Following the 1993 demo releases the demos Rehearsal 1993 and Vargnatt, which have a similar (albeit somewhat rawer) style, the band's first album, 1994's Bergtatt - Et eeventyr i 5 capitler, is a folk-themed black metal album. The title Bergtatt literally translates as “mountain-taken”, but is more commonly used to describe someone who is stricken with awe. In Norwegian folk tales the word refers to people who wander off into mountains, lured by trolls or other mythical beings. The narrative of the album’s lyrics follows a woman as she becomes so mountain-taken. The subtitle means “An Adventure in 5 Chapters”. Bergtatt features a melancholic, fully acoustical song “Een Stemme Locker” (“A Voice Beckons”).
1995's Kveldssanger, Ulver’s second album, contrasts with Bergtatt as it uses classical guitars, cello and chamber chants, and completely eschews the black-metal elements of Bergtatt, while still having a folk theme. Garm has since remarked that Kveldssanger was an “immature attempt at making a classical album.” He later clarified this by saying that the performance was immature, yet the content is strong when their youth is taken into account.
The third album, 1997's Nattens madrigal - Aatte hymne til ulven i manden, was a return to black metal, more ferocious than Bergtatt was, with only one mellow acoustic interlude in the first track. The album is intentionally under-produced, akin to Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger, with buzzing guitars and rather muffled drums. There are rumours surrounding this album and its recording, the most famous being that the band recorded this album in a forest. The band has dismissed this as impossible, although When Bitter Spring Sleeps later would record their albums in a forest. Another and less-known rumor is that the band purposely recorded the album on a four-track cassette recorder and used the money that Century Media gave them for other things, for example Armani suits, haircuts, cocaine, beer, and/or a new car. When questioned about this, Garm said the band did have rather expensive tastes, though he has denied buying a new car, saying there wasn't enough money.
Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, released in 1998, was different from what Ulver, or even any other band, had made before. Tore Ylwizaker, a new composer and sound architect, paired up with Garm's expanding artistic visions and together they stepped over the boundaries of black metal aesthetics, creating a genre-defying work. In this album, the musicians blended electronics, industrial music elements, progressive metal and avant-garde rock, adding ambient passages. Lyrically, the album incorporates the entire text of the William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and features guest vocals. Despite confounding and perhaps alienating many fans of the band's first three albums, the album received widespread acclaim from critics within both the rock/metal and alternative music press. For instance, it was reviewed as 'album of the month' in several high-profile magazines such as Terrorizer, Metal Hammer, and Rock Hard. It also ranked very high at many year's best polls that same year.
Ulver's next two releases, the EP Metamorphosis and full-length album Perdition City: Music to an Interior Film, were even more experimental than the “Blake Album”, and a lot more pensive. The Metamorphosis disclaimer reads: “We are as unknown to you as we always were”. The band had moved further away from rock and metal and into a more ethereal style, much like that of Coil. The use of programmed sound and atmospheric style is dominant here, unlike the previous albums. Neo-classical composer and film scorer Craig Armstrong may have been an influence on Ulver as his use of electronics and hip-hop beats over strings and pianos is somewhat reminiscent of Ulver's later works.
The band followed up these two releases with two minimalist/ambient/glitch works, Silence Teaches You How to Sing and Silencing the Singing. These works featured minimal melodies and often had subtle weird and unnatural noises throughout the song structures; the band also stretched out at length, with "Silence Teaches You How to Sing" being the band's longest composition to date at over twenty-four minutes in length. Due to their individual rarity, they were later released together as Teachings in Silence.
Having proved their proficiency at making atmospheric electronic music, Ulver were hired to make music for cinema films Lyckantropen (whose soundtrack was released as Lyckantropen Themes), Svidd neger, and Uno.
In 2003, Ulver began making more symphonic music. They released A Quick Fix of Melancholy, which kept the minimalist, sparse stylings of their previous albums, while adding a much more expressive, dramatic, symphonic element, with various string sounds (most likely sampled) and various operatic singing styles.
In July 2004, the band finished recording their next album, Blood Inside, which was released on June 6th, 2005. With Blood Inside, the band stepped away from the more minimal styles they had been experimenting with previously. Bringing back more traditional rock instruments like guitar and acoustic drums (since 1998 the band had used primarily digital drums and/or sampled beats), and combining them with real and synthetic classical instruments, brass horns and sound samples, the band created something they had never done before. Managing to fuse genres ranging from rock, classical, minimalism, electronica and vintage progressive rock music with Garm's broad vocal range, Ulver created an album that was far beyond anything anyone has heard in the avant-garde scene.
Ulver have recently collaborated with drone band Sunn O))) on a 15-minute track which appears on Sunn O)))'s WHITEbox box set, released in July of 2006. Additionally, Ulver had announced back in 2002 that they had been working on a string remake of Nattens madrigal, but Garm has stated on the message board of his alternative rock band, Head Control System, that the project "is in a state of total dormancy".
The band's seventh album, Shadows of the Sun, was released on October 1, 2007. Garm called it “our most personal record to date. Low key, dark, and tragic”. The album mostly consists of dark ambient music, with lush symphonic orchestrations backing up the band's mellow material.
The band's eighth album, Wars of the Roses, appeared after nearly four years of silence in April 2011. This time around the band was highly influenced by progressive rock music, also incorporating elements of ambient, post-rock, and spoken word. The same year, the band also released the live album The Norwegian National Opera, a nearly career-spanning performance with the opera cited in the title that featured renditions of material dating from the Blake album to Wars of the Roses.
The band's ninth album, Childhood's End: Lost & Found from the Age of Aquarius, followed in 2012. A long-delayed cover album of material from the '60s psychedelic rock era, the material Ulver chose to cover was mostly quite obscure (with Jefferson Airplane's "Today" being easily the best known track), but further revealed the band's diverse range of influences.
In 2013, Messe I.X-VI.X appeared. A companion piece of sorts to Shadows of the Sun, the music on Messe continues in the same reflective, brooding vein as that album, but contains more influence from post-rock and modern classical music. Most of the tracks were instrumental this time around, and the band stretched out in length, with the longest song exceeding eleven minutes. The same year also saw the release of the live album Live at Roadburn, consisting mainly of live renditions of Childhood's End material (one improvised piece, inspired by and dedicated to the German krautrock band Can, was included as an encore).
2014 found the band's second collaboration with Sunn O))) released, the full-length album Terrestrials. Despite the metal background of the two bands, the material here was mostly subdued drone/dark ambient with little metal influence. The same year also saw the release of the box set Trolsk sortmetall 1993-1997, serving as the definitive retrospective on the band's black metal phase by collecting their 1993 demo Vargnatt, their first three albums, and previously unreleased rehearsal versions of four songs from Nattens madrigal. All material was remastered for this set, with Nattens madrigal seeing substantially more dynamic range and its bass line being clearly audible for the first time.
2016 saw the release of the band's double album ATGCLVLSSCAP, its title an acronym consisting of the signs of the Zodiac. Ulver constructed the material on this album around a series of improvised soundscapes recorded live at twelve different shows, but the studio overdubs create a tightly structured set of compositions, some of which are rearrangements of earlier Ulver songs such as Nowhere/Catastrophe. The material here, which consists of twelve tracks spanning eighty minutes, covers a wide range of genres, including psychedelic rock, progressive rock, dark ambient, avant-garde, and post-rock. The end of 2016 also saw the release of the film soundtrack Riverhead.
2017 saw the release of the band's synth pop album The Assassination of Julius Caesar, which marked the band's first album in since 2011 that wasn't: partially recorded live (ATGCLVLSSCAP, Messe I.X-VI.X); a cover album (Childhood's End); a collaboration (Terrestrials and, to a lesser extent, Messe again); or a film soundtrack (Riverhead). Hailed as a return to form (as much as a band like Ulver can have), it received some of the band's most positive reviews in years. The end of the year saw the release of a companion EP, Sic transit gloria mundi (Thus Passes the Glory of the World).
Ulver have established themselves as some of the most remarkable musical chameleons of the twenty-first century, and continue to evolve with each new release.
1993 - Rehearsal 1993 (demo)
1993 - Vargnatt (demo) (Wolf Night)
1994 - Bergtatt - Et eeventyr i 5 capitler (Spellbound - A Fairy Tale in 5 Chapters)
1995 - Kveldssanger (Twilight Hymns)
1997 - Nattens madrigal - Aatte hymne til ulven i manden (The Madrigal of the Night - Eight Hymns to the Wolf in Man)
1997 - The Trilogie: Three Journeyes Through the Norwegian Netherworlde (box set)
1998 - Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
1999 - Metamorphosis (EP)
2000 - Perdition City: Music to an Interior FIlm
2001 - Silence Teaches You How to Sing (EP)
2001 - Silencing the Singing (EP)
2002 - Teachings in Silence (compilation of the above two EPs)
2002 - Lyckantropen Themes (soundtrack)
2003 - 1993-2003: 1st Decade in the Machines (anthology)
2003 - Svidd neger (soundtrack)
2003 - A Quick Fix of Melancholy (EP)
2005 - Blood Inside
2007 - Shadows of the Sun
2011 - Wars of the Roses
2012 - The Norwegian National Opera (live album/video)
2012 - Childhood's End: Lost and Found from the Age of Aquarius
2013 - Oddities and Rarities #1 (anthology)
2013 - Live at Roadburn (live album)
2013 - Messe I.X-VI.X
2014 - Terrestrials (collaboration with Sunn O))))
2014 - Trolsk sortmetall 1993-1997 (Trollish Black Metal 1993-1997 or Bewitching Black Metal 1993-1997; box set)
2016 - ATGCLVLSSCAP
2016 - Riverhead (soundtrack)
2017 - The Assassination of Julius Caesar
2017 - Sic transit gloria mundi (Thus Passes the Glory of the World; EP)
2019 - Drone Activity
2020 - Flowers of Evil
A Memorable Fancy
Ulver Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they
dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whatever they did
not think at the time that they would be so misunderstood,& so be the
cause of imposition. Isaiah answer'd: 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a
finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in
every thing, and as I was then persuaded,& remain confirm'd, that the
voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for
thing is so, make it so? ' He replied: ' All poets believe that it does,&
in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many
are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. ' Then Ezekiel said:
'The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human
perception: some nations held one principle for the origin,& some
another; we Israel taught that the poetic genius (as you now call it) was
the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the
cause of our despising the priests & philosophers of other countries, and
prophecying that all gods would at last be proved to originate in ours &
to be tributaries of the poetic genius; it was this that our great poet
king David desired so fervently & invokes so pathetic'ly, saying this he
conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we
cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations and asserted
that they had rebelled; from this opinions the vulgar came to thin that
all nations would at last be subjected to the Jews. 'This' he said 'like
all firm perswasions, is come to pass; for all nations belive the Jews'
code and worship the Jews' God, and what the greater subjection can be? 'I
heard this with some wonder,& must confess my own convivtion. After dinner
I ask'd Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works; he said none of
equal value was lost. Ezekiel the same of his. I also asked Isaiah what
made him go naked and bare foot three years? He answer'd: 'The same that
made our friend Diogenes, the Grecian. 'I then asked Ezekiel why he eat
dung,& lay so long on his right & left side? He answer'd 'The desire of
raising other men into perception of the infinite: this the North American
tribes practise,& is he honest who resists his genius or conscience for
this sake of present ease or gratification? (plate 14) The ancient
tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six
thousand years is true, as I have heard from hell. For the Cherub with his
flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and
when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and
holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by
an improvement of sensual enjoyment, but first the notion that man has a
body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing
in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and in
medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite
which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear to man as it is. Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he
sees things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern
The verse in the song "ii" by Ulver is a narration of a conversation between a speaker and two Biblical prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel. The singer asks the prophets how they had the audacity to claim that they had a connection with God. The prophets respond that they did not see or hear God in any finite, earthly sense. However, they both experienced a sense of the infinite in everything around them. Isaiah believed that the voice of honest indignation was the voice of God, and this led him to write honestly without worrying about the consequences. Ezekiel explained that their belief in the poetic genius as the first principle of human perception made them despise other nations' priests and philosophers. They also believed that all other gods would eventually be proven to originate from their God and that all would be subject to the Jews. The conversation ends with Ezekiel emphasizing that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years, and the doors of perception must be cleansed for man to see things as they truly are.
Line by Line Meaning
The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whatever they did not think at the time that they would be so misunderstood,& so be the cause of imposition.
The singer had dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel and asked how they could assert that God spoke to them, without realizing the potential for being misunderstood and causing others to impose their beliefs.
Isaiah answer'd: 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded,& remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote. '
Isaiah responded that he did not see or hear God in a physical sense, but rather sensed the infinite in everything. He believed that honest indignation represented the voice of God and was willing to write about it, regardless of consequences.
Then I asked: 'Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? ' He replied: ' All poets believe that it does,& in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing. '
The singer questioned whether a strong belief in something made it true. Isaiah responded that poets believed it did and that this belief had the power to move mountains in ages of imagination, but not everyone was capable of such firm beliefs.
Then Ezekiel said: 'The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin,& some another; we Israel taught that the poetic genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the priests & philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all gods would at last be proved to originate in ours & to be tributaries of the poetic genius; it was this that our great poet king David desired so fervently & invokes so pathetic'ly, saying this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations and asserted that they had rebelled; from this opinions the vulgar came to thin that all nations would at last be subjected to the Jews. '
Ezekiel talked about how different nations had different beliefs about the origin of human perception, but that Israel taught that the poetic genius was the first principle and all others were derivative, leading to their disdain for priests and philosophers of other countries. They believed that all gods would eventually be traced back to theirs and be tributaries of the poetic genius. They loved their God so much that they cursed in his name all other surrounding deities and asserted their rebellion, leading people to believe that all nations would eventually be subjected to the Jews.
'This' he said 'like all firm perswasions, is come to pass; for all nations believe the Jews' code and worship the Jews' God, and what the greater subjection can be? 'I heard this with some wonder,& must confess my own convivtion.
Ezekiel stated that their firm beliefs had come to pass as all nations now believed in the Jews' code and worshiped their God, leading to the ultimate subjection. The artist was amazed by this and convinced of their conviction.
After dinner I ask'd Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works; he said none of equal value was lost. Ezekiel the same of his. I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and bare foot three years? He answer'd: 'The same that made our friend Diogenes, the Grecian. 'I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung,& lay so long on his right & left side? He answer'd 'The desire of raising other men into perception of the infinite: this the North American tribes practise,& is he honest who resists his genius or conscience for this sake of present ease or gratification?
After dinner, the singer asked Isaiah and Ezekiel about their lost works, but they both claimed that nothing of equal value was lost. The singer also asked Isaiah about his actions of going naked and barefoot for three years, to which he responded that it was the same reason as Diogenes the Grecian. The singer then questioned Ezekiel about his strange behavior of eating dung and lying on his right and left side for a long time, and he answered that it was to raise other people's perception of the infinite. He compared this to the practices of North American tribes and questioned whether it was honest to resist one's genius or conscience for the sake of present ease or gratification.
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from hell. For the Cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment, but first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and in medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
The singer states that the ancient tradition of the world being consumed by fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as he has heard from hell. The Cherub guarding the tree of life will leave, leading to the whole creation being consumed and appearing infinite and holy, unlike its current finite and corrupt state. This will happen by improving sensual enjoyment, but first, the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul must be eliminated. The singer plans to achieve this by printing in the infernal method, using corrosives that are considered salutary in hell to melt away apparent surfaces and reveal the hidden infinite.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is. Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern
The artist believes that if people's doors of perception were cleansed, they would see everything as it truly is - infinite. However, man has closed himself off and now sees things through the narrow chinks of his own limited perspective.
Lyrics © O/B/O APRA AMCOS
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
MCMLXXXVII MCMXCVI
Even better than the studio version!
Wolf Stalker
Much better than album version with that "robotic" voice... I think it was a big deal for Garm to play this song live... Thank you ULVER!
MCMLXXXVII MCMXCVI
That guy's a goddamn genius...
Heber Ramos
holy shit!!, amazing....
Acquired Taste
<3
Sight of Emptiness Official
Rad!
TheAphexTim
Is there any instrument mr. O'Sullivan can't play?
Darknight
Do black metal ao hip hop..
Jennifer Grove
Now hear a plain fact, YouTubers. We impose on one another.
amal
Opposition is true friendship