. deliver what is perhaps the sharpest and most striking vision since the decade-old heliocentric anthem of Shadows Of The Sun.

Just a few months later, Ulver also released the EP Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, containing two tracks that follow in the wake of the last album with just a touch more emphasis on '80s-style melodies and keyboard layering, plus a cover of Frankie Goes To Hollywood faithful to the original. Ultimately, it's Garm's voice that holds the whole EP together, captivating even in the moments where the arrangements are perhaps a bit too drowned in layering to reach masterpiece status.

With the live album Drone Activity – a commissioned work for Red Bull – Ulver return to draw from the source of their most radical and far-reaching metamorphosis, one that came to fruition at the dawn of the new millennium, compiling four long improvised suites, true exercises in absence with no temporal placement nor clear symbolic references, if we exclude the titles later assigned to the tracks. 70 of the overall 90 minutes are documented on the double LP, and condensing it further would certainly not have conveyed the variety of this unreleased performance. Here too, the quintet's ability to shape a fully-formed, self-sufficient "sonic organism" proves convincing, but not all the underlying ideas are strong enough to make Drone Activity a meaningful addition to their eclectic discography.

In 2020, the year of the band's 25th anniversary, came Flowers Of Evil. The lineup on "Flowers Of Evil" is almost identical to the one that recorded the imposing The Assassination Of Julius Caesar and the subsequent EP, confirming that this time around no transformation has taken place, and that this is indeed a further foray into the synth-pop and darkwave territory explored on the previous record.

"One Last Dance" sets up the album's dark spleen, built on relentless drum machines and synths, which from the outset feels less martial and more romantic than its 2017 counterpart. The presence of Christian Fennesz on guitar, with his trademark smears of sound, makes the track even more piercing and evocative. "Russian Dolls" pushes in the same direction with a tighter, more danceable rhythm, while the following "Machine Guns And Peacock Feathers" is even sturdier, harnessing the force of a punchy electric guitar riff to rail against the deceitful, self-destructive governments of our time.

After "Hour Of The Wolf" and "Apocalypse 1983", which rather formulaically just expand the band's synth-pop catalogue, comes "Little Boy" with its long closing section streaked with abrasive guitars and distant echoes of bagpipes. We're back to dancing with "Nostalgia", a single with an almost radio-friendly drive: an insistent piano-and-synth rhythm reminiscent of bygone-era Depeche Mode, disco-style backing vocals showing up in the chorus, and a long coda just made for swaying along to.

Granted, it lacks the disruptive force and the "surprise factor" of the 2017 album, but Garm and his bandmates wear the synth-pop clothes so well that listening to this new batch of pitch-black synthetic ballads is both a pleasure and a necessity.

While it's true that Ulver seem perfectly at ease within this elegant, refined synthetic dimension, it must be said that with the recent Liminal Animals (2024) a certain underlying repetitiveness starts to creep in, beyond a handful of tracks that best distill the ambient-electronic experiments already appreciated throughout their career. The album gathers several singles released over the preceding months and is dedicated to the late keyboardist Tore Ylwizaker (who passed away that summer), a longtime member of the band since way back in 1998.

Among the best compositions are "Forgive Us" and "Locusts", two tracks of excellent caliber capable of lifting the not-always-stellar quality of a record that is undoubtedly solid, if not as essential as others.

With Neverland (released in late 2025), on the other hand, the hoped-for change of course doesn't amount to much. The almost entirely instrumental nature of the work manages to blend progressive electronic-style suggestions with others that are more suspended and rarefied, setting itself somewhat apart from the band's older, darker and more cinematic ambient repertoire. The end result, however, comes across as overly cold and clinical, starting with the cover art. Something works, but it's also hard to be fully satisfied.

Contributions by Davide Sisto ("Wars Of The Roses"), Michele Palozzo ("The Norwegian National Opera", "ATGCLVLSSCAP", "Riverhead", "The Assassination Of Julius Caesar", "Drone Activity"), Matteo Meda ("Messe I.X-VI.X"), Francesco Nunziata ("Terrestrials"), Michele Corrado ("Flowers Of Evil"), Paolo Chemnitz ("Liminal Animals", "Neverland")

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