Sunn O))) & Ulver – Terrestrials

As a collaboration, Terrestrials makes just as much sense as Sunn O)))’s previous ‘joint album, 2006′s Altar with Japanese feedback merchants Boris. Ulver have their roots in troll-bothering Norwegian Black Metal, Sunn O))) have also dabbled in none-more-evil, greasepaint-slathered gloom, culminating in 2005′s nocturnal Black 1. Albeit personified by earthshaking heaviness and subterranean frequencies, Sunn O))) have steadfastly refused to be tied down to a certain approach, as proven by the adventurism of their most recent album, 2008′s much-acclaimed Monoliths and Dimensions. Similarly, Ulver have kept leaping between various amalgamations of metal, improvisation and drone.

Based on an overnight jam the two groups indulged in after Sunn O)))’s show at Oslo’s Oya festival in August 2008, Terrestrials sounds surprisingly cohesive considering the project’s improvised roots and slow development. Sunn O))) mainstays Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley visited Ulver’s Oslo H.Q. at irregular and infrequent intervals between 2008 and 2012 to add overdubs (the foreboding tones of trumpet being the most prominent addition to the original bass, guitar, electric piano and drums line-up) and to tweak the produce from the original all-night session but there’s little sense of excessive tinkering here. Terrestrials sounds admirably live: it’s easy to appreciate how punishing the decibel levels must have been during the original 2008 session at Ulver’s Crystal Canyon studio.

Of the three lengthy tracks, “Western Horn” sounds nearest to what you’d expect from a Sunn O))) project: several tons worth of basement-level rumble on a single-chord workout that appears to be drilling its way towards to the core of the earth. The first movement of “Let There Be Light”, on the other hand, sounds nearer to modal jazz, with electric piano and trumpet seeking foothold in a waist-deep quicksand of bass and guitar drones, eventually – just when you’re ready to sign the whole thing off as aimless noodling - blooming into a colossal racket of near-symphonic proportions (reminiscent of the skronk segment of Lou Reed’s “The Bells”): the light that Sunn O))) and Ulver refer to here is almost certainly not one associated with a bright sunny day.

All of which pales next to the monumental closer. A mournful and majestic piece that bears a distant resemblance to the minor-key ambient drift of Stars of the Lid, albeit amplified to ribcage-rattling levels of decibel-bingeing, “Eternal Return” sounds like a graceful ballad slowed down to the point where the tune begins to melt, with haunting fragments of melody drifting to the surface, only to sink again into the heavy-ambient mass of sound. Intensity drops down a notch once Ulver vocalist Kristoffer Rygg’s verses transport the track nearer to conventions, but it’s a stunning cut nonetheless: a beautiful yet also deeply unsettling slice of cosmically inclined, totally unclassifiable exploration.