ULVER - Riverhead (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The new cult dark label House Of Mythology closes its first, intense year of activity with the same artists who had opened it: twelve months on from “ATGCLVLSSCAP”, the polymorphous entity Ulver releases an original soundtrack, picking up the thread laid down by “Lyckantropen Themes” and “Svidd Neger” over ten years ago. Their relationship with cinema can ideally be traced back even further, to the electronic turn of “Perdition City”, whose subtitle describes it as an “inner film”, a dimension that sidesteps the interdependence between image and sound, leaving room for a purely mental dramaturgy to unfold.

Already active in independent cinema as an assistant director and camera technician, young Justin Oakey wrote and directed two shorts before his official debut with “Riverhead”: a first feature that edges toward the emerging docu-drama genre in recounting the religiously-tinged internal strife of his native Newfoundland, the Canadian island historically settled by migrants from south-east Ireland. The centuries-old feud between these Catholic settlers and the Protestant English colonists mirrored the conflicts that had played out on European soil, generating a climate of oppressive tension and a string of crimes that can fairly be described as a genuine "holy war".

Following a procedure that's hardly unprecedented in modern cinema - at least since "Koyaanisqatsi" - it was Ulver's score that preceded the filming itself, shaping its icy atmospheres with equally spare suggestions in which neoclassical language meets drone music. Kristoffer Rygg and co. seem to treat the soundtrack as a more traditional form of composition, favouring particularly stark textures that nonetheless carry an immediate evocative power, acting as a symbiotic, non-intrusive complement to the film's images.

As with “Svidd Neger”, the primary element here is strings, whose registers are explored across their full range, from the constant high pitch of the title track – close to Scelsi's microtonal meditations – to the deep growl of an open-string cello (“In A Wooden Coat”), amid the screeches and creaks typical of the contemporary vocabulary. Alongside the Ulver core, the performers are the talented duo of fellow Norwegians Sheriffs Of Nothingness: Ole Henrik Moe (also part of the Island Band) and Kari Rønnekleiv, who use instruments from Norwegian folk tradition to add a subtle fiddling coloring to the drones, evoking its Celtic ancestry (“Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Playthings”).

The essential sonic fabric driven by the core trio finds almost no foothold in the solemn sound of their recent studio and live work, settling instead into the stable coordinates of a rather conventional dark-ambient, occasionally stirred by horns and percussion reduced to the bare minimum, or by electronic keyboards that, perhaps not by chance, recall the recent exploits of Mogwai (“Stoke The Fire”) and the well-established Reznor/Ross duo (“Stalking”) – not to mention the implicit nod in the dreamy “Bored Of Canada”.

Precious little on offer this time, for an entity that has always managed to stand out even in its less inspired moments, while on “Riverhead” it blends into the bleak average of film music contributions: a genre that has forcefully returned to the spotlight, yet still struggles to produce new scores that leave a mark; the benefit of the doubt remains as to what effect it might have paired with Oakey's film, but there it is.

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28/12/2016