Style: Ambient, noise
Primary Emotions/Themes: The professor is in, the class is to remain silent
Thoughts: This was my reintroduction to Ulver. I had listened to the first three albums quite a bit in my youth and then wasn't able to find William Blake anywhere so I dropped off with the band. I had heard that they changed styles significantly, but a million years could not have prepared me for this.
Starting with Silencing the Signing was perhaps not the wisest move, but I didn't know any better. The music here is minimalistic at best. What little music is here revolves around repeating melodies, repeating static, repeating drums. Everything repeats, over and over in different cadences. It's an EP that demands your patience and doesn't always reward you for it.
Silence Teaches you How To Sing is a bit more varied in it's approach. The static, repetition and repetition (I know I said this twice) are still there but they come in shorter bursts. The whole twenty minute song is more of a journey than anything on Silencing the Signing.
Of the two EP's I prefer Silencing the Singing, but listening to these two and a half decades later gives me a different perspective than when I first heard them. These are fascinating studies in sound design and are some of the most experimental that Ulver ever got. I oftentimes wish the band would come back to this period... at least in terms of experimental creativity. But alas, we are getting pop songs these days.
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