Band:	Ulver
Album:	Perdition City
Style:	Electronic Avantgarde
Release date:	March 26, 2000
A review by:	Sephiroth

01. Lost In Moments
02. Porn Piece Or The Scars Of Cold Kisses
    1 - Piece One
    2 - Piece Two
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

Please, we don't need to talk about the Black Metal past of this band. Take this album and think about a new band, completely unknown. But with the same talent [genius? For me, pure genius] for electro/ambient sounds as Ulver [the old ones] used to have for Black Metal. Genius for music i would say. Music moves feelings, and this album moves as much as Bergtatt or Kveldssanger did.
End of the similarities, different feelings, same intensity.

On the booklet, a sentence: 'Music to an interior film'. The city takes form in you. But, you don't know where you are, you don't see precise streets or buildings. You rather feel the city around you.
The feeling you can have walking for a big city at night: neon lights, wet streets, jet-set elegant men, beggars in the corners, whores, couples going for cinema, cars driving you anywhere [and nowhere], subways, long highways and dark alleys.

You feel it all coming from a focusing point in the head of the Ulver guys, they filter the essence of "a" city and condense it for you on a CD. An heavy urban spleen, oppressive and somehow sick.
We want to mention the production? The wonderful choice of sounds, the layered, complex yet immediate impact of the "traffic" of sounds? But don't think about a noisy carnival of beats: this City is populated and quiet, dead and secretly alive, it never sleeps, but seems like sleeping. The radio is on, but noone is listening.

The 53 minutes of this album reach the best achievement music can reach: they give emotions. The music is able to paint -with a palette of a wide range of different sounds [electronic and analogic]- a scenario around you. Sometimes [just a few times] Garm's eerie vocals remind you of human beings living there, with delicate taste, never obtrusive but strong in their imaginative power.
Like on the booklet, no lyrics but pictures, moments of the city, instants of the everlasting flowing stream of its life.

Much more could be said, but let's music speak this time. Listen to this album, it has a lot to say. With passion, coldness, melancholy, delicacy and poetry.
Track 5: 'The Future Sound Of Music'. Let's hope so.

On the booklet another sentence 'This music is for the stations before and after sleep. Headphones and darkness recommended'. That's indeed the ideal condition for you to grasp the mood of the City and drive your soul through its nocturnal melancholy and lonelyness, in places where you can find peace or -eventually- Perdition.