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
Nowhere
Ulver Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Through an enormous dark room
A room of noises
Endless shimmering glissandi
Crackling pizzicato
Coal black, turbulence holes of bass drones
But otherwise empty
If anything, perhaps fine dust clouds of exploded music
You float there, somewhere between pleasure and fear
In a piece of time you can't determine
You're everywhere but in the present
Hey you disappear further and further
Into these incalculable rooms
And your personality fades away
Your features evaporate, your body decomposes
And your last thought is that you have become a noise
A thin, nameless noise among all the others
Howling in the empty dark room
The lyrics of Ulver's song "Nowhere" describe a transcendental experience where the singer is experiencing a sense of detachment from reality. The first paragraph sets the scene as the singer is flying or floating through a vast, dark room filled with various noises. The use of words like "drift" and "float" implies a feeling of weightlessness and lack of control, perhaps suggesting a dream-like state or an out-of-body experience.
The second paragraph further explores the atmosphere within this dark room. The singer is surrounded by a cacophony of sounds, described as "endless shimmering glissandi" and "crackling pizzicato." These musical terms evoke a sense of dissonance and distortion. The mention of "coal black, turbulence holes of bass drones" portrays a feeling of darkness and uncertainty. Despite the vastness of the room, it is depicted as empty, devoid of any tangible objects or celestial bodies except for possible remnants of music that have exploded into fine dust clouds.
In the third paragraph, the lyrics delve into the emotional and existential state of the singer. They find themselves floating between pleasure and fear, unable to determine their exact existence within this realm. The line "You're everywhere but in the present" suggests a dissociation from time and a lack of grounding in reality. The singer starts to disappear further and further into these incomprehensible rooms, causing their personality to fade away. This can reflect a profound sense of losing oneself in the vastness of the unknown.
The final paragraph encapsulates the singer's eventual dissolution into the chaotic environment. Their features evaporate, and their body decomposes metaphorically, symbolizing the disintegration of their identity. The singer's last contemplation is that they have transformed into just another indistinguishable noise within the vast darkness of this room. They become a thin, nameless noise that howls along with the others, losing any sense of individuality.
Overall, these lyrics paint a picture of a disorienting and introspective journey into the unknown. It explores themes of detachment, existential questioning, and the fleeting nature of identity within an overwhelming and chaotic environment.
Line by Line Meaning
You fly, or rather float, drift
You are in a state of aimless movement, neither soaring nor sinking, simply moving with no specific direction
Through an enormous dark room
You traverse a vast space devoid of light, filled with mystery and uncertainty
A room of noises
The space is filled with a multitude of sounds, creating a cacophony of auditory sensations
Endless shimmering glissandi
There are continuous, smooth transitions of musical notes, creating a shimmering effect
Crackling pizzicato
There are sharp, snapping sounds produced by plucking musical instrument strings
Coal black, turbulence holes of bass drones
Deep, low-frequency sounds with a sense of instability and darkness pervade the space
But otherwise empty
Apart from these auditory elements, the room lacks any other substantial presence
No planets, no meteorites
There are no celestial bodies or significant entities in this vast expanse
If anything, perhaps fine dust clouds of exploded music
The only perceptible remnants are ethereal particles formed from the disintegration of music
You float there, somewhere between pleasure and fear
You exist in a state of ambiguity, experiencing both enjoyment and trepidation simultaneously
In a piece of time you can't determine
You are in an indeterminate span of time, unable to discern its beginning or end
You're everywhere but in the present
Your consciousness is dispersed, existing in various places, but not fully grounded in the current moment
Hey you disappear further and further
You gradually vanish, disappearing more and more with each passing moment
Into these incalculable rooms
You become lost in countless immeasurable chambers, losing any sense of spatial orientation
And your personality fades away
Your individuality gradually diminishes and becomes less noticeable
Your features evaporate, your body decomposes
Your distinctive characteristics vanish, and your physical form disintegrates
And your last thought is that you have become a noise
Your final realization is that you have transformed into an indistinct sound among countless others
A thin, nameless noise among all the others
You are now a faint and unrecognized sound blending into the chorus of other noises
Howling in the empty dark room
You emit a mournful, echoing sound within the vast emptiness of the dark room
Lyrics © O/B/O APRA AMCOS
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
CurseOfThePharoah
yeah cheers mate this sounds so unique and atmospheric and chill and im so going to go buy this tomorrow
Max Chukhlib
Best song of the universe
LeftFootofEnki
Epic song, epic LYRICS
Industrialisis
Masterpiece....
LysergicBliss67
actually they played a fair amount of bluesy rock, mostly on stage
Nova Nero
Ulver are..... the future
Hetaf A
Amazing.
Weston Philp
0:28 Endless shimmering wasabi, crackling with style.
Warunki Media
I ALWAYS thought this was the lyric :I
Kodanshi Helcarver
😂😂😂😂