Ulver — ATGCLVLSSCAP

Bertrand Russell once quipped that he couldn't tell the difference between a mysticism that covers over a profound truth and one that was merely nonsense. There is however another possible form of mysticism the Russell didn't consider; that of the type which rather than being plain nonsense or covering over a profound truth merely adds interest to a banal one. This is perhaps worth bearing in mind when approaching the output of Ulver who for the past twenty or so years have been engaged in a knowing and protracted courtship with the mystical and the banal played out across numerous records and multiple styles of music.

As always with this band the precise status of the record is less than obvious. On the face of it ATGCLVLSSCAP is a live recording bringing together the best bits of their 2014 European tour which have subsequently been given post-production work in London and Oslo. But the fact the record contains material that is more or less "new" as well as several complete reworkings of older songs means it is also something of a remix album and a showcase of where the group is right now. ATGCLVLSSCAP is also one of two records inaugurating the newly formed House of Mythology label. Since the record and its characteristically gnomic liner notes point toward something of a summary of Ulver's output to date this review will also reflect on the band's career as a whole, as well as their ever more conspicuous circling around the legacy of the English esoteric underground of the 1980s and 90s as exemplified by Coil.

Indeed the nods toward the latter begin immediately with the opening track title England's Hidden, a clear reference to the 2003 biography of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, England's Hidden Reverse. The track itself is a slow building collage of church bells, processed voice and unplaceable drones which like many of the tracks here segue neatly into the one that follows. Glammer Hammer is a mostly straight re-playing of Glamour Box (Ostinati) from 2013's Messe I.X-VI.X albeit with guitars and keyboards filling in for the Tromso chamber orchestra's swelling strings. Anders Moller's excellent percussion adds an extra layer of drama which the somewhat muddy recording of the original lacked.

Third up is Moody Sticks which is a minor rework of Doom Sticks from 2003's A Quick Fix of Melancholy. Moller's drums are a perfect fit for this piece which is brought up to date with Ulver's current sound by the subtle addition of that twanging guitar they deployed all over 2012's album of psychedelic rock covers Childhood's End. The rock theme continues with the amusingly titled Cromagnosis. Perhaps a play on Gnosis (a track title from 1999's Metamorphosis EP) and Cro-Magnon man. The track is a straight-up whig-out space jam around staccato guitar riffs and tribal drumming. The ghosts of Can, Faust, Sun Ra and whole host of other such groups are present and I defy anyone to not feel moved to the groove of this one. Only Ulver could evoke in one song the image of tub-thumping cavemen and Neo-Platonism.

The core of the record consists of several primarily instrumental pieces spanning a wide range of moods and influences none of which appear to draw on older material. Om Hanumate Namah as the title indicates is something of a mantra inspired by Indian Vedic chanting. Its soundworld is however decisively more 1960s San Francisco than ancient India and manifests a suitably psyched out guitar solo from Daniel O'Sullivan. The stand out instrumental here for me is Desert/Dawn, a keyboard led march suitable for both funerals and triumphs which over its ten minute duration layers slow percussion with pulsing electronics and a glowering organ drone. Ulver fans who pine for the quasi-operatic dramaturgy of the Blake album will find much to appreciate here. D-Day Drone and Gold Beach are darker and more derivative pieces of avant-mood music. Nothing especially wrong with them but there's little here to distinguish them from a very overcrowded field of dark ambient producers.

So we come to the album's centrepiece an updated version of Nowhere Catastrophe from Perdition City which here under the name Nowhere (Sweet Sixteen) has been transformed into a stunningly euphoric slab of post-rock that Explosions in the Sky would be proud of. The wonky meter of the original with its spare arrangement and almost glacial atmosphere has been utterly drenched in the pathos of stratospheric guitars and anthemic vocals from Kristoffer Rygg. This perhaps more than any of the songs on ATGCLVLSSCAP shows where Ulver are right now. Nowhere Catastrophe was a rare moment of conventional song writing during the period which saw Ulver's most strident and experimental work; roughly between the Metamorphosis EP of 1999 and A Quick Fix of Melancholy in 2003. This was the period during which the "Wolves" of Ulver justified their moniker in a self-conscious departure from their black metal records of the mid-1990s and instead sought to construct a kind of floating aesthetic within the dialectic of silence and pure sound. This is the meaning of that imaginary dialogue found at the back of the booklet accompanying Perdition City in which Rygg claims for Ulver a music "beyond the order of words" and that "overrides pre-existing schemes". The music they released during this time was a bold attempt by the band to find a "voice" beyond the word, which in practice meant beyond Rygg's unmistakeable and undoubtedly brilliant rock vocals. Although some of the material produced during this period hasn't dated well, these moments are few and far between. More often than not the band successfully distilled the darkness of their former incarnation into a composed and highly intelligent form of electronic music with the two film soundtracks Lyckantropen Themes and Svidd Neger arguably the highlights. However somewhere between 2003 and the release of Blood Inside in 2005 this project was decisively abandoned. Since then the band has progressively reengaged with the rock idiom and Rygg's vocals have again taken centre stage. The reimagining of their older experimental material as enjoyable but nevertheless predictable pieces of alternative rock signals for this reviewer something of a surrender.

The last track of note on ATGCLVLSSCAP is Ecclesiastes (A Vernal Catnap) which redeploys the well known chapter two of the book of Ecclesiastes which begins "to everything there is a season", an almost universal meditation on the vanity of this life and the perishability of all things. O'Sullivan backs it up with a suitably melancholic piano refrain but the familiar wise words of the "gatherer" are rendered somewhat hackneyed by the overall noirish atmosphere that wouldn't sound out of place soundtracking an overwrought American melodrama. I have no doubt that there are genuine sentiments behind the use of this text, the problem is that the content is too familiar and the delivery too affected. Kristoffer Rygg's voice carries such a weight of rockish braggadocio that it inevitably draws whatever music he's singing over into its familiar orbit. This just re-iterates the cause for the band's experiments in silence circa 2001; an attempt to lose that familiar "face" by abandoning the word, or as they put it themselves in the sleeve notes to Silencing the Singing: "sound qua sound; a voice over in the void".

There's an echo of the themes of Ecclesiastes on the record sleeve. One panel includes a schematic diagram of the Pantheon at Rome with the Latin text mille viae ducunt homines per saecula romam from the Medieval Liber Parabolarum above a dedication to Ian Johnstone, Coil founder Jon Balance's last lover who Ulver collaborated with for their appearance at the Norwegian National Opera in 2011. The traditional translation into modern English is the well known 'all roads lead to Rome', in this case perhaps a reference to the necessity of death for all living things or perhaps in conjunction with the diagram a suggestion that Johnstone like his former friends in Coil now takes his place in the Pantheon of the Gods, a true House of Mythology.

ATGCLVLSSCAP has much to recommend it to supporters and detractors of the band. But one thing it clearly is not is cutting edge or new; nor do they seem too bothered about that fact. Ulver have studiously avoided being pigeon holed into any of the musical forms that they have engaged with and have taken this attitude as a virtue. I'm not so sure that it is. It's one thing to engage in a refusal of identification for the purposes of forging a unique and challenging musical voice (in practice that itself becomes a mark of identification), it's quite another to make yourself a jack of all trades equally adept at belting out alt-rock anthems, psychedelic jams and long excursions in prog-drone hybrids. The former points them in the direction of their beloved Coil (now an almost clichéd ever-present evocation for Ulver), the latter would leave them as just an avant-rock group with pretentions. Now that really would be a banal truth. Perhaps then they might read in another verse of Ecclesiastes something of a comment on their former calling towards silence, pure sound and genuine risk taking. "Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes with much business, and a fool's voice with many words" (Ecc 5:2-3).