Ulver "Blood Inside" CD

"For The Record No One Will Understand What It Is About", declares Kris "Trickster G" Rygg in the opening lines of "It Is Not Sound". You can't help but think he has a point. For almost a decade now, Ulver has been confounding its long-suffering (and no doubt exhausted) fan base with a tireless exploration of the outer limits of musical creativity. Since the introduction of Tore Ylwizaker to the line-up for 1998's “Themes From William Blake...” Ulver has displayed characteristics more chimeric than lycanthropic in nature. The works that followed have been a haze of dissonant genre-defiance, contradiction and self-reference. By rights, Ulver should not be.
But they do Be, and they Are, and this latest fragment to fall from the jack-knifed truck that is Ulver's collective conscience is an apt overview of the band's previous decade of activity. It is the construction of music itself that becomes the focus of this album, interlaced flawlessly with asides and hints at parallel themes that range from the biblical to the surgical. This release stacks layers of meaning on top of each other, creating a sonic Babel comprising as many interpretations as there are listeners, and then awaits with joy the moment of its own demolition by a baffled and irate audience. The deceptive production techniques hint at chaos within the tightly structured arrangements. Layers clash and compete for brief moments during transition, before one element gives way, allowing a wholly new Thought to take centre stage.
The over-arching effect of this technique is to create an album of holistic intention - no single track here is a standalone classic; few would make any sense at all if played individually. Unified though, they become something more than the sum of their component parts. Much like Life's "box of chocolates" the value comes from anticipating the approaching unknown. Strangely sentimental pop sequences suddenly fall away into the abyss and settle upon a crunching, pounding mechanical techno beat. Hellish cacophanies of multi-layered dissonance will rise to crescendo before someone hits that mute button and all is gone in a microsecond. The (now trademark) drum & bass rhythm break rattles on in an adjacent room - a segue into a powerful acappella vocal line.
Garm's vocal delivery commands a special place amongst the nightmarish compositions. There is a growing realisation that Rygg is one of the most under-appreciated and technically able vocalists of his generation; the long list of guest spots on other peoples' albums can attest this. That three quarters of the music buying public will never even consider buying an album with his vocal talents on is a defining injustice of modern pop culture. Here, each syllable is thrown out with an unmatched precision of power and inflection. The lyrics themselves are ambiguous conundrums with meanings that shift like desert sands. Subtle stream of consciousness verses become blasphemous innuendo depending on where the listener imagines the punctuation to fall:

"Love God harder from behind the red flames of the dragon with seven heads directing angels to blow the horns going down faster than the light..."

A sense of self-awareness permeates every aspect of this album like a rogue sentient AI on the verge of discovering its own ego. The unusual sterile white CD tray, the wipe-clean lyric sheets (printed on plastic, not paper), and the musical references themselves are at once purposeful and yet almost deliberately "gimmicky". The elaborate solo at the end of "It Is Not Sound" for example, is taken from a Bach composition played on an antiquated synthesiser. However, it is also a reference to Wendy Carlos' "Switched on Bach", the first electronica album ever recorded. Simultaneously, it echoes the score of "A Clockwork Orange" (also composed by Carlos), and introduces a cinematic theme which is revisited in stabbing string loops in later tracks that pay direct tribute to Bernard Hermann's "Psycho" score.
The ability to dissect this album in such a manner is one of its strengths, and the reason for an abundance of layers - the listener is challenged to pick out every possible meaning from the miasmatic whirl of sound. The concept here is to create deliberately orchestrated Found Sounds, though rather than using mundane sounds of city centres, Ulver explores the sonic artefacts that rattle around the collective consciousness of modern popular culture. In this respect the album is as meaningful as it is absurd. It will appeal to post-structuralist music theorists as if it were the final Revelation burnt on plastic. Anyone looking to Ulver for a new metal album though is clearly a decade late.

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