The genius of Ulver in 5 clips

It's hard to imagine a better way for a band to be insulated from the alternative mainstream than Ulver's triple whammy:

1. Be Norwegian
2. Don't perform live for 15 years.
3. Start out as part of the early 90's black metal scene in Norway which, whatever else it was, was certainly not indie-friendly.

As it is, they've quietly gotten on with becoming one of the best bands on the planet without much serious English-language coverage outside the world of metal, which seemingly hasn't rescinded their membership of The Club (they're still a bunch of intimidating looking guys with tattoos, after all)

I'm also hard pressed to think of a group which has made music in so many styles - black metal, folk, instrumental hip-hop, ambient, prog, dream-pop - and made darn fine records in all of them. 

I'd shorthand them as the Norwegian Radiohead or the Norwegian Notwist if I didn't think I was going to be struck down for lazy pigeonholing if I did.

So let's take a quick tour through their back catalogue, starting with their good-bye-to-black -metal third album, Nattens Madrigal.(1996)..

The lead off track, Of Wolf and Fear, is a fuzzy blast of barely discernable noise, with themes and vocals lycanthropic in equal measure. It's strong medicine, indeed.

But even before then, Ulver had shown exciting signs of eclecticism - album number two Kveldsanger, from the previous year, was a full-on excursion into beautiful, austere acoustic folk, with singer Kristoffer 'Garm' Rygg's vocals multi-tracked over classical guitar and strings. Check out Østenfor Sol og vestenfor Maane here for a flavour.

By 2000 and Ulver's fifth album Perdition City, shedding members as they went, they'd arrived at instrumental hip-hop soundtracks to imaginary films, five years after the high-water mark of tr*p-h*p. Garm was now referring to himself as Trickster G and barely sings at all. You don't need me to tell you how bad this could have been.

If it wasn't apparent before this point in their career that Ulver didn't give a damn what anyone else thought, it was now.

Except, against the odds, Perdition City is great - atmospheric, brooding, applying the sound-scaping lessons of their black metal apprenticeship to a different, no longer fashionable genre and making it work.

Here's Hallways of Always (a Nearly God/Tricky reference?)

Fast forward through ambient and soundtrack works of the early 00's which build on the platform of Perdition City and push it out further, and by the middle of the decade Ulver decided to become more of an orthodox (for Ulver values of orthodox) band again.

Of the three original, for-want-of-a-better-word-proggy albums that followed, the mother bear and #7, Shadows Of The Sun (2007) is my favourite. A set of slow-burns for late night listening, with some of Rygg's best singing accompanied by droning, hymnal keys, glitching and jazz playing, it's really rather wonderful.

And they even find time to cover Black Sabbath's Solitude.

 
Last year's album was a set of covers of 60's psychedelia, Childhood's End. By far and away, the most straight-ahead thing they've done, their own take on Nuggets it was what reeled me in to Ulver when I came across it in (yes) the metal section of the record store when beginning my odyssey from indie towards stranger shores.

Here's their take on In The Past by the Chocolate Watch Band which manages to be perky and slightly unsettling at the same time, very much in the psych spirit.

Ulver square the circle between constant reinvention and authenticity to themselves so well that you have to ask how they have managed it when so many others have tried and failed before? Certainly, I think they've been both lucky and smart in their relationship to the alternative mainstream; circumstances and their own efforts have created a space where they can be their awesome selves.

But they've also been consistent in their own vision of music and their own themes and motifs - melancholic, brooding, Byronic, subversive - whatever genre they've been operating in and whoever the core group has drafted into help. 

Scratch the surface of any of these albums and you find the same Ulver genius.

Altaar: music for melancholic minds

Altaar's self-titled album may be adding extra weight to the idea that doom metal is only a small step away from being lounge music for the leather jackets and beards brigade, but it is pretty darn good.

There's an exclusive stream of the album on the Invisible Oranges blog. You should check it out now.

Over two long-form pieces we get Dylan Carlson style instrumental metallic-folk blues - slow, stately and cool, man - punctuated by drones and steady-state wig-outs. 

At one point on the second track - Dei Absolutte Krav Og Den Absolute Nåde (they're Norwegian, don't you know) the singer wakes up from his reverie, goads the drummer into upping the tempo, and briefly gives it his best Joe Cocker goes black metal.

Spent, he collapses back into the narcotic/necrotic haze from whence he came. His cooler bandmates, mellow unharshed, return to carrying him in state across the monochrome terrain.

This is music made by melancholic minds, clipped of expectation, elegant and elegaic. I love it, and I'd do so without qualification were it not for the feeling that those responsible feel lost as the rest of us.

Welcome to The Warehouse

As you may know, I work in possibly one of the most eccentric yet cosy office buildings in the country, The Warehouse in Digbeth. Owned and run by Birmingham Friends of the Earth, we workers by brain, by hand and occasionally by petition and fluffy bee costume from Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland also have an outpost here.

The Warehouse also includes meeting rooms for hire, a health food shop and a whole plethora of other community organisations renting space.

Much like the Japanese car industry, the Warehouse is in a condition of continuous improvement, thanks to the indefagitable Building Manager Phil Burrows and his team of volunteers. As there's a whole range of changes happening at the moment even by Warehouse standards, however, I thought now was a good time to begin sharing life here with you in photographic form.

So, here we go! Welcome to the Warehouse

That's the Moor Street viaduct in the background - we're just round the corner from the station and the city centre.

Here is our lovely reception (Phil manning the reception desk) with murals and more take away info materials than you can shake a stick at.

To get to the offices, you pass through the secret behind the scenes storage area of the Warehouse

"But in the Latin alphabet, Jehovah starts with a Y..."

Putting in a new window for a small office, inadvertently doing a Rothko 

Phil is arranging for the dead tree resources of Birmingham Friends of the Earth to be finally disposed of - [sniff]. Sentimentality aside, they are very rarely used now and we do need the extra office space.

Mice attraction very infra-dig, although why they aren't just deterred by our many-headed Eric Pickles-hydra I have no idea... 

Finally, a sneaky preview of the main office, more photos and introductions to follow next time...

The Green Man @ Walsall Leather Museum

Cthulhukitsch

Of all the feats of geek culture, the one which most consistently surprises and intrigues me is its ability to twist the writings of HP Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) into novelty shapes. And sometimes even make money from it.

That's Lovecraft, the writer of horror and weird fantasy whose protagonists generally mutate, go mad, die or some noxious combination of the three; Lovecraft, the misanthrope and holder of some unsavory views about non-white races which ought to severely test the Wagner Defence for any fan; Lovecraft, man of a thousand hysterical adjectives, usually loathsome, hideous and blasphemous.

The Lovecraft, who in spite of all of the above wrote a small number - I stress the word small - of truly great short stories in which he dialed down his nervous tics and channelled his talents into saying just this: that what humanity laughably terms normality, knowledge, civilisation are candles in a universe far larger and darker than we can ever know.

The Lovecraft, whose for-want-of-a-better-term brand ambassador is a titanic giant with an octopoid head sleeping beneath the waves awaiting a time in which he will (consults notes) ah yes, lead humanity in a Nietzschean power-trip culminating in species-death. Or something to that effect.

Sketch of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft

Yet fans, geeks and gamers go mad for cutesy extrapolations of the Lovecraft mythos. And Cthulhu seems to have become the focus for this attention. Not bad for a slimy, squamous  bringer of armageddon.

At the commerical end of the spectrum, take this plush example, courtesy of the Geekest Link. 

Or, from tabletop gaming, Munchkin Cthulhu, from where this free downloadable card originates.

Not to mention the wackier end of the Call of Cthulhu RPG - Cthulhu for President indeed... 

And then, reluctantly joining the 21st century, there's Cthulhu Saves The World for your android phone.

But let's not forget what the fans do purely for the love, like this Adventures of L'il Cthulhu animation

Or pushing the boat out still further, Lovecraftian webcomics, Lolthulu, and Cthulhu Mythos Christmas jingles (clip below).

You can find more examples of Cthulhukitsch in a Guardian article I swear I haven't read.

But my question is not: should I join in by attempting to rewrite the theme tune to the Mickey Mouse Club among Lovecraftian lines (and I assure you, you can fit C-T-H-U-L-H-U F-T-H-A-G-N in there). Rather, it's why? Why has Cthulhu become the cosmic threat beyond space and time it's ok to like? 

I've got two possible answers to run up the flagpole here. One, while Lovecraft wouldn't have known how to promote his work if it was carved in prehistoric runes on a mysterious monolith thirty foot high, he did have extraordinarily savvy (culturally if not commercially) posthumous champions. Right from his death in the 1930's, supporters like August Derleth founded Arkham House to ensure his work, never properly published outside of pulp magazines in his lifetime, was properly and respectfully released. 

Authors since then have written further works in the Lovecraftian universe, or at least in his idiom, further extending its tentacular reach through fandom. Further amplified by the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and works in other media (see examples above, but also Metallica songs, Re-animator movies etc) HP has grown to the point where - beyond the grave - he is an undisputed big deal.

Yet the Lovecraft legacy has been distorted over the years such that he has become to wierd fiction what Elvis is to rock and roll. You don't need to listen to Elvis to go to Graceland, talk about jelly bean sandwiches or invoke the rhinestone jump suit. Similarly, you don't need to read Lovecraft in geek culture to roll off - and crucially parody - the list of tropes he's associated with: madness; cultists; forbidden knowledge; tentacles; indescribable horror; the Necronomicon, the word 'squamous'. 

I didn't read much of his work until my thirties and I still could have told you all about him, after having put both hands to my chin and waved my fingers in a tentacular fashion.  

In other words, pop culture Lovecraft (as opposed to Lovecraft the writer) is ripe for commodification, homage and satire.

And yet there's a second possibility here - that at his best (say, The Whisperer in Darkness or The Shadow Over Innsmouth), there is something sufficiently disturbing and original still in Lovecraft that the urge to camp him up, to ironically enjoy him, to consume plush offshoots of his work, is a defence mechanism. 

We laugh at his obsessions - and boy is it easy to laugh at him - because if we go back to the books and allow him to draw us in then he still, as an outsider artist with a singular vision, has the power to unnerve, to ask what lies beyond the reach of our candle in the darkness.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft, the Call of Cthulhu

Oxford Botanical Gardens up close and personal

More self consciously arty photos of hothouse plants close up at my Flickr page. 

Newsflash - blog re-designed

As well as experimenting with a redesign and backdrop, to your right you'll now see that the following posts have been indexed by category

• My creative writing (you brave souls who read that)
• A tree-hugging geek at King Arthur's Court - anything to do with my job, activism or politics 
• Book, music and film reviews

It now feels like a better ordered and altogether less austere place to visit. :-)

Callaghan's Crosstime Saloon and down-home SF group therapy

If anyone ever suggests that SF has nothing to say about the human condition, you could do a lot worse than point them towards Spider Robinson (1)

Callaghan's Crosstime Saloon (1977) - the first of many collections of stories he's produced about a very special Long Island Bar - is by some lights barely in the genre at all. The tropes it does employ - little green men, time travel, telepathy - seem in most of the tales to be window dressing for solving a patron's problems. 

Taking the first story as an example: In The Guy With The Eyes, the very first Callaghan story, the bar has to help an alien scout avoid a compulsion to report back to their superiors, thus triggering the destruction of the Earth. But the first half of the tale is taken up with the story of a recovering heroin addict seeking an audience and some kind of absolution. 

 And here's the kicker: both parts are complimentary reflections on the absolute value of agape - the ability of mankind to offer unconditional, fraternal love.

With a quiet mistrust of authority, an emphasis on the personal rather than the political, and the sense of a people licking its wounds, it's also hard not to read the Callaghan stories as group therapy for the counter-culture in the After The Goldrush 1970's. 

So in the second piece, The Time Traveller, there is actually no time travel as such - 'only' the experience of one who has for tragic but mundane reasons missed the political, social and sexual explosion of the late sixties, and feels radically alienated from the current era. 

With subject matter like this, the risk is that one loses the effervescence of much SF. Robinson's achievement is to cloak this depth in descriptions of what sounds like the best boy's club (2) in existence. Come to Callaghans, and you'll get yarn spinning, punning contests, musical entertainment and endless repartee.

This could have all been a whimsy too far in the wrong hands, but the tales rattle on, never quite leaving the rails, like a chance meeting of Ray Bradbury, John Barth and Douglas Adams in a Norman Rockwell painting. Glibness is largely avoided.

Callaghan's Crosstime Saloon might defy categorisation under Asimov's three types of SF - gadget SF, adventure SF and social SF -  but it's undeniably part of the genre. It forms part of a long-standing fourth pillar of science fiction which is mainly interested in providing new ways of looking at how we live now. And it has as much to say about that as anything from within the mainstream. 

(1) Spider Robinson is not a real spider, for then we would be expecting insights into the arachnid condition. 

(2) Women characters are a little scarce in these tales, and the only two major characters are looking for love and children, respectively. 

Clark Ashton Smith: all horror is speakable

Clark Ashton Smith sounds like a firm of estate agents, was in fact a pulp weird fiction writer, contemporary and bestie pen pal of H P Lovecraft, writing in the 20's and 30's.

I acquired a second-hand short story collection, Genius Loci,because of the HPL connection, and jumped right in. It's a mix of horror, fantasy and SF which reminds you forcefully just how weak the boundaries were between genres during the first blossoming of mass market speculative fiction.

Genius Loci demonstrates CAS's chief accomplishment as a writer: depicting the gruesome, haunting image. Whether it's Hobbes' leviathan made flesh through dark sorcery (The Colossus of Ylourgne) a garden adorned with grafted body parts (The Garden of Adompha), or a statue of the goddess of love entwined with an amorous corpse (The Disinterment of Venus) the images remain with me even though the stories themselves may sometimes be ephermeral. 

To put it another way, unlike Lovecraft, all horror for CAS is fundamentally describable and speakable.

Smith was an artist as well as an author, and while a flippant response to his work would be to say as a writer he makes a pretty good painter, it's interesting to see the uncanniness of his pulp fiction as a pop counterpart to the visual revolution of surrealism happening at the same time across the Atlantic in a very different milieu. This may well be a strong misreading of his influences, but I prefer to see it as the same cultural currents coming to the surface in different ways.

Certainly, reading CAS reminds me of nothing more than Dali's photorealist nightmares.

But does Clark Ashton Smith still matter, three-quarters of a century later? Well, the SF tales are hard going, tending towards the dated OMG it's a polygon from Pluto strain also found in Lovecraft, the prose regularly empurples, and his attitudes to women (victims, fiancees and concubines, in the main) are very much of his time. Yet in spite of all this, he cuts through all this back to the original Gothic spirit of awful sublimity in a way which would do Ann Radcliffe proud.

And it's telling that a pulp writer working in your grandparents' or great-grandparents' idiom has bags more imagination and creativity, more downright erudition placed in the service of his craft, than most fantasy authors today.  If we can't match the high-water marks of interwar weird fiction, then frankly the genre is in trouble.

Postscript: while drafting this review I came across a rather splendid academic/fan site for Smith - The Eldritch Dark. Here you can read some of his works, view his work, consider literary criticism and even hear some of his stories read out loud.

The Black Metal Nick Drake: Alcest - Les Écailles De Lune

Sometimes you need in your life a music which takes you away from all this reality - unconcerned with the here and now and emotionally affecting you in a way which surpasses language and subject.

The second Alcest album,  Les Écailles De Lune (2010) is that kind of music. 

Essentially a one-man band, Alcest's roots are in black metal, but by the time of Ecailles the blast beats and growling are only one element of the music. They jostle for space with some lovely fluid post-rock guitar lines which Dave Pajo would be proud of, together with a lot of love for early 90's shoegaze (see Solar Song below for the best example of this, as well as the most accessible moment on the album).
  

One of the criticisms frequently levelled at then-shoegaze was that it had nothing to say - behind the fringes and the mumbling there was nothing but beautiful noise. Intentionally or not, Neige (Monsieur Alcest) deals with this by providing a meta-narrative for his songs, all of which address ... and this is where it gets interesting ... his nostalgia for childhood experiences of another world.

In fact, he insists on the validity of these experiences when questioned in interviews. To revise an old Spacemen 3 quote, Neige's approach seems to be having transcendental experiences to make to music to have transcendental experiences to. 

This wouldn't be the first time an artist has used a frame like this as the basis for their work, whether we're talking religious devotion or the UFO reveries of late-period Philip K Dick. And it lends the whole enterprise a greater degree of intensity, an introspective self-sufficiency which elevates Alcest from middle-class freakout to something approaching beautiful, melancholic outsider art.

Oh, and best thing I've heard so far this year.

Video of the week: Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing

Warning: don't watch this video unless you're ready to cry. It's a beautiful piece of animation to accompany Steven Wilson's latest album, a song cycle of supernatural tales, also called The Raven That Refused To Sing. 

Steven Wilson's best known as bandleader for proggers The Porcupine Tree, but don't let the 'prog' tag put you off this, which isn't not a million miles away from Radiohead's ventures into brooding piano territory.

Interactive world creation - Atlantis: Years One and Two

In a couple of weeks, for the first time in several years, I'm running a role-playing gaming session, as opposed to 'just' playing one.

I've decided to start by trying a bit of interactive world creation with the players, as an exercise in creatively surrendering the gamesmaster's control to make something together.

In this post, and the comments that follow, we're going to start to create the setting together. If you're not in the game, don't hold back from making your own suggestions; we can't guarantee we'll use them, but if you're inspired by what you read we'd like to hear your ideas too.

The gameworld

For those of us with finite time, it's good to start with some published material, and then start adding to it and remixing it.

The starting point for this world creation exercise is Progenitor, a source book for the Wild Talents game. It's one of the best pieces of work in this area that I've seen in gaming for a long time - broad enough in its canvas that there are many places and times you can slot in a campaign; original enough in its detail that you find inspiration in many places.

It starts with the idea that the first superhuman, an American woman named Amanda Sykes, is discovered in the late 1960's and slowly begins to infect the population with strange powers while fighting for the US in Vietnam. The world slowly starts to get very weird indeed.

Hot-spots for infection this early in the time-line are Washington DC and the Vietnam War.

The interview after the jump with Amanda sets the scene well and makes it clear that you're not dealing with world where everyone with powers has to dig spandex and capes. It's reminiscent of Aberrant, which I loved despite its material being wildly uneven in quality.

 The setting

For the game, I'm focussing in on Atlantis, a small island in the Atlantic created in 1969 in the Progenitor timeline by a superhuman with earth control powers. Woozy from the bitter end of the summer of love, Cynthia Carls creates the island as a refuge from the conflicts of the United States, for humans and metahumans alike.

There's a great image from the book of this staggering act of creation here.

But the Progenitor material leaves lots of questions usefully unanswered, which is where we come in.

Some useful dates

April 1968 – Blurry footage from the Vietnam War leads US military to admit to the use of “metahuman soldiers”

May 1968 – reports from the war indicate that the Viet Cong also have strange destructive powers on their side.

June and July 1968 – battles between metahumans in Boston and New York - the first of their kind... certainly not the last.

August 1968 – North Vietnamese metahumans begin sabotage operations on US soil, apparently through teleportation.

March 1969 – Cynthia Carls creates small Atlantis – an island outside US territorial waters in the Atlantic.

July 1969 – The first monster created by Tina Shaw – a tiny homunculus created when she heals the sick – appears live on television

September 1969 – Atlantis now has approximately 100 citizens, as Cynthia Carls quietly spreads the word of her new utopia.

Key questions for players and anyone else who fancies suggesting ideas? Please reply in the comments

• What striking features, flora or fauna might Atlantis have? Give us one example.
• Suggest a character with superpowers who has sought sanctuary in Atlantis. What is their main power and why are they there? Who were they before they had powers?
• Suggest a normal human character who has sought sanctuary in Atlantis. What did they do before they came to Atlantis and what did they do there?

It probably makes most sense at this stage for these initial characters to be American - but if you can think of a convincing reason why you might have come across an infected superhuman elsewhere, or have heard about Atlantis through other means than Cynthia and her rainbow nation of American refugees be my guest!

Don't worry at this stage whether these are the characters you want to play - your role here is to make sure the island is an interesting place and help to give it a ferret-sack-full of interesting people

I'm going to do this too over the weekend. Looking forward to seeing your ideas. :-)

Room 101 guest post: Put Room 101 in Room 101, says @onlystephan

Stephan Burn blogs about writing at Endless Realms and tweets at @onlystephan. 

I'd like to put Room 101 into Room 101. I know this might cause a paradox in time and space, sucking everything into a destructive vortex, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. Firstly, taking the metaphorical Room 101 concept, that of the TV show and countless blog posts, it's the finality that annoys me. 

Nothing is ever final, there are always exceptions, there are caveats, nuances and subtleties. Take 'people standing on the left on the escalator', a popular choice to expunge from the universe. It's irritating, isn't it? And yet, we dampen down our passive aggressive tutting in the case of tourists, those burdened by large bags or prams. And for the rest, the inconsiderate or the wilfully obstructive? They rob us of seconds of time. Mere Seconds. Maybe even a whole minute if it's a particularly long escalator.

It's never the big things that get put into Room 101, it's the tiny, inconsequential first world problems that irritate us slightly, or for which we see no place in the world. It's Twilight fans waxing lyrical about the 'wrong kind of vampires', it's cinemas full of movie sequels, it's people eating with their mouthes open. Small annoyances that really affect nothing consequential, or that might be important to someone else but butts against our prejudices or sense of entitlement.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'd rather not pollute my body or sully my tastebuds with cheap instant coffee. But while I may make a big song and dance of my dismay for those who do, I still wouldn't send instant coffee to Room 101. People can make choices for themselves. People can learn, can educate their palates. Or not, it's actually irrelevant to me.

What about the big things? Perhaps we should send organised religion to Room 101? There's no doubting the harms it has inflicted on society, culture and lives. And yet, a deeper, more nuanced look at it reveals the benefits it has gifted society, culture and people's lives. Does the equation balance? Does it swing more one way or another? I'd say it doesn't matter. It's not a black or white issue. And that's what the concept of Room 101 demands: A black or white decision, separating things that are tolerable from some things that aren't.

Finally, we all know that Room 101 stems from Orwell's 1984. But Room 101 was not a place where annoyances were sent to be wiped from our lives. It was a torture chamber, a place where undesirables were sent to be 're-educated' by subjecting them to their worst nightmare, fear or phobia. Personally, I don't think I'd be happy sending anything or anybody to such a place and I'm a little suspicious of anybody who is comfortable with that.