Ulver
Shadows Of The Sun

After a confusing album and, in my opinion, not entirely successful like "Blood Inside", Kristoffer G. Rygg & Co. return to the music market with their most intimate and mystical album ever.

Elegantly oscillating between ambient, chamber music, art pop and electronics, "Shadows of the Sun" looks back (with evident nods to the minimal settings explored in works like "Silencing the Singing", "Silence Teaches You How to Sing", or "Lyckanthropen Themes") to move beyond and become something different and surprising in the daring discography of the Norwegians.

Yes, in my opinion, Ulver hits the target perfectly: "Shadows of the Sun" asserts itself from the first notes as the most elegant, refined and balanced album that the Wolves have been able to create since they decided to embrace the avant-garde paradigm. Of course, a trained ear will find no difficulty in understanding that our artists are not electronic geniuses (oh my, how they mess with harmonies and metrics!), but in my opinion, we should not fall into the mistake of judging them based on the feats of the big names in electronics.

It must indeed be acknowledged that Ulver has undertaken and carried on a courageous and certainly not easy journey: a path, theirs, beaten with conviction and passion; a path fraught with pitfalls that they have been able to navigate brilliantly, avoiding every emulative temptation on the one hand and pursuing on the other the aim of defining a clear, distinct, strong identity. An identity that has proved capable of surviving the drastic changes of skin over the recent years.

With "Shadows of the Sun" Ulver confirm themselves as intelligent, mature musicians. And Garm (yes, because for me Kristoffer G. Rygg remains always and forever the good old Garm!) is a singer able to enchant with every single vocalization. Of course, at every moment he seems on the verge of giving us a tremendous off-note, especially when he decides to dive into daring polyphonic twists, but every time he either stops in time or manages to grab the right note. His singing, in "Shadows of the Sun", stands at the center of everything, ethereal, intimate, oblique, minimal, enigmatic: perfectly in line with the twilight mood of the work. "Shadows of the Sun" presents itself to our ears as a single emotional flow in which the nine moments follow each other with grace and homogeneity.

If the mephistophelean Mr. Settembrini from "The Magic Mountain" (by Thomas Mann) identifies the "moral side" of music in the "fact of giving - through a living and peculiar measurement - presence, spirit, and preciousness to the flow of time", arguing that "music awakens time, music awakens us to the most refined enjoyment of time, and as it awakens is moral", certainly "Shadows of the Sun" constitutes the most intense and meaningful forty minutes we can spend our time on: every single moment must be religiously savored, there is no dispersion in "Shadows of the Sun", generous with ideas and nuances, often appreciable only after several listens.

So much so that its brevity seems directly proportional to its depth, as if Ulver's music develops vertically, in height or depth, on relatively narrow horizontal spaces.

Inner landscapes, soft sounds, emotional chiaroscuro: with this album, Ulver seems to rediscover their native land, Norway, and with it the magic, majesty, and mysticism of its landscapes. Spiritual music, music for the mind and heart, and forgive me if I dare to evoke Popol Vuh's "Hosiannah Mantra": suspended piano phrases, the caressing sound of strings (our artists will take advantage of the contribution of a chamber ensemble), the intricate counterpoints of an electronics never intrusive.

A dry, essential, flexible sound, stripped of any futility or redundancy: although abstract, Ulver's art appears defined and balanced in the most insignificant detail, such that no detail ends up seeming insignificant but strictly functional to the sense of the whole.

Incorporeal, ascetic, at times sacred music. Notes tinged with the tension of a session of psychoanalysis, tension that becomes poignant poetry, bewilderment, melancholy, inner song, detachment, bitter realization: a frozen lake in which to see and find oneself in solitude, a path in the night and in the darkness of one's own mind, in the intricate maze of one's own soul.

"Eos", "All the Love", "Like Music" follow one another with the naturalness of a heartbeat, the gradual approach of day to night, the path of the sleeper from wakefulness to sleep and then to dream. "Vigil" dispenses moments of true electronics, and it's no coincidence that the touch of the master Christian Fennesz is in it (chilling are the electric guitar reverberations at the end, restoring the chill and naturalistic pathos of the early albums!).

The unpredictable title track opens with drones and dark vocalizations, but immediately collapses into piano scores that immediately clear the unconscious mists, before the laptops draw uncertain and stumbling rhythms. The colossal "Let the Children Go" crossed by nervous beats, instead delivers a Garm that seems to recover the epic vein dormant and missing since the times of Arcturus.
"My name it means nothing, and my fortune is less", and with these proverbial lines, the classic "Solitude" of Black Sabbath materializes out of nowhere, perfect and timely with its sly pace, in its lysergic moods, recognizable even in the new blurred guise of a noir-jazz for werewolves.

Fundamental is the trumpet of Mathias Eick, which erratically and obliquely wedges through the interstices of the shadows, warming on more than one occasion the icy atmospheres that envelop the entire album. "Funebre", "What Happened?" restore the intimate moods that had opened the session, leading us by hand to the end of this journey through darkness, absences, void, imbalance, beyond the dense fumes of our conscious being. Beyond the fleeting glow of the Sun, along the path of its dark shadows.

It’s truly a shame that Ulver is the preserve of a few enlightened metalheads: "Shadows of the Sun" deserves the respect and attention of anyone else with taste and intellect!

Don't be presumptuous and especially don't miss them this time around... you would be the worst indeed...