june gloom on 30/8/2019 at 15:48

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I wake up. It's 2019. I have to drive my car to get an oil change. I'm listening to Ulver again on the way.

Ulver are my favorite band of all time.

i've had a lot of favorite bands over the years:

- Green Day
- Iced Earth
- Megadeth (well, until Dave Mustaine lost his mind)
- Opeth
- Beloved
- Strapping Young Lad
- Black Sabbath
- Electric Wizard
- Isis (no relation to the terrorist group)

I wake up. It's 2002. I blink. It's 2003. I blink. It's 2005. I blink. It's 2008. I blink. it's 2011. I blink. It's 2015. I blink. It's 2017.

I drop off listening to all of these bands, one by one, as my tastes change. I blink. I'm sick of traditional metal, with its stagnancy and deeply insular, incoherent culture. I blink. I'm no longer the angry shithead who found solace in musical seizures. I blink. I grow tired of most guitar-oriented music in general. I rediscover my love for electronic music, especially now that dubstep is no longer popular. I blink. I discover vaporwave. I blink. My entire way of looking at music is suddenly, irrevocably altered, as I finally find a genre that has seemingly endless emotional value no matter how much I obsessively listen to it.

I wake up. It's 2001. My only avenue of discovering new music is dialup and Napster.

I don't really remember how I discovered Ulver. I think someone was talking about their recent album Perdition City, back in the old AOL metal forums. Someone else was whining about how Ulver "sold out." somehow I got hold of a few tracks. It was intriguing, but didn't grab me immediately -- just went into my repertoire of stuff I'd stick on a CD.

I discover The End Records' website. There's a bunch of random songs from across their catalogue. Aside from some decent triphop that mercifully isn't Massive Attack or Portishead, there's also some Ulver. A track from Lycantropen Themes, in fact -- might have been track 8 or 9.

Little by little I amass a small collection of songs off various Ulver albums, mostly their Black Metal Trilogie but also about half of Perdition City, which captures my imagination and serves as one of the early influences that gave me an appreciation for jazz.

I wake up. It's 2007 or so. I'm on DSL. The internet sucks less. My piecemeal collection of tracks has been traded for full albums. Shadows of the Sun had just come out. Not only was it the most amazing album I'd heard that year (and there were a lot) but it also gave me a greater appreciation for their last album, Blood Inside, which I was a little mad at for not being more like Perdition City.

At this point I'm very heavily into the band Isis and its contemporaries -- Callisto, Cult of Luna, Pelican, Russian Circles, Red Sparowes, Rosetta. but I keep going back to Ulver. My appreciation for this band has begun to extend beyond simple "slobbering Perdition City's knob" to an understanding of what Ulver really mean, especially in the wake of Krystoffer Rygg's other band, Arcturus, breaking up. (They've since reformed, a fact I only discovered while writing this.)

I wake up. It's 2012. Childhood's End is out. I listen to it all summer. The idea of Ulver covering a bunch of obscure 60s psychedelic rock is bizarre and yet makes complete sense -- and Ulver have left their indelible stamp on it. I discover synthwave through Hotline Miami. It's all I listen to for months... except when I put on Ulver.

I wake up. It's 2017. I've moved on from synthwave to vaporwave, a couple years too late for its heyday but just in time to witness the genre truly flower and expand. Then The assassination of Julius Caesar is released. For a band that does "radical departures from their previous sound" every other album, this is almost completely unlike anything else they've done: a straightforward, (relatively) radio-friendly pop album in the vein of Duran Duran. And it works -- and blends perfectly with the other crap I've been listening to. Despite the new sound I can draw a direct line to it from Blood Inside and Wars of the Roses. i finally realize that this is the only band that I have never stopped listening to. All the others, forgotten, left in the dust.

I wake up. It's 2019. My mom is gone and I'm truly alone for the first time in my life. Ulver is still here. I discover they put out a new album, Drone Activity. It's a drone album. Considering they collabbed with SUNN O))) once, not a shock, but this is surprisingly listenable, reminding me a little of Teachings in Silence.

I wake up. It's August 2019. I'm supposed to be moving soon. I'm listening to ulver. I realize that I'm finally free to make my own path in life. Ulver, at long last, have recently begun to dip their toes into touring the US -- only NYC right now, and they had to cancel a west coast tour, but who knows? I might actually get to see them. I feel like if that happened, my soul might exit from my body, leaving my body collapsed, boneless and sagging, on the floor like a bag of wet muesli.

This band has changed with the times. So have I. But I understand it. It's one of the few things I do understand. When I say "this is my favorite band," I mean this is the one thing that has never left me in almost 20 years.

Sulphur on 30/8/2019 at 18:07

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I still have to thank you for introducing me to Perdition City. It really is one of the very absolute best.

May you have every strength you need on the path ahead of you.