It sees them locked inside their Hall of Mirrors. "One last dance / in this burning church", Kristoffer Rygg announces on the album's opening track, featuring old friend Christian Fennesz on guitar and electronics. Once again Michael Rendall (The Orb) and legendary producer Martin "Youth" Glover have taken crystalline care of the mix.Īs Caesar demonstrated, Ulver haven't abandoned any of their obsessions, worries or nightmares as they enter the gilded palace of pop. Flowers of Evil comes across as an unfeigned progression along the course set by that album, revealing a band moving deeper into beats and grooves, hooks and choruses, synths and guitars, yet sounding more stripped back, making room for the distinctive detail. "Doom dance", someone dubbed their last studio album, the critically acclaimed, Impala Award-winning The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2017). Have Ulver discovered new pastures under the sun? Or scoured the ruins of their own moonlit past? The truth is, they're closer to their previous purlieu than perhaps ever before. The threads of haunted places and images entwine. Visions similar to those of Orsini come to mind, as untamed life abounds: Slowly, nature finished what he had started.įlowers of Evil, the new studio album from Ulver, finds the wolf pack exploring the fear and wonder of mankind's fall from redemption. Soon after Orsini's death, trees began to close in on these many peculiar beings, and green moss would eventually seize them. It's a forest of symbols, suggesting a civilisation overrun by the beasts, demons and monsters of the primordial world. This sacred grove, near Bomarzo in Lazio, Italy, reveals the nightmare vision of Vicino Orsini, a sixteenth century nobleman. A lion sinks its teeth into the fire-breathing monster's chest. In the midst of the forest, the floor is littered with monstrous heads and mythical figures, frozen in torturous combat or threatened by wild beasts. II – Wolves Evolve: The Ulver Story, edited by Tore Engelsen Espedal with Ulver Or as curator Lars Mørch Finborud states in the album's liner notes: "a definite highlight in Henie Onstad Kunstsenter's music and performance history."
![daniel caesar pilgrims paradise 320kbps daniel caesar pilgrims paradise 320kbps](https://i.cbc.ca/1.4574067.1520954010!/fileImage/httpImage/daniel-caesar.jpg)
A moment of flight captured for posterity. But most of all Hexahedron is expansive, transportive and luminous. with hints of Supertramp and Sun Ra", as the band jestingly told someone on a social medium. The result is spectacular, spaced out, and "astral black. A total recall made the job less gruelling than expected, they report, and in a fortnight the mixes were in stellar shape, ready to be mastered by Vegard Sleipnes via the same society's good old Studer tape machine and collection of high-end outboard gear. But as we all know, the pandemic put a spanner in the works.Ĭome 2021, and Anders Møller and Kristoffer Rygg decided to restart the Solid State Logic console in Subsonic Society.
![daniel caesar pilgrims paradise 320kbps daniel caesar pilgrims paradise 320kbps](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.860217993.6253/fposter,small,wall_texture,product,750x1000.jpg)
Then The Ulver Story was brought to a conclusion, with huge plans for their final dance. They left it for Flowers of Evil, for which the seeds had already been sown. Professionally multi-tracked in the gallery, a first go at the mix was done simultaneously with Drone Activity, early 2019. One continuous session of sixty minutes broken into five parts. Three years have passed, and finally it's here. I suppose we were all sidereal messengers, cruising through the groovy galaxies. Around them, the audience moved unhindered among hallucinatory lights and laser-guided melodies, losing themselves in interstellar clouds of gas, dust and broken junk of exploded stars. Inside it they experimented with all-new ideas in an installation as galactic as the music presented was unmistakably ulverish.
![daniel caesar pilgrims paradise 320kbps daniel caesar pilgrims paradise 320kbps](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2019/06/28/gettyimages-1062704016_wide-c502a554784e070285c32dcbf36a7e52908a8eb5.jpg)
"Doing whatever we want, not knowing what it's supposed to become or where it will end up."ĭuring the shows at Henie Onstad the band found themselves trapped in a multidimensional "hypercube" in the middle of the asymmetric space. "To orientate our music into an art setting is appealing to me", he said. A special commission and "an honourable undertaking", as Tore Ylwizaker put it in their career-spanning book Wolves Evolve – The Ulver Story, published last year. Hexahedron documents the second of the two dazzling, sold-out Ulver shows in the legendary Studio at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter at Høvikodden back in April 2018. ULVER HEXAHEDRON (LIVE AT HENIE ONSTAD KUNSTSENTER) PRESS STATEMENT APRIL 2021