Category Archives: Live

Short Cuts 4: FM Einheit, Peter Brötzmann/Full Blast, Terry Riley, Naked Lunch

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The fourth in an occasional series of handy bite-size reviews of recent concerts I haven’t got the time or the energy to write more about.

FM Einheit, Vienna Fluc Wanne, 5 October 2010

Enjoyable evening of metal-bashing and whatnot from the ex-Einstürzende Neubauten man. Einheit had kitted out the venue with long metal coils suspended from the ceiling, and played them with mallets and hand drills to the accompaniment of backing tapes. He also made the already dusty atmosphere of the Fluc Wanne even murkier by pulverising concrete blocks into rubble. It was all very industrial, but I can’t help feeling that the moment for this kind of thing has come and gone. Neubauten didn’t replace him, after all. Plus, it wasn’t Mufti’s fault but this concert had the most annoying audience member I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter, a bloke down the front who insisted on dancing – dancing, I tell you – and shouting incomprehensibly throughout the entire set.

Full Blast, Vienna Porgy & Bess, 18 October 2010

The incomparable Peter Brötzmann returned to Vienna for the first time in a year, this time with his Swiss rhythm section of Marino Pliakas on bass guitar and Michael Wertmüller on drums. The trio was augmented on this occasion by the ubiquitous Ken Vandermark on reeds, plus an additional trumpeter and percussionist. Unusually, the first half of this evening was devoted to a composed piece by Wertmüller, who conducted energetically from his drumkit. It was something of a surprise to see music stands onstage at a Brötzmann gig; he didn’t have one himself, of course, but all the others did.

It was “as you were” after the interval, as the sextet launched into a furious, raging improv. Great to see Peter end the set by jumping into the air on the last note, just like Springsteen with his guitar. Except for a blistering duet with Brötzmann in the second half, I felt Vandermark struggled to make his presence felt in this context.

Terry Riley, Vienna Porgy & Bess, 23 October 2010

A grave disappointment, this. I went along on the basis of Riley’s peerless reputation as a minimalist composer, rightfully gained from his seminal works In C and A Rainbow In Curved Air. But on this occasion Riley proposed a series of shortish, dreary piano pieces, with meandering and soporific accompaniment from Talvin Singh on tabla and George Brooks on saxophone. I’m out.

Naked Lunch, Vienna Arena, 30 October 2010

This was the first time I’ve seen Naked Lunch do a proper show of their own, rather than play the Universalove soundtrack. It was a superb, engrossing performance. Oliver Welter prowled the stage intently, his haunting voice tracing patterns of love and loss around the emotionally dissonant forces unleashed by the music. There’s a troubling, volatile core to this group; the songs obey many of the rules of alt.rock, yet they contrive to keep the listener off balance with their jagged, restless qualities.

And by the way, am I really the only non-Austrian who thinks Naked Lunch are great? Apart from the growing pile of unread and uncommented-upon reviews on this blog, I’ve never seen a single word written about them in English.

Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Vienna Blue Tomato & Martinschlössl, 3-5 November 2010

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I nearly fell off my chair when I read the announcement of these dates. On both previous occasions when I’ve seen the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet it’s been at Porgy & Bess, the kind of spacious venue where you might expect this huge free jazz aggregation to play. But the tiny stage of the Blue Tomato, and the local Gasthaus Martinschlössl? Some mistake surely?

There was no mistake, of course. The first two of these nights saw the Tentet perform in various subgroups, while the last night saw the whole shebang come together for the kind of all-out aural assault in which this group specializes. The idea of subgroups made good sense for a couple of reasons. Firstly, these breakout groups are kind of fundamental to the ways of the Tentet, with their gigs flowing freely between full-on blats and quieter duo/trio sections. And secondly, there was no way that all eleven [sic] members of the Tentet were going to fit on the stage of the Tomato anyway.

Having said that, I did feel that the first night at the Blue Tomato could have got off to a more rip-roaring start. The first group on was the Brass Choir, consisting of Johannes Bauer and Jeb Bishop (both on trombone), Joe McPhee on a little trumpet (a pocket trumpet, apparently) and Per-Åke Holmlander on tuba. This was heavy going, with Bauer throwing his usual self-satisfied poses and a comparative lack of timbral variation adding to the monotony. The set dragged on for much too long, but things perked up soon after when Sonore (Brötzmann’s reeds trio with Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson) took to the stage. Of course, lack of timbral variation is something you could equally well accuse Sonore of; but in their case it hardly matters when the music is as deliriously joyful and bouncy as this. McPhee re-emerged on sax to round off the evening, accompanied by the all-guns-blazing cello of Fred Lonberg-Holm and Michael Zerang’s rippling, surging percussion work.

The second night kicked off with Sonore sans Brötzmann, a wild and lusty duo in which Gustafsson and Vandermark gave full vent to the sheer physicality of their playing. It was dizzying stuff, and there was to be little respite as the great Paal Nilssen-Love sat down behind the kit, on this occasion across the stage from Jeb Bishop. Having developed a dislike for the trombone I didn’t particularly expect to enjoy this set, but Bishop convinced me with his flowing and disciplined approach to the instrument, the antithesis of Bauer’s tiresome flights of self-indulgence. Nilssen-Love, needless to say, was formidable.

I opted to skip the trio of Bauer, Holmlander and Lonberg-Holm in favour of some much-needed fresh air outside, and was able to exchange a few words with Brötzmann, who was also outside, smoking his way through an enormous cigar. Returning indoors, the saxophonist lined up his quartet with McPhee, Zerang and double bass player Kent Kessler, a group that has played together on many occasions but which I had never had the pleasure of catching before. It was a storming finale, the four of them perfectly attuned to each other as only great improvisers can be.

The appearance by the entire Tentet the following night at Martinschlössl was an extraordinary experience, and without a doubt one of my concerts of the year. I had never been to this joint before, and had little idea of what to expect; what I certainly had not banked on was the hall being filled with long wooden tables and the stage being barely big enough to contain the group (indeed, I believe it was specially extended for the occasion). What was even more unbelievable was the capacity audience, many of whom I had never seen before at places like the Blue Tomato or Porgy & Bess. As on so many previous occasions, I marvelled at the way normal people in Vienna – not trendies or hipsters, nor weirdy-beardy jazzers – turn out in their hundreds to listen to this loud, wordless, ecstatic music. There was even a girl of about ten in the audience, who seemed to be having a great time even though she did spend most of the evening with her hands over her ears.

As for the Tentet themselves, the thing that struck me was how badass they are. For all their smiles and outwardly friendly demeanour, these guys are a gang, and once they get onstage they mean business and are not to be f*cked with. Their music is like a juggernaut, destroying everything in its path with its blistering, volcanic energy. They are, as my son is fond of saying, deadly serious, and seriously deadly.

Faust, Vienna Szene, 23 September 2010

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Incredibly, this was my first visit to the Szene for 2½ years – a fairly damning indictment of this venue’s generally shoddy programming since its takeover by Planet Music (for more on which, see here). It’s more than a little ironic, too, that this particular duck was broken by a visit from one of the two extant versions of Faust, this one being the line-up featuring two original members of the group, bass player and vocalist Jean-Hervé Péron and drummer Zappi Diermaier. Ironic, that is, because one of the reasons why the Szene’s current programming is so woeful is its over-reliance on ’70s relics, tribute bands and nostalgia-trip artists. Now, I realize this is a contentious point but watching Faust last week it occurred to me that they have become a simulacrum of themselves.

I was talking about the Faust schism before the concert with W., who knows much more about the tortuous history of the group than I do. When I put to him the crucial (to me, at least) question of which version of the group was the more authentic, he replied that they were both authentic. In my view, however, you can’t have more than one ‘real’ Faust (“I’m Spartacus!” “No, I’m Spartacus!”). Ultimately, if both of them are authentic, then neither of them are.

What we got last week, then, was a performance that ticked all the boxes of what a Faust performance should contain: a hypnotic motorik groove from Diermaier, chilling vocals by Péron and the requisite amount of diverting onstage business. An oil drum was roundly abused as a percussion instrument and brought into contact with an electric sander to make industrial quantities of sparks fly. This was all highly entertaining stuff, but it was unfortunately accompanied by too much of what the kids these days would describe as “meh”. There was rather a lot of aimless noodling and pointless axe heroics from the electric guitarist situated stage right. Péron and his female co-conspirator also let their vox and keyboards wander more than was strictly necessary. At one point they even gave a reading, for heaven’s sake, while at another the ivory-tickler came down from the stage onto the floor and proceeded to execute a low quality word painting on a sheet tacked to the wall.

Péron and Diermaier are figures of heroic stature, greatly to be admired for their dedication to keeping the mystery of Faust intact. The hulking Diermaier is an incongruous sight in his sandals, socks and orange shorts, but there’s nothing bizarre about the way he anchors the whole edifice with the miraculous forward motion of his drumming. For his part Péron is a malign and forceful presence, constantly breaking up the flow of the music with his arsenal of disruptive measures. And yet somehow the spark (excuse the pun) one expects from Faust, given their legendary reputation, was fatally absent.

A quick word on the opening act, the duo of Primordial Undermind mainman (and Jandek bassist) Eric Arn and Stefan Kushima. Their slot was mesmerisingly effective, all the more for being delivered on the floor of the hall rather than onstage. Arn drew huge waves of psychedelic riffage from his electric guitar, while the crouching Kushima flayed his devices mercilessly. The warped and tangled vortex of sound that resulted was a synapse-searing delight to behold.

Oliver Welter, Vienna Radiokulturhaus, 20 September 2010

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One of the best things about writing a column which previewed upcoming concerts in Vienna (for the now defunct Ether magazine) was that it encouraged me to investigate musicians who were previously unknown to me. In one or two cases, that research led me to groups of which I am now a confirmed fan and can’t imagine life without them. Okkervil River would be one of those, and another would certainly be Austrian independent outfit Naked Lunch. I’ve raved about their superb soundtrack to the film Universalove here and here, but my original Ether column about the group contained a seed or two which may have led to their becoming an important presence for me. Knowing the group’s turbulent history, which saw one founder member (Georg Trattnig) dying of alcoholism and the other (Oliver Welter) living on the streets for a while, would certainly have contributed to my sense of the anger and desolation that clouds 2004’s aptly titled Songs for the Exhausted, as well as their 2007 masterpiece This Atom Heart of Ours.

It was a real pleasure, then, to catch Oliver Welter in solo acoustic mode at one of Vienna’s smartest venues, the Radiokulturhaus. Limbering up for what will no doubt be a period of extensive Naked Lunch activity (with a new album and tour in the offing), Welter played a solid two hours’ worth of old and new songs, with a sprinkling of cover versions thrown in for good measure. He was in a relaxed and chatty mood, although his between-song patter was all in German and therefore passed me by entirely. The songs themselves, however, are sung in English. One might hazard a guess that this is being done for commercial reasons, were it not for the fact that Welter’s whole approach seems as unmediated by commerce as that of Peter Hammill (of whom, a reliable source informs me, Welter is something of a fan). Despite the group’s profile having increased as a result of Universalove’s acclaimed presence on the international film festival circuit, I get the feeling that their strong Austrian and German fanbase is likely to remain the bedrock of their following.

In any case, it seems to me that the lyrics being written and sung in a language that is not the singer-writer’s own lends Naked Lunch’s songs a sense of alienation coloured by optimism, even a certain naïveté. This hunger for redemption from estrangement is shored up in turn by Welter’s voice, which sounds like that of a battered but resilient angel. Stripped down to skeletal acoustic versions, the songs emerge as haunted, uncertain reveries: a wedding day is a funeral, a fleeting encounter with a girl who was “so sad, so beautifully sad” is anatomized in unsparing detail. A new song, “The Sun”, meanwhile, was delivered with immense rhetorical power, Welter’s sense of relief at having successfully navigated its treacherous waters evident in the way he triumphantly punched the air at the song’s end.

The audience were held rapt throughout, and refused to let Welter leave. Much to his credit he was generous with the encores, winding up with a song sung in Spanish, no less (from the soundtrack to The Wild Bunch, if I understood correctly). Despite the shift of language, its tender fragility was entirely of a piece with what had gone before – an emotionally unsparing performance from this self-effacing but vastly talented musician.

Konfrontationen Festival Day 4, Nickelsdorf, 18 July 2010

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On the fourth and final day of the festival, I arrived just in time to catch the tail end of Evan Parker and Sten Sandell‘s duo concert in the church around the corner from the main festival venue, the Jazzgalerie. There was, of course, standing room only – not, I would imagine, a situation in which the church finds itself most Sundays. The music sounded, well, heavenly, with Parker’s achingly beautiful sax lines arcing gracefully above the imposing swell of the organ.

Opting to skip the following solo performance by Joe McPhee (also in the church), I went instead for a walk along the back road behind the Jazzgalerie, where a number of sound installations had been placed in and around an old farmers’ shed. I was rather taken with Kathrin Stumreich’s Faden #2, which consisted of a bicycle with a long spool of thread and a contact microphone attached. As the bike was ridden, the thread played out – creating a visual record of the journey to go along with the noise produced by the microphone.  And no, I didn’t have a go on it. Even better was Klaus Filip’s Photophon, which required the visitor to don a pair of headphones and walk among an array of lights dangling at head height from the ceiling of the shed. As each light swung in the air it transmitted sounds to the headphones, sounds which varied according to the position of the visitor and the extent of the swinging.

All good fun, of course, but the festival really got down to business later in the day when Peter Brötzmann took the stage to play in his semi-regular quartet line-up with Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, Massimo Pupillo (of Zu) on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. I had only seen Brötzmann play with this unit once before, but that occasion last year was certainly the best Brötzmann show I’ve ever seen. If this appearance didn’t quite reach those heights, it was only because the Jazzgalerie’s courtyard in daylight couldn’t rival the brutalist architecture of the Fluc Wanne as an appropriate setting for the monstrous slabs of sound proposed by this quartet.

Since the demise of Last Exit, this group – which officially goes by the name Hairy Bones, although I can scarcely bring myself to use this ridiculous moniker – has surely been Brötzmann’s hardest and most far-out configuration. On Sunday night the saxophonist was consistently matched for sonic extremity by Kondo, who subjected his trumpet to all manner of wild treatments and distortions. The resulting tornado of sound was anchored down by the phenomenal power of the rhythm section. Pupillo’s bass was dark and thunderous, while Nilssen-Love astonished as much as ever with the furious inventiveness of his drumming. Sitting with his head at an angle as if listening intently through the storm to learn where the music would go next, the Norwegian extended his claim to be the world’s finest Improv drummer.

Things got taken down a notch or two, as they needed to, with the quintet featuring Evan Parker and Roscoe Mitchell on reeds, Joëlle Léandre on double bass, Tony Hymas on piano and Hugh Ragin on trumpet. This was a comparatively restrained, even polite conversation, with the liquid fluency of the saxes layered amongst Hymas’ elegant pianistics and Léandre’s darting arco and pizzicato work. Parker seemed to have overestimated the warmth of the summer’s evening and showed up in a T-shirt; with the chill necessitating a blanket draped around his shoulders, he seemed reluctant to make too many dramatic statements. Except for a sustained passage of circular breathing, Mitchell too was somewhat reserved. None of which is intended to detract in any way from the exquisite pace and movement of this music, which embraced silence as a sixth and vital element.

And so to the finale of this most enjoyable festival – a barnstorming performance by Austro-Deutsch-Australian aggregation Heaven And. Despite the presence of a bassist and not one but two drummers, Heaven And remains very much a vehicle for the incendiary playing of Viennese guitarist Martin Siewert, who switched between a regular electric guitar and some kind of tabletop deal with insouciant ease. If the group’s name holds out the promise of something vast and transcendent just around the corner, it’s a promise that was fulfilled by this hugely convincing performance, which meshed Crimsonesque vectors of sound with the fiery interplay of drummers Tony Buck and Steve Heather. It didn’t sound a whole lot like jazz, that’s for sure, but by this stage in the game it hardly mattered. Bravely and confidently lighting out for the territory where noise, rock and Improv meet, Heaven And brought Konfrontationen 2010 to an irresistible and staggering conclusion.

(Review of day 2 here.)

Konfrontationen Festival Day 2, Nickelsdorf, 16 July 2010

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Konfrontationen is a festival of free jazz and improvised music held every summer in Nickelsdorf, a small village in the Austrian province of Burgenland close to the border with Hungary. To hold any kind of Improv festival in such surroundings must be counted an achievement; to hold one that year after year attracts the world’s biggest names in free jazz bar none brings the endeavour closer to one of heroism. The festival’s organizer, Hans Falb, has weathered the storms of bankruptcy and seen his commitment to the festival vindicated not only by the quality of the artists who come to play there but by audiences numbering in the hundreds – a uniquely European, perhaps even uniquely Austrian phenomenon.

This year Falb curated the festival (which stretched over four days for the first time, another indication of its rude state of health) jointly with Swedish sax maestro Mats Gustafsson, fresh from his wedding in Nickelsdorf a few weeks earlier. Their joint pulling power ensured that the festival line-up read like a virtual who’s who of improvised music. I was only able to make two of the four evenings, but these alone provided a surfeit of riches, beginning on the Friday with the trio of Agusti Fernandez, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Paul Lovens. This group proved a bracingly effective curtain-raiser, with Fernandez’ glacial Schlippenbachian piano cascading around Håker Flaten’s flaying bass runs and Lovens’ ever forceful percussion. Flowing effortlessly from hypnotically quiet passages to full-on kit-driven assaults, the trio were never less than engrossing.

Much the same could be said of Swedish Azz, Gustafsson’s homage to Swedish jazz of the 1950s and 1960s. This unit seem to have hardened up their act somewhat since the last time I saw them in Vienna, with Gustafsson and Dieter Kovacic in particular ramping up the electronic and noise elements of the group’s sound. Those still labouring under the misapprehension that Improv is po-faced and humourless could have done worse than to lend an ear to the last piece, introduced by Gustafsson as “an old Christmas song” and which saw the vestiges of the song in question being laid to waste by the two men’s scouring blasts of noise. More entertainingly still, Per-Åke Holmlander’s calm four-note tuba motif proved itself equal to this tempest and was more or less the only thing left standing by the song’s end.

Without doubt the highlight of the evening, though, was a devastating set by an extended line-up of The Thing, with the standard trio of Gustafsson, Håker Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love augmented for the occasion by Ken Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Terrie Hessels (of The Ex) and Johannes Bauer. It was truly awe-inspiring to watch this septet take the stage at 2.00am and play as if their lives depended upon it to a large audience that stayed rapt on their every note.

Given the size and line-up of the ensemble, it came as no surprise that The Thing XL (as they were billed) approached the ecstatic fervour of the sadly absent Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet. The German, arguably the godfather of this whole scene, was to have his chance to shine two nights later; in the meantime, his gifted protêgés and collaborators made their own presence felt with their hugely exuberant big band sound. Live as on record (check out 2009’s Bag It! for the definitive Thing studio document), The Thing consistently astonish with the euphoria of their swing and their groove. You want to see gorgeous Swedish girls dancing the night away at a free jazz gig? You’ve got it, courtesy of The Thing and Konfrontationen 2010.

(Review of day 4 here.)

Primordial Undermind, Vienna Rhiz, 13 June 2010

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Very intense and powerful preview of the forthcoming Primordial Undermind album Last Worldly Bond on a hot and rainy night at the Rhiz. Singer and guitarist Eric Arn was careful to explain that the group were going to play the record straight through, and that’s exactly what they did – no extraneous material, and no encores. As a result there was barely time to pause for breath as the quintet slammed through their new material, leaning heavily on a delirious mix of Velvets-y riffing and MBV-esque wall-of-sound guitar attack.

One or two of the songs began with fidgety improvs during which the group would attack their instruments in a fairly abstract manner. Arn and cellist Meaghan Burke brought all manner of glitches and scrapes from the sticks and objects placed between their strings, around which Vanessa Arn’s electronics swirled ominously. Intriguing as these sections were, it came as a relief when the bass and drums kicked in and the murky throb of Arn’s guitar enveloped the group’s sound in a fog of uncompromising noise.

The first song on side 2 of the record was introduced – with a dose of irony, one suspects – as a “power ballad”, and there was indeed something soaring and beautiful about this, the only song of the night with Arn on vocals. The evening’s richest moments, however, came when Arn launched one of his brief, incandescent solos into the spaces limned by Burke’s delightfully unhinged cello and David Schweighart’s furious drumming. With the Undermind firing on all cylinders right now, it’d be a brave soul who would bet against Last Worldly Bond being one of the albums of 2010.

Short Cuts 3: Autechre, Russell Haswell, Jarboe, Modell Doo

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The third in an occasional series of handy bite-size reviews of shows I don’t have the will or, more pressingly these days, the time to write more about.

Autechre & Russell Haswell, Vienna Flex, 30 March 2010

Mesmerising night of electronic wildness, at a venue whose pristinely loud sound system I love almost as much as the eye-poppingly beautiful nature of many of its clientele. Russell Haswell – at least one supposes it was him, although it was impossible to tell given the baseball cap pulled down low over his face – came onstage just before midnight and made a huge and inspired racket for just ten minutes. Crushing drones collided with sick frequencies in a synapse-cleaning curtain-raiser to the main event.

Autechre were superb. Their precise, mechanistic sound could so easily have descended into a dry, sterile exercise; not a bit of it. This music was endlessly vital, bubbling and, oh yes, hot.

Jarboe, Vienna Chelsea, 12 April 2010

An all-too-brief setting of Jarboe’s powerful, otherworldly voice against a churning Metal soundscape. The Chelsea’s murky acoustics couldn’t dispel the hypnotic intensity of this, less a performance than an invocation.

Neonbeats, Vienna Replugged, 24 April 2010

Fun evening of Austrian new wave and post-punk revivalism to celebrate the release of a new, extensive compilation of this stuff on Klanggalerie. Of the four groups I saw, the only one that made a really lasting impression were Modell Doo, a synth/guitar and drums duo who played with a sharp, brittle passion.

Swedish Azz, Vienna Echoraum, 28 February 2010

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Fascinating and highly unusual evening of not-quite-free jazz from ace Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, three of his fellow countrymen and Viennese ringer dieb13 (Dieter Kovacic). The deal here is a contemporary take on Swedish jazz of the 50s and 60s, transplanting that music’s strong melodic lines and sense of lyricism into the context of improvisation and electronic soundscaping. It could have ended up as a right old mess, but in the event it was a thoroughly convincing performance, due in no small part to the exhilarating urgency of Gustafsson’s saxophone work.

In marked contrast to the long, sweeping improvs we normally see from Gustafsson, these pieces were short, tightly focused and – at least in part – notated. The saxophonist took the trouble to introduce each piece, carefully and humorously introducing the composer and his place in the history of Swedish jazz. It was clear that the group love this music and were there, more than anything else, to pay homage to it.

Judging by the intentness with which Gustafsson, tuba player Per-Åke Holmlander and vibraphone player Kjell Nordeson were studying their music stands, the notated elements were important to the overall structure of each piece. As a result, the pieces tended to begin steadily, with the warm tones of the vibraphone bringing colour and light into the room. It wasn’t ever long, though, before the group ceased to rely on their sheet music and ventured into the realm of pure improvisation, with Gustafsson’s sax playing as wild and torrential as it is in The Thing and Sonore. Taking the occasional break from this vein-bursting activity, he manipulated various bits of table-top electronics to produce clouds of unforgiving noise. Kovacic’s own interventions on turntable and electronics unfolded slowly and unnervingly, while Nordeson’s vibraphone weaved miraculous patterns around this stormy weather.

I still don’t get the point of that missing J, though.

Ulver, Vienna Arena, 23 February 2010

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Not a group I know very much about, this, but I was sufficiently intrigued by Ulver‘s reputation to check them out at the Arena last week, and was highly impressed by the power and intensity of their performance. Seemingly with their roots in black metal, they appear to have abandoned that particular creative cul-de-sac in favour of an uncanny and highly original synthesis of avant rock, prog, noise and electronics. As is often the way with music I’ve never heard before, I found myself groping for reference points, and was initially befuddled by clashing impressions of Pink Floyd, King Crimson and late-period Coil. Things started to make more sense when I realized how close elements of Ulver’s sound were to the more liturgical moments of Dead Can Dance, with the same atmosphere of metaphysical grace and eerie, otherworldly detachment that I loved in that fondly remembered duo.

More striking still were the similarities with Towering Inferno’s Kaddish, a mostly forgotten, hugely powerful multimedia project that I had the privilege of seeing twice in London in the early 90s. Described as “a dream history of Europe in the wake of the Holocaust”, Towering Inferno used back-projected film montages alongside pulverizing rock music, Jewish chant and serene eastern European folksong to shattering effect. I was more than once reminded of Kaddish while watching Ulver, whose use of film (Nazi rallies, death camps, pornography, bloodthirsty wild animals and so on) as a visual accompaniment to the music was frequently devastating.

None of these lazy comparisons are intended to detract from the uniqueness of Ulver as a proposition. Urgently driving these short, potent songs, the dense, riffing guitar was offset by plaintive, haunting vocals and sonorous keyboard lines. I found this music to be affecting in a strange, almost dehumanized way, insidious in its ability to channel atmospheres that many people would prefer to remain dormant.