Ulver — Metamorphosis — released 27/09/1999

Metamorphosis! An album that is actually an EP, even though it barely makes it into album runtime territory imo (just over 25 minutes). It also came out exactly one day after my younger sister was born, and was released as sort of a teaser to their following album Perdition City and has a very similar style, though they don’t share any songs as far as I can tell.

Metamorphosis is composed of four tracks, two of which are decidedly in the longer side, all of which are entirely electronic with a strong 90s Aphex Twin/Squarepusher-adjacent, ambient-y flavor, and no riffz whatsoever. In the sleeve notes to this release, they make a point of distancing themselves from the BM scene and paint themselves as free-thinking experimentalists, never content with sitting in one spot indefinitely. Okay! That sounds great!

Unfortunately, there is not a lot for me to say about this EP other than I don’t really like it. It’s uninspiring to me. The tracks gravitate mostly around techno and ambient and were all produced by our old acquaintances Haavard, Tore Ylwizaker and Gar- I mean, Trickster G. The production is alright, I guess, but feel pretty uninspired and derivative except for some few good moments here and there that nevertheless fade away in an instant and never really amount to something larger. According to Wikipedia, our boy G commented that Metamorphosis was made in an improvised way in the studio (as is most electronic music actually), but that seems to have also resulted in a generally self-satisfied, masturbatory feel to the whole thing. Yeah, those beats are okay, the synths and samples are often interesting and even surprising, but that on its own doesn’t make a good song — you still gotta fit them together in an interesting way! I’ve heard later electrulver, and I know what they’re capable of, so this is just underwhelming.

All in all, I could see this as an interesting experiment leading up to greater things, but that’s pretty much the best I can do. Gonna have to pass.

DOES IT PULVERIZE? I would tell you if I could, but Gar- fuck, I mean Trickster G, he asked me to refrain from voicing superficial remarks regarding their music and/or personae, and that they are as unknown to me as they always were.