ULVER Shadows of the Sun LIMITED LP CLEAR VINYL 2022
Sold Date:
January 23, 2023
Start Date:
December 23, 2022
Final Price:
€29.99
(EUR)
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Artist:
ULVER
Title:
Shadows of the Sun
Format:
LP (180g-Vinyl, transparent) inkl. dicker (350gsm)
Kastentasche mit Mattlack, mit gefütterter, schwarzer
Innenhülle, 4-stg. gedruckter Beileger, bedruckte
Innenhülle und Schutzhülle
Year:
23.12.2022
Label:
House of Mythology
Tracklist:
A1 Eos 5:05
A2 All The Love 3:42
A3 Like Music 3:30
A4 Vigil 4:27
A5 Shadows Of The Sun 4:36
B1 Let The Children Go 3:50
B2 Solitude 3:53
B3 Funebre 4:26
B4 What Happened? 6:25
Info:
Eleven years and eleven revolutions
around the sun. There have been deaths and pregnancies, victories and
chance encounters. Too many sombre news bulletins and retrenchment
notices. Through it all, earth’s orbit, the night sky and
music. In whichever ways, we recount this traversal of elapsing time
and we have come far. So too has Ulver.
Since the 2007 release of Shadows of the Sun, the Oslobased collective
has busied themselves broadening the grounds of their
multi-dimensional, multiconfessional church. Once limited to the
studio, the indefatigable Norwegians these days command the stage,
crossing continents and oceans delivering a surreal and visually
transfixing live act.
Once described by Kristoffer Rygg, Ulver’s founder, as their
“most personal record to date,” first-time Shadows
listeners will find neither the dance-floor subversives of Julius
Caesar nor the dense hallucinatory grooves of ATGCLVLSSCAP, recent
works that have swelled the ranks and given rise to a handsome new
generation of wolf pups.
More than a decade on, Ulver’s seventh studio album arguably
remains their most personal, a decidedly interior account of grand
cosmic indifference. It explores the familiars of life and death, love
and loss – but from the furthermost purview. All the
electricity of life, playing out as perfect circles on a mote of dust
suspended in a sunbeam. We are captive to its long shadows.
Shadows of the Sun is a meditation on all the crosses we collectively
carry and the folly of carrying them. It is a pensive, quiet work
singularly committed to an aesthetic of beauty. We find in it the
melancholic grace that would later blossom to the fore in
2013’s Messe I.X–VI.X. Though it is, by no means,
an embryonic affair. Revisiting these sounds in 2018, one is struck in
equal measure by their elegance and grandeur, restraint and simplicity.
One encounters consolatory string arrangements on a spectral sea of
electronics. The soft dance of fingers along the mouth of a piano. A
tremendous depth of feeling with each waving crescendo or soft
reverberation. Divine outbreaks of a trumpet’s blare. Only
occasionally are we confronted with glimpses of a discordant
underbelly, the prospect of decay and menace of less hospitable
soundscapes. Where there are forays into rhythm, subtle percussion
crashes and amplifies the emotional undercurrent.
At the helm are Rygg, Jørn H. Sværen and Tore
Ylwizaker, who have been Ulver’s creative core from the heady
metamorphoses of the late 90s through to the present. The trusty
triumvirate are joined by a string quartet and guest musicians, the
likes of Austrian electronic music legend Christian Fennesz, renowned
theremin sage Pamelia Kurstin, Norwegian jazz musician Mathias Eick,
among others whose contributions enrich the album’s
distinctive sheen.
Among these warm, sonic arrangements – mostly linear
constructs that unite variants of looping electronics with crisp
organic instrumentation – there are glimmers of baroque pop
in Rygg’s vocal work, often delivered in the lower register.
Each word uttered a negotiation: between loss, questions and the
oftenuneasy terms of their acceptance. A cover of Black
Sabbath’s downtrodden classic,
“Solitude”, is right at home in its folds.
Didrik Søderlind, a Norwegian journalist and author,
remarked back in 2007 that these songs of loss and disillusion amounted
to Ulver giving their fears “a shapely form,” an
approach “capable, perhaps, of bringing a little comfort to
some.” It is evident that this album came together under the
weight of very personal trials. Søderlind rightly identifies
qualities of a sombre empathy at work in this music, imbuing certain
moments with deep emotional resonance.
Shadows of the Sun possesses a power to prompt reflection like few
things do, particularly where existential matters are concerned. We,
too, may come to take the furthermost purview. The Ankole, an
East-African bull whose mesmerizing lyreshaped horns grace the
album’s stunning cover art, are a dying breed expected to
disappear within decades. Our own sun fares somewhat better in this
equation. It will be several billion years before it swells nearly a
hundred times its current diameter in a spectacular last hurrah.
Ample time to wonder: “What happened to us here?”
– NILE BOWIE, FEBRUARY 2018