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"Wir sind die Toten.” / "We are the dead.”

(Welcome to the centre of perdition city.)

2000 e.v. I woke up at night, finding myself wet of sweat, shivering because of ague, with wild untamed thoughts circling around a whispering voice declaring that we are the dead. I was alone in my room, yet a dim noise below my window echoed from the street canyon and made me remember the anonymous haunting life outside seemingly never coming to sleep. A voice forming German words: wir sind die Toten. I turned round in my bed and caught a glimpse of the new spookily ULVER album I received some days ago. This is music for the stations before and after sleep. Headphones and darkness recommended. Too bad I had fallen into my feverish sleep whilst listening. But still some days ahead the interview with Kris. I should ask him about that nightmarish passage in the middle of this scaring subtle record.

Kris, a few days later: Darkness is always fascinating, as well as the great void. It doesn’t matter under which aesthetic circumstances this void appears. It is always there and that was important for us to realize on "Perdition City”: the void is even over the voice. (…) It is funny you call us criminal alchemists. Indeed in our lyrics there are enough criminal and alchemical aspects, or fascinating borderline topics, to be more concrete. That all takes place in the dead city, or better: in a centre, an imagined location of nowhere and nothing.

That is the new phenomenal aspect of perdition city – which had been visited by other visionaries before – and its music: it is ultimately close and nowhere at the same time; the longer the night, the more it denies concrete forms, although clear and concrete pieces of a midnight scenery pop up every now and then, but they fade to bizarre and shady schemes that you can’t really remember or even decipher the next morning. You float there / somewhere / in a piece of time you cannot determine. In that regard ULVER took the basic ideas of THE FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON’s as well frightening and awe-inspiring "Dead Cities” album to another level. While the pioneers of ambient techno and masters of electronica had already traced the decline of modernity by combining futurist techno puzzle pieces with echoes from a music once made popular by Jean-Michel Jarré, the Norwegian quick-change artists drew a jazzy lounge music scenario of the ultimate post-modern (night = non) life which floats as helplessly as anonymously and still implies all modern dangers, if not at much higher potential. Friends of irony and extreme opposites that they are (none else would find that much delight in William Blake’s poetry), ULVER approached the dead centre with an almost terrorist creed enabling them to walk among the lonely ghosts and communicate with them quite relaxed and of course with darkest humour.

Kris: The sample you refer to was intentionally included. "You’re taking a ride to the underworld where death lurks at dark corners...” We only had to cut "…saturdays on Discovery Channel”. It fits the album’s atmosphere perfectly and we must use it. We found that passage by coincidence, but not without method. Sometimes we had the television connected with the mixing desk and thus were able to listen to the TV programme on two channels.

And nothing comes closer to setting the great void to music than to use TV.

Kris: Exactly.

ULVER’s approach to reflect the void is not the most playful, but maybe the most varied so far. With "Perdition City”, at least for that moment, everything was said and the singing was silenced short afterwards.

From today’s perspective, especially in comparison with similar concepts in non-mainstream music, like THE SOUNDBYTE’s fragile "City Of Glass”, TOR LUNDVALL’s soft ambient "Empty City” or contemporary reflections by melancholic dub step wizards like BURIAL or DISTANCE, no place was filled with so many dark surprises and anticipations of vulnerability like "Perdition City”, none reflected so many different shades of a void that still keeps inspiring musicians from various scenes. ULVER’s restlessness might be a pain in the ass of the wolves sometimes, but their creativity and sensitiveness, their fascination for darkness and contrasts allows them to supply their musical paintings with sublime nuances others can only dream of. "Perdition City” still proves this with seldom easiness.

Thor Wanzek

TRACKLIST: 01 - Lost In Moments 02 - Porn Piece Or The Scars Of Cold Kisses 03 - Hallways Of Always 04 - Tomorrow Never Knows 05 - The Future Sound Of Music 06 - We Are The Dead 07 - Dead City Centres 08 - Catalept 09 - Nowhere / Catastrophe