Natures way - Ulver

This is an essay written way back in 2010 - and featured in the already legendary biographical book on the former black metal band Ulver: Wolves evolve (House of Mythology 2020) edited by Tore Engelsen Espedal - who also translated this essay into english. The book is translated to french, and will be translated to german. Hopefully a second edition in english will be out soon to. The last copies of the book can be purchased with link provided at the end of the essay.

DETOUR

The Powers of Good and Evil | Nature’s way

By Torolf Kroglund

Lillehammer 2009–1994

I am sweating. The clock says it’s getting late, but the sun is still warming up the hillside. As I walk the surprisingly long road I hear the comforting song of the lone blackbird in the top of a spruce tree.

It is the end of May, and I am – appropriately enough – on my way towards Maihaugen (The Hill of May). The annual festival of literature in the small Norwegian town, Lillehammer is on. This year’s event have since months been the most debated in the history of the festival. Why? A controversial invitation given to the Holocaust denying historian David Irving, who’s divergent view on the extent and character of the persecutions and mass murders of Europe’s Jewish population during World War II, as well as his connections to racist organisations, has placed him in the absolute fringes of the historical debate. The following controversy verged on the border of the scandalous; inviting him to give a lecture seemed to have been too bold of a move. But the theme for this year’s festival, however, was the concept of “truth”. And who is more apt to talk about truth than “a person convicted and imprisoned of falsification of history after questioning the truth about the extermination of the Jews”, as artistic director of the festival and author Stig Sæterbakken later stated in an interview printed in the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, reflecting on the invitation.

He should not have thought so. Soon, the pressure against Sæterbakken and the Festival administration became massive to the extent that the festival took Irving off the poster, and a debacle of the highest order reached its climax. Sæterbakken resigned as artistic director, as a protest to the festival’s decision and cultural Norway’s “inability to listen to and debate opinions differing from what everyone agrees upon”. In spite of all this, Sæterbakken retained his job as temporary manager for the former black metal band Ulver’s first concert in 16 years, announced as a part of the original festival program.

I arrived yesterday, and had a few beers with some of the literati later that night. A short week every year they occupy Lillehammer, where once (at the time of Norwegian black metal’s first period of greatness) the Winter Olympics reigned supreme. All throughout the day there’s been a strange atmosphere in town. During the author Cornelius Jakhelln’s lecture on Ulver in the public library earlier, the unlikely­ but quite beautiful mix of “dressed in black and longhaired” metalheads, and “dressed in black but shorthaired” writers and critics, was rather striking. The seance was a show in itself. Young men with (newly washed) long hair and Burzum shirts listened devoted to Jakhelln’s poetic review of his favourite album by Ulver, Blood Inside. Citing references from William Blake, Edvard Grieg, Georges Bizet and Woody Allen, Jakhelln brought Ulver’s darkly beautiful musical journey to a point where I, hours later this sunny May evening, can’t help but to think of the poet Tor Ulven as I walk up the hill. Tor Ulven, who wrote some of the most strikingly beautiful, but also gloomiest poetry ever written in the Norwegian language, poignantly stated in the single interview he gave during his lifetime, published in the journal Vagant: “According to a banal saying it is better to light a candle in the dark than to curse it. But wouldn’t it be better to get to know the darkness, and avoid the risk of putting the whole house on fire.” We’re all Ulven’s [Ulven means “the wolf” in Norwegian] brothers and sisters, I think. We are all about to become wolves.

Be that as it may, I’m still not prepared for what’s about to hit me. I've been sensing it for the past 24 hours, something beyond normal, as if the air is charged. Electric. Finally there, outside the venue entrance, in the last rays from the sun, having finally secured a cold drink I have to sink quickly before we enter the concert hall, it strikes me again: this is something else. Everything can happen.

After he ended his lecture in the city’s library earlier today, Cornelius Jakhelln suggested having a beer in the Olympic park. I trudged along in the group following probably the only one to rightfully claim both being a black metal musician and a writer in this rather special festival blend. As we approached the serving area, I felt like being in a movie of the slightly comical kind, where submissive disciples join the prophet wherever he walks. Over the café tables this strangeness dissolved into pleasant conversation between Jakhelln, his girlfriend, philosopher Lars Fr. Svendsen, a literate, four black metal musicians from Switzerland and two passionate black metal fans from a local high school. I found it particularly exciting to talk to NN from Switzerland. He is the vocalist and guitarist in a band called Brothers of Cain and the only one of them to engage in the conversation. (The others were clumsily modest and cautious in their approaches to the female literate I arrived with). NN had been in a relationship with a Swedish girl some years ago and grown a strong tie to Norway, he said, durable enough for him to learn the language quite well (with a Swedish accent). He is a couple of years older than his band members and a fellow in Nordic language and literature at a universitiy in his home country. As I noticed the rather unusual range of themes and topics buzzing across the table, as if the circle was about to become complete, I finally got it: this is a black metal happening for the studious.

All of us sitting around the table seemed to share an admiration for Ulver’s musical expression. It didn’t seem to matter that the band has travelled a long way since their black metal origins. Quite on the contrary, this is in a sense “avantgarde”, I said. Still, the Ulver concert had the promise of putting the whole genre in perspective, several seemed to believe. Or as Jakhelln preached poetically in his lecture (held in English because of the international audience), addressing the 90s metal, and those still clinging on to True Norwegian Black Metal:

Hey, dude … are you stuck in 1993, or what? This is the music you will be playing in 2009, NOT the unholy Satanic fistfucking black metal (or whatever else it is) you believe you will be playing in the future …

The future is now. I’m lovin’ it. Enjoy Coke.

Jakhelln had wanted to show a Youtube clip to illustrate Ulver’s development from 1994 to 2009, but the library had funnily enough lost its internet connection. Hence he described the proceedings in words: in the Olympic and National Romantic year of 1994, prior to the release of Ulver’s first record, the band’s teenage singer Kristoffer Rygg (aka Garm) made his mark, appearing as one of several figures in the Norwegian black metal milieu interviewed for the first ever documentary on the movement, Det svarte alvor. It aired on the state-owned public broadcaster, NRK, and besides Rygg, Hellhammer from Mayhem and Ihsahn from Emperor, as well as the boys in Immortal from Bergen, appeared. Long hair, leather jacket and steel-plated boots: as Garm enters a church and strides his way up the aisle, he comes across as a young man, filled with bold courage and self-assurance, saying “Christianity is a weak, inconsistent and pathetic religion created for weak people”. He then explains why a few affiliates in the milieu are burning, or have a desire to burn, churches – this was aired at the time when churches were set ablaze almost routinely. He goes on to describe himself and his allies as “the sons of Odin” intent on taking back “what is ours”, and points out that Christianity was forced upon the inhabitants of Norway’s lands a thousand years ago.

Jakhelln, ­and all of us who have seen it, found it fun to watch this clip from the 90s. There’s something ridiculous about the rather naive attitude of the young boys portrayed. Still, ­besides the inexorable irony of time, most striking is the worn out and obsolete form of the clip. Of course, one could laugh at the basic principles of their anti-Christian attitude, emphasizing the feeling of betrayal against our authentic Norse heritage and identity, but the outworn form, as Jakhelln says, belongs so precisely to this period of time, 1993–94.

Ulver’s appearance is strong and powerful in 2009, as well, but that owes perhaps more to the fact that they have evolved. That said, the band’s black metal legacy cannot be disputed, at least not when seeing how fans are flocking in and around Lillehammer these days. Many are wearing Burzum shirts, and I wonder whether it’s a deliberate statement. Varg Vikernes, who’ve spent the past fifteen years since the documentary was aired behind bars, was released from prison just a few weeks ago. As the original havoc played out, Varg’s Burzum admittedly stood completely out from his peers, possessing a different and, in my opinion, deeper musical and aesthetic quality than the more death metal-inspired black metal bands of the time (although the origins of Norwegian black metal definitely owes a lot to death metal and death metal-inspired music).

A few days earlier, a church in the neighbouring region Hedmark was burnt to the ground. And a couple of days prior to that, vandals paid a visit to a church in Oslo. All of a sudden, a string of incidents appears as reminders, echoes, or simply, blasts from the past.

In his poetic and literary lecture earlier, Jakhelln had described himself and his colleagues in Ulver as “followers of Apollo’s art”. He may have alluded to Apollo as the god of art and music in ancient Greece. It is hard to tell. Nevertheless, the statement made me think of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and how both the Apollonian order of beautiful harmony and its complementary antipode, the disintegrating or transcending Dionysian forces are at work in this music. Stig Sæterbakken philosophized similarly in his essay from 1998, “Why I always listen to such sad music”, describing the inherent disharmony and overwhelming melancholy of the music that moved him the most, before ending in a sort of Apollonian conclusion where music (like literature) becomes the opposite of (the universe’s) cold silence.

I’ve heard Jakhelln talk about fantastical orchestras and classical composers, and I’ve listened to Ulver’s Blood Inside on my PC speaker in the hotel room, while preparing myself for the concert. The grand and orchestral needs a bigger stage. Thick layers of vocals hover over the instruments: “Like hell we are, all dressed in black.” “Fucking heaven to kingdom come,” Ulver continues. It may sound banal but is convincing to me, with its many allusions. “Fucking heaven to kingdom come.” Chew on that.

Is there such a thing as anti-religious music? Or is music per se in its immediate – and wordless – state, sacred, regardless of its profane inclinations? If not growling, low frequencies, drones or the tritone interval in itself demonstrate Dionysian depths and disintegrating forces, would it be possible to create anti-religious music adding an ideological or lyrical content? Which etheric (s)layers are to be found in Ulver’s flow of hard-to-define dark music?

*

The stalwart and steadfast, black-clad and longhaired are all here, in the foyer. The atmosphere is tense, and it is hot. I exchange a few words with NN. He has the young boys twinkle in his eye – a striking contrast to the grey temples of his long hair neatly gathered in a ponytail. He’s got his finest suit on for the occasion. He buys a t-shirt and enters early. I find my seat in the far back of the auditorium between the philosopher Lars Fr. Svendsen and the local newspaper’s representative. It is packed, and the clapping and cheering fills the room long before the band goes on.

Entering the stage, the musicians are all dressed in big baggy single-coloured dark blue overalls. It is as if they’re about to flee the scene, or a prison. Finally in place, most of them hide behind the instruments in front. The huge timpani is easily visible. And the guest musician – the petite Pamelia Kurstin (with a cigarette) – is a striking sight as she plays her theremin (an electronic instrument playing radio waves, without touching anything). Garm is a bit more up front than the rest. He sometimes sits in a crouching position, while waiting for his parts, and then he smokes a cigarette. He is different from the young version of himself, quite big and with a full beard. Behind them is a large canvas, where images move in an unbroken stream. The sound pervades the room. It is omnipresent, and rolls over everyone as they sit in their chairs with their eyes drawn towards the back of the stage.

Some have mentioned Icelandic Sigur Rós with reference to Ulver, and it is possible to understand why the comparison is made. Both Sigur Rós and the good old version of Pink Floyd are worth mentioning. This is just a lot darker, I think. The grave mood, the pull towards the depths of existence, is still present in Ulver, although more subtly than in the band’s early period. Curiously, it’s in the most orchestrated parts, when the music roars with classical instruments, the metal mood suddenly comes to the surface, albeit in a strange way. It makes all the black-clad people cheer and clap – quite disciplined – between the songs. Initially, the film shows images from Nazi-Germany. It quickly transforms into gruesome images of the mass graves in the concentration camps: piles of skinny corpses, and starved eyes behind barbed wires. Are they making a comment on the Irving controversy? Soon, scenes from the savannah, of lions on the hunt: in slow motion a lioness is chasing the weakest of the hunted herd. A young animal is killed in front of its mother. It is painful to watch. The disturbing part, though, is the beauty of the images: the close-ups of the lion’s primordial strength and elegant radiance. Is that a comment as well?

I start asking myself questions: why do they choose such strong images to accompany the music? They haven’t quite abandoned their black metal attitudes, have they? And what do they mean by first showing images of the Holocaust and then the lioness killing a feeble deer? The camera pans and captures the mother of the young animal who respires after being chased, before she tries to find her offspring. It is paning again, and now the camera captures the lioness. With a bloody muzzle, she lies adjacent to her prey. What do you see in the eyes of the mother and the predator? Are these emotions human? Or is the animal’s gaze blank? I guess it is nature as nature is: brutal and beautiful. Is the music we hear like that, too?

Ulver’s music is, first and foremost, visual and evocative. Huge, expressive sounds turn into vivid pictures in the listeners mind. Or what Jakhelln in his lecture named “Grand nocturnal pop”, or, in a more ironic turn of phrase, “black metal’s Coldplay”. Isn’t all music expressive and evocative, you might want to object? And that is of course a valid point. Music is wordless communication made up of tones and basically logical and mathematical, but that’s only the detailed floor plan. As both Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard have argued, music is also a sensual form of expression which is immediate and beyond human reason. Is it also a-rational? Somewhere along the way to the listener’s senses, music loses its rationally analysable being – or retrieves its original being – and becomes something else.

One can probably critically object that the images shown on the gigantic canvas behind the band somehow “directs” the free listening experience, that the connection between image and music is not at all unproblematic. In this case, however, if you choose to see it positively, like I do, the images are open enough to not pre-interpret the viewer’s experience, more like fleeting extensions of the music. One image replaces the other in a kind of subconscious stream, while the musicians make every effort they can, not to stand out on stage. The music becomes the centre of attention in a way that is (paradoxically) rather unusual at a live rock concert. It is the music that speaks to us. Not the musicians, nor the images. Jakhelln had also touched upon this in his lecture, how Garm and Ulver, after the infamous appearance in the NRK documentary Det svarte alvor, had moved ever deeper into the music and thus out of the limelight. Jakhelln quoted a statement by Kristoffer Rygg and Ulver given in an interview conducted for the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet in connection with the release of their album, Shadows of the Sun:

There are many things about the music business that we are uncomfortable with. You have to play theatre, kind of, wear a mask and act in certain ways in order to get media attention. We are not very skilled at this. Wearing some kind or public persona (or personality) is so unnatural, I can’t relate to it. In that respect, none of us in Ulver should have been musicians. We should have done something completely different. We are good only in one segment of doing music, namely doing music as such.” The last line should be quoted in Norwegian, as it translates only difficultly: “For det er bare ett segment av det å drive med musikk som vi gjør bra, og det er musikk i egenskap av musikk.”

*

The concert is over and we can hardly believe it. An hour has passed way too fast, and the experience – the concert as a complete and defined totality – almost demands for the band to abstain from encores, despite the audience’s enthusiastic and long-standing ovations. Ulver return to the stage, take a bow and express their gratitude (like after a play, I think). “I would like to experience it all again, in its entirety,” says philosopher Lars Fr. Svendsen to me as we get ourselves together and leave the concert hall. Out in the open May air we meet a dazed and confused NN. He looks like he’s been crying, but blames it on the at times heavy cigarette smoke coming from the stage. In any case, he more than willingly admits that he is thoroughly shaken by the intense experience. Most of the people I hear outside seem to be of the same opinion. A couple of Polish guys (die hard metal fans on an interrail trip to Norway) I spoke to earlier, however, are not entirely happy with the fact that the band didn’t perform anything from their early metal years. They cannot possibly have any clue of what Ulver is about, says Cornelius Jakhelln, Stig Sæterbakken and Lars Fr. Svendsen, who have lined up outside the entrance.

Soon, Svendsen and I start walking from Maihaugen and towards town. Taken by the experience, our associations are soon connected to the power of the place: in 1994, this region was the great pride of the Norwegian nation as its people almost went completely off their trolleys with eager enthusiasm to host the Winter Olympics and the world. In a highlight during the opening ceremony at the ski jumping arena, Lysgårdsbakken, just a few hundred meters from here, the singer and icon Sissel Kyrkjebø sang clear as a bell and exuded her healthy Nordic purity, while vets and other small subterranean folkloric beings were dancing like nature’s own. “Se ilden lyse” (See the fire bright). Around the country other creatures of the underworld were about to show their painted faces: Norwegian black metal had become well known to Norwegian and international tabloids, primarily associated with church burnings and killings. Varg Vikernes was charged with the murder of Øystein Aarseth (Euronymous from Mayhem), as well as arsons, a couple of months after the games ended. The trial of Vikernes, popularly called “The Count”, became the nation’s unifying horror movie. The non-repenting murderer became public enemy number one; as had the official and diplomat, Arne Treholt, precisely a decade earlier, in 1984, when he was charged for espionage in favour of the Soviet Union and Iraq, and eventually sentenced to 21 years in prison, as Vikernes was ten years later. Following suit after the arrest of Vikernes, another murder case, from 1992, had been linked to the black metal circles when the Lillehammer based drummer Bård “Faust” Eithun from the Notodden band Emperor was charged with first-degree murder of a gay man not far away from here. The killing seemed unmotivated, as if the murderer had committed it just to prove he could. Still, this irrational and stupid murder and its aftermath ended up in the shadow of the more “charismatic escapades” of Count Grishnackh.

Consequently, the month of May fifteen years ago sure must have been a time of surreal moods around here, I think to myself, as I approach the small city centre. Later that year, in the autumn of ‘94, the Norwegian population – stubborn and self-indulgent after the nationalistic fire were sparked during the Olympics – voted no to their inclusion in the European community, the EU. Afterwards Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland ironically stated, “It is typically Norwegian to be good.” Ulver, on their side, had stepped out of their infancy and released their first promo-tape, Vargnatt, showcasing a traditional black metal approach, mixed with melodic elements from Scandinavian folk music and lyrics in Norwegian dealing with, among other things, the Norse alternative to Christianity. “Vi er mange og alene / lik Odins tapte øye.” (We are many and alone / like the lost eye of Odin.)

Lars Fr. Svendsen and I continue to talk about the concert and our shared interest in extreme music as we’re back in the small city centre. Svendsen has in various newspaper interviews repeatedly declared his unhinged love for Pet Shop Boys, and I tease him a little for that. Ulver is inspired by techno and noisy pop music, he claims, and deliver a long exegesis on a music genre I don’t know that well. He talks about Throbbing Gristle and how far they went in their boundary pushing. Back in the park, a little later, the now resigned artistic director and Ulver manager, Stig Sæterbakken sits down with us. Sæterbakken agrees with Svendsen’s claims and the two again make mentions of Throbbing Gristle (which they agree is the coolest band name ever; you can find out for yourself what it really means …), Death in June, Der Blutharsch, Coil and a whole lot of other groups. I get it. The brutal and desperate Throbbing Gristle track “Discipline”, is not that far from Burzum’s “Lost wisdom”, for example, and the Youtube clip of the same group, reunited in London in 2004, shows a band working in a similar manner to Ulver.

Musical kinships are shows itself in many places: at the moment Karen Dreijer from the electronic popduo The Knife has launched her new alias Fever Ray, to popular acclaim. Her music is dark, as well – but far more melodic – and techno-inspired, I would say. Like many black metal musicians Fever Ray wears a mask. One month prior to Ulver’s Lillehammer concert, NRK, who produced Det svarte alvor 15 years earlier, did a rare interview with her, with a darkened face, hidden under long blonde hair and behind a scary mask. Even her voice was distorted. (Later this year, she also urged people to distance them from Norwegian extreme metal in general, and Varg Vikernes in particular, and characterized the musical genre as racist and sexist.)

Coinciding events are piling up, it seems. On his side, Sæterbakken assert that most black metal does not have the same progressive character as the music they have brought into the conversation. Still, he agrees when I name Emperor or Burzum as worthy exceptions. He also says that he, when travelling around giving lectures, often starts the session by playing a selected clip of Burzum, without informing the audience. They’re immediately put in a special mood, fitting to his objective: ready to cut straight to the existential core of things. It is poetic and beautiful, while at the same time conveying rawness and desperation. When he later reveals to the listeners what they’ve just heard, they tend to get surprised, he says, and laughs.

As we sit out here in the ever-cooler night of May, at the end of a long table in the park, several of us are fighting with ourselves, as we try to overlook the neighbouring table. A whole bunch of testosterone-filled local youngsters are shouting and screaming in the most low-browed way. Dressed in pique shirts and wasted. I can sense my own contempt, as in a sudden and sneaky revival of the “aristocratic” facet of black metal, when individualism and spiritual exaltation characterized an ideal, condensed in a statement made by Ihsahn from Emperor in the aforementioned documentary, explaining he didn’t have many real friends, simply because he was “mentally superior to everyone else his age”. Seen in this light, this night makes clear how heavy metal culture can represent the opposite of what many people in general think of it, as unintelligent rebellion and crapulous rioting. As the Scandinavian art critic Tommy Olsson once said: “art is the new rock!” Or turned around for this occasion: “rock is the new art.”

Ulver 1994–2009

Towards the end of the 00s it is evident that rock culture has entered the art scene. For better or worse. In the fall of 2009, Turbonegro vocalist Hank von Helvete is enjoying huge success in the lead role as Jesus Christ Superstar at the Norwegian Theater’s main stage in Oslo. Not much “rock” is left there, one might argue, but in the late summer the same year, American guitarist Stephen O’Malley from the band Sunn O))) worked on a musical installation piece which will be part of the grand autumn venture at Høvikodden, the Henie-Onstad Art Centre. The exhibition is multi-disciplinary and called “To Be Heard is to Be Seen”, and Mayhem vocalist Attila Csihar is one of the artists performing as well. A year ago, Platekompaniet (Norway’s biggest record store chain) named the then newly released album by Sunn O))), Monoliths & Dimensions, “one of the best metal records of the year”, prior to the bands concert at the Øya festival in Oslo. Among the guests on the record were the same Atilla Csihar, but also Julian Priester, who used to play trombone with the likes of Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Herbie Hancock. Experimentation by the means of metal music aesthetics has entered the art world, not that different from how pop and art approached each other a few decades earlier. In Norway, Enslaved has been commissioned to work for Festspillene i Bergen (Bergen International Festival) together with the noise artists Maja Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord, and composed music to Victor Sjøberg’s silent film interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s Terje Vigen in the quarry Fjæreheia outside Grimstad.

Although O’Malley says straight out that he works with art music, Kristoffer Rygg and Jørn H. Sværen are not too excited about the prospects of conceptualizing their music with regards to the art world. All music is art, but still: some is more “arty” than the rest.

What is indisputable, though, is the fact that Ulver anno 1994 and Ulver anno 2009 are two very different beasts.

– Oh no! There’s no difference at all, says Kristoffer Rygg aka Garm aka Kris. He sits reclined on the sofa in his living room at Ryen, a suburb of Oslo with more villas than apartment blocks. He’s holding a cigarette between his fingers and has got wine in the glass, and smiles gleefully. Jørn H. Sværen and co-musician Daniel O’Sullivan also seem to be amused. Ulver’s development, from the core of Norwegian black metal to become by far the most adventurous of the second generation scene, have brought them way out in the grey areas. And it would be absurd to see them as part of the genre unless one have a very broad understanding of what black metal can be, or ought to be.

When movie director and screenwriter Harmony Korine (known for the movie Kids, and in this context, for using music by Burzum as soundtrack to one of his films) said that “There’s a real lineage from a composer like Wagner to a band like Ulver”, he was obviously onto something several others have developed later: that heavy metal and rock carries just as much heritage from heavy classical music (and opera) as from, for example, blues, often seen as the precursor to rock and metal. In the entertaining social anthropological documentary, Metal ­– A Headbanger’s Journey, Sam Dunn points to the historical legacy of Wagner, Beethoven and Mozart. With avantgarde bands like Ulver or Sunn O))) or Enslaved, or for that matter Burzum, the reasoning behind such statements is, of course, easier to see – and hear. The threads and traces are piling up.

Ulver haven’t done a lot of interviews, and knowing that the chat is exclusive of course made it more exciting to take the metro all the way to Ryen and walk through suburbia at dusk. I rang the doorbell, and Garm were easily recognisable, just older, as the door opened, wearing a black cap. On his arms and hands: tattoos. He looked at me, somehow testing if I’m worthy, but quickly called it off, and invited me into the hallway where children’s shoes and adult-style shoes are placed side by side. Jørn’s tattooed as well. FAITH on one hand, and HOPE on the other. It is easy to see that they are “rockers”, who have grown up.

­– I was 17. You have to keep that in mind, Kris says of Garm, and the famed clip from the documentary Det svarte alvor, aired on the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation in April 1994.

I say I found it pretty bold what the 17-year-old Garm did, walking into the church talking freely, while simply just trying to explain some of the motives others had for burning churches and hating religion, i.e. Christianity.

– They tried to get some of the other guys into the church and film them, but they flat out refused to enter the church. It was important to be consistent, you know. But the whole aesthetic was part of – even though it was a reaction to – a Christian view of the world, I couldn’t really see the problem. So there I was, walking up the church aisle, with my metal plate boots and leather jacket and long hair, and said what I felt so strongly that time.

– But I don’t know that 17-year-old anymore.

– I wish I did.

Says Garm. Says Kris, about Garm. And there is a wistful and human weight in his words. The cigarette smoke lies thick as a veil in the living room. Out of the windows I see the lights from downtown Oslo. In the background: obscure music and the sounds of wine being poured.

– I really wish I did, Kris repeats, looking at Daniel O’Sullivan, the Englishman now playing with Ulver. He has short black hair with long bangs, and looks like an urban postmodern boy from London. He is originally from Manchester, and has played in the experimental rock band Guapo, plays occasionally with Sunn O))) and Æthenor (where O’Sullivan, Rygg and O’Malley play improvised music together), and he played live with Ulver in Lillehammer, and will continue to do so in the future.

– But there’s no ideology left, Kris says. Jørn H. Sværen nods. The two write lyrics together. The ideology has disappeared into the poetry, radically open and free from ideology, but still subject to ideological interpretations.

– I don’t quite understand what people mean when they say “second wave black metal” while talking about the Norwegian scene in the nineties. It was then this stuff became codified, Kris continues.

Thus: in 1992–94, the first wave or generation of Norwegian black metal was made known to the Norwegian people through Det svarte alvor and countless tabloid covers of burning churches, as well as the two murder cases, when all of this culminated in 1994 with Varg Vikernes, smiling and unrepentant in the courtroom as public enemy number one. With his imprisonment, a number of other central young figures in the circle followed, and a second-generation of Norwegian black metal bands were to follow.

Burning churches could be seen as a strong statement in the fight against Christianity, I say.

– I guess so. But those who lit up churches around that time hardly saw it as any kind of performance art. It was more primitive than that. Making it into something more in retrospect would consequently be a part of the interpretation of and the commentary to the phenomenon, Kris says.

I guess a more effective and legitimate fight against Christianity need to work with information and aim for enlightenment. At the same time, Christianity is struggling in today’s Norway. Kris says he is no longer “fighting against Christianity”.

– Simply because I don’t believe in anything anymore. I’ve probably lost the old instinct for war.

– You know, says Jørn, this rebellion against Christianity, it’s a form of belief too, it’s something to believe in, if you understand what I mean. It gives you a direction, an identity, and a place to belong. I also wish I could believe in something, that I had a faith. But I haven’t, and it makes the world a lonely place. I try to do my best. I stay close to my loved ones and search for meaning in the small things.

– Yes, Kris says. It’s quiet for a moment, and Jørn continues: – You know, the black metal circles of the early 90s were like most youths in many ways: they were in opposition to most things and they had a fairly simple understanding of their enemies.

– Everything was black and white back then, Kris says. – It probably is today, too, for those who cling on to how it once was. But bands that wear makeup and keep it lo-fi, and generally follow the same approach as back in the early 90s, are rather sad and obsolete in 2009, I would say. It’s like those who try to emulate The Beatles or American West Coast music. “Hey! Wake up! The revolution is over, man.” Of course, we were serious back then, but we were youngsters … 17–18 years old. And we were fanatical, as people of that age often are, extremely confident in their relation to the world and what life is about, Kris says, suggesting that with age comes the uncertainty and understanding that life does not give many answers except for illusions, as a kind of meagre comfort.

– When things are that black and white, there are no “grey areas”, O’Sullivan adds. Jørn nods when I suggest that Ulver is all about these grey areas. Neither in black nor white, but in the liminal spaces, searching for new boundaries to break. Still, Ulver is uncompromising in an inventive way and seemingly never afraid of not living up to genres or pre-determined concept.

– Subgenres, like Norwegian black metal, have of course grown with all the interpretations of it, Kris says, arguing that the genre is no longer “pure”. “True Norwegian Black Metal” does not exist, other than as a kind of nostalgic interpretation of what it once was.

I then claim Ulver as a band represents a form of music approaching art, and this time they back up a bit.

– That is precisely why we do not comment on and interpret our own things, and avoid labels and genres and such, Jørn says. – We make music. This is what we know, and we do not calculate or determine exactly where to end up. The music develops according to our development, in our pace.

Daniel points out that O’Malley’s art installation at the Henie-Onstad Art Centre, where he himself was taking part playing the grand piano, inevitably becomes a kind of comment on O’Malley’s own – more immediate – musical expression. In a museal or art centre setting, music is turned automatically into a comment, he says.

All three stresses that Ulver wants to stay in immediate and intimate contact with what they are doing: the music.

– The concept of truth is important to us, and it was a timely, and fitting, frame at the festival [of literature] when we performed there, says Kris. – In a reality that is becoming more and more unreal, it has gradually become a kind of mandate for us to hammer down things that are unquestionable, or indisputable, in our lyrics. The song “Eos” [Shadows of the Sun] is a good example.

Truth. True.

Ideologically speaking, the rule of law in black metal was to be true to oneself. But a lot of people seem to be more faithful to the framework, to the interpretation of what it supposedly is all about. The concept of True Norwegian Black Metal is thus something created, or fabricated, an interpretation, a comment: nothing immediately and ultimately … neither real nor true.

– What are you supposed to be true to? A form or your own dynamic self? Kris asks.

– Take Mayhem, for example, they have changed a lot over the years. At the same time I think they have managed to keep things fresh and interesting. It is closer to contemporary arts music what they’re making now, Kris says, adding that an industrial band like Coil also changed their musical form from album to album, constantly taking on the fleeting nature of life. They were also a band that developed the British post-punk, which otherwise crumbled into “rubbish”, as O’Sullivan puts it.

– You can’t say that first wave of Norwegian black metal was insignificant, because it wasn’t. But when you afterwards peel away the interpretations and comments from the picture, you are left with a small and rather naive scene, O’Sullivan claims.

– Of course, but that is according to art’s own rules. It has to do with time and place. You can say the same about, for example, The Velvet Underground. It doesn’t mean much, Kris replies to O’Sullivan, who defends his hypothesis: – But they are artists and subcultures with a lot more weight and impact than black metal ever had. And black metal itself, in its pure form, the very basic idea, is that it is not complicated. It’s a simple return to pagan nature worship and the primeval forces, somehow. Whereas the modern adaptation of it is … so much more …

– So much more interesting? I say.

– Yes, much more interesting, I think. It is a lot of exciting elements at work in the development of black metal, O’Sullivan says. And now Kris concurs: – Yes, I guess. Considering that it has moved quite far away from the rather crude emotional state it initially sprung out from and was shaped by. As I see it, it is precisely in this loss of youthfulness, you know, the commercial interests, and the intellectualisation – when the music is thought before it is felt – it loses much of its nerve. Its authenticity, if you will. Anyway, when all of this happened, we kind of fell off the whole wagon, and decided to explore completely different things.

­– Considering some of the innovators of the genre “back in the days”, many of them have not progressed a lot since. The starting point was also a “dead end”, you might say. But there is also a nostalgic element in this, which many find appealing; the idea of “yes, wasn't that great?” Nostalgia is part of the whole metal genre, just look in London, with Iron Maiden and all that; it’s a huge part of the scene, O’Sullivan says.

– That’s true. At some point people do end up as parodies, Kris adds.

Someone mentions the band Immortal, and it’s easy to laugh at grown men doing the same show 15 years later. Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen’s black-metal parody, or any parody for that sake, awkwardly exposes an expression uncritically cultivated over years.

– Speaking of this “artification” of black metal: The other day we talked a bit about Peter Beste, a guy who is taking photographs of all these black metal musicians. I find it hard to see the point in what he does. He kind of documents the genre, publishes books and gets lots of attention, but he adds absolutely nothing. It’s black metal’s “Welcome to my Crib”. I said no to the guy at least five times. He was quite insistent. But I didn’t want to be part of that project.

– It’s exploitation! … of a sub-genre, O’Sullivan says.

– Blaxploitation! Kris paraphrases. They laugh.

Jørn mentions the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, who worked with black metal aesthetics in the early 2000s.

– His is among the more interesting takes on the genre. At least from what I’ve seen. I’m not thinking of when Frost [of Satyricon] fired up pictures in the gallery and similar. That’s too simple. But his paintings have a kind of urgency that I believe in. He is difficult to place, both artistically and morally. Peter Beste is easy to place.

– He [Melgaard] actually owes me a whole bunch of old photographs and negatives, which he “borrowed” many years ago, Kris cuts in.

Sunn O))) and Ulver are very different, too, Kris and O’Sullivan believes. They meet in Æthenor with Stephen O'Malley, whom they both have a lot of respect for. Now, even Ulver and Sunn O))) will be making a record together. A collaborative project. But Kris and O’Sullivan emphasize that the attraction towards the collaboration lies in how different the two bands are, not their similarities.

– Ulver is more involved with composition, says O’Sullivan. Kris believes that first and foremost applies to the latest record Shadows of the Sun.

– We’ve done some sonic experiments in the past, he says, highlighting the two EPs Silence Teaches You How to Sing and Silencing the Singing.

– But Ulver is more modern than postmodern. O’Malley is more postmodern … commenting, perhaps. Even though O’Malley is of course fully immersed in his work as well, O’Sullivan says.

Kris would prefer not to be part of this move towards “art”. At the same time, he’s not too happy about the prospect of being a part of the new-old black metal scene either.

– I like to have a bit of fun with the black metal stereotypes. There is no escaping the fact that there are many simple souls in that scene, who run around in uniform, with their jargon, and consider themselves radical rebels. I dare say I know a thing or two about what expectations you meet, what you are supposed to say and mean in that company. It is extremely predictable, so I often say the opposite, just to mess with people. In that sense, the little Satan is still inside here, somewhere.

– It’s like that old Groucho Marx joke: I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member, O'Sullivan says. They laugh again.

I point out that Garm – even without his black metal vocals – still exists within a black metal paradigm, and is to be considered an important contributor in the development of a genre that has evolved since he was indisputably a part of it.

– I am not sure I like it when you say that, kind of insisting that there is still a lot of black metal in me, although you are probably right. Of course, it was very important to me once, and it probably still is a bigger part of me than I want to admit, Kris replies, smiling.

– The least developed element of black metal is in my view how the lyrics fail to process the duality between Christianity and Satanism. And that points to an important element in what makes Ulver into a liberating force, so to say. Those who are so focused or hung up on Satanism are also slaves of the cross, even when they turn it upside down. They too depend on the Christian symbols and its understanding of reality and unreality, says O’Sullivan.

Ulver’s lyrics are basically poems, filled with symbolical weight. Jørn calls it “expressionism”. The title of the last album, Shadows of the Sun, then, articulates and conveys the Ulver phenomenology, in a single image.

– The connotations in the lyrics are associated with the music and pictures on the canvas, says O’Sullivan.

I tell them of the strong emotions evoked in me during the Lillehammer concert, as I watched the images of the Holocaust and the lion’s hunt accompanying the music.

– We discussed the imagery prior to the concert, whether people would get it wrong and think that we propagated for Nazism and such. But we ended up thinking that most people would understand, says Jørn.

– We kind of hoped people would feel rather than analyse, Kris adds. For him, it was difficult to work with this material, especially after becoming a father.

– After all, I often get discouraged and feel broken while dealing with these subject matters. In a way, we put the world against the wall. It is hard thinking like that when you have children yourself. But it also makes it more … I don’t know if “important” is the right word, but it is in a way “all I have left to work with”, does that make any sense? It’s nature’s way of telling you, something’s wrong … [He sings “Nature’s way” by the 70s band Spirit.]

After the tape recorder has stopped, we talk loosely, before speaking more about their lyrics, how they are drawn towards the grand topics of life and death, and the singular universal feeling of love. Everything boils down to love, life and death. Hate, too, is a part of that love. L’Amour fou, mad love, reveal how love can be as dark and destructive as it is light. As tattooed on Jørn’s knuckles: hope and faith.

[QUOTE:]

ALL THE LOVE

WE FEAR THE THINGS

WE DON'T UNDERSTAND

THE POWERS

OF GOOD

AND EVIL

OF THE WORLD

THE PAST

THE FUTURE

THE PROMISES

THE FOLLY

OF THOSE WHO DIED

FOR NOTHING

LEAVING THEIR WIVES

AND THEIR CHILDREN

FOR LOVE

THE ONLY THING

THAT MAKES US HUMAN

[END OF QUOTE]

Following Ulver’s resurgence live “at home” in Lillehammer, they have performed live at the Øya festival and at a few other festivals. They are working on several projects, and O’Sullivan is on board. Jørn and Kris tell him that they are happy for that. However, it could entail a more experimental approach, O’Sullivan says, as a warning to the two.

– But this is one of the world’s least settled bands, Kris replies.

– But even in the world’s most “unsettled” band, I want something even more “unsettled”, O’Sullivan says, continuing: – And more light, there’s not only darkness in the world. You’ve gotta cheer up, guys.

– But Dan, Jørn says, I’ve been thinking about that … Before we turn to the light, I think we should take one more step further down in the basement. Perhaps there is some kind of light there, after all. A kind of hope, hidden in something even more naked and personal …

– I hear what you’re saying, Kris tells O’Sullivan. – I quite often think it’s time to focus on something brighter, more hopeful. But I can’t shake off the feeling that optimism is self-deception. All the while I am becoming more and more afraid that all this pessimism will manifest itself and start eating its way into my life. It is making me paranoid. Still, this is what we can, and have done for so long, we cannot pretend otherwise. As if this darkness does not exist.

It gets quiet.

As I get up, and prepare myself to leave, Kris asks: – What’s your next question? And then it crossed our minds, that I actually asked one question only.

– A novel approach to the art of the interview, O’Sullivan comments dryly.

The question was: what is Ulver 1994 and what is Ulver 2009?

As I leave the living room and head out to meet the flickering lights of downtown Oslo, consumed and carried away in the stomach of the metro wagon, Coil sum it all up:

… they walk serene, in spaces between …

Purchase the book at House of Mythology or use this link (copy paste): https://en.spkr.media/en/Artists/Ulver/Ulver-Wolves-Evolve-The-Ulver-Story.html?fbclid=IwAR3T0LpLlZ363miRJcYNUu72wPXB8tEctX-toxmc2a9G3_2gycnmuuPvG_k