Did anyone really expect anything other than a lengthy musical communion of the spirit when two such elegiac acts as Sunn 0))) and Ulver decided to combine their talents. Far removed from their black metal roots, Ulver have spent the best part of a decade investigating the fringes of post rock and progressive music, whilst Sunn 0)))’s white hot experimentation is a thing of legendary beauty and violence, the pinnacle of which must surely be ‘Monolith’s and dimensions’, the impossibly dense album from 2009. COmbine the two acts together and you get ‘terrestrials’, a three track journey into blackened fields where dense noise and the avant-garde  combine in a manner rarely heard since ‘Bitches brew’ was first unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.
Indeed, with its lone trumpet sparking out from betwixt the mangled sound of reverb-drenched guitars, the first track of ‘terrestrials’, ‘let there be light’ does a grand job of sounding like Sonic Youth’s instrumental EP ‘the silver sessions’ being covered by Miles Davis and, as the track progresses, there is no doubt that Ulver and Sunn 0))) are ideally suited to each other. The sound is contemplative, vast in scope and glorious in conception. Both bands deal in music that fires the senses and expands the imagination and ‘terrestrials’ is no exception. An album that acts as a soundtrack to a movie not yet made, what you’ll experience when alone with this music will be personal to you, the two bands working to facilitate your dreams rather than supplant their own imagery into your mind. It is typical of their approach that the music undulates beautifully, rising to a crescendo one moment only to be distilled to a nerve-ending destroying whisper the next. Deep, dark and sensuous, it is every bit as good as might have been hoped and while the music is playing it is quite impossible to do anything other than sit back and let the rich textures wash over you. ‘Western Horn’, the album’s shortest track at a mere ten minutes in length, is also its most terrifying piece. Opening with the sound of a horn reverberating, it seems, through your very soul, the jangling menace of discordant guitars slowly builds up to sense-fraying proportions, the tension inherent in the sound slowly pervading the atmosphere of the room until the oxygen has been bled away and you’re left stifled and alone in a place that reeks of fear. Fortunately the final piece, ‘eternal return’ offers up a beauty which, whilst uneasy, transcends the gloomy, nightmarish reality pondered on ‘Western horn’ and leaves you deep in tranquil waters, alive with doubt but calm enough for the time being. More than anything else, this mind-melting collaboration strikes at the heart of what it means to be genuinely progressive and there is an argument that the music here draws a direct line back to Pink Floyd’s instrumental work with Ron Geesin, the still-perplexing ‘atom heart mother’, and the ambient beauty of Fripp and Eno and, indeed, with Kristoffer Rygg’s fleeting vocals (hidden at the centre of the track amidst see-sawing strings) sounding more like Roger Waters than ever, the Pink Floyd comparison becomes even more sharply focused. With delicate strings balanced against white hot guitar drone and feedback, neither band allows the beauty of the subtle melody to be subsumed by the earth-shaking levels of volume that always lurk in the corner of the mind as a possibility (although never fully materialise) with the result that the piece maintains a dramatic tension until its uneasy conclusion leaving you to flip the record and play the whole thing again.
A cleverly sequenced journey, ‘Terrestrials’ takes the listener from the jazzy opening of ‘let there be light’ through the sweat-soaked nightmare of ‘western horn’ and into the haunting, progressive pastures of ‘eternal return’, always beckoning the listener to take that extra step into the maelstrom and always rewarding faith with moments of sublime beauty. Collaborations all so often turn out to be exercises of mutual backslapping and ego massaging, but here the result is one of genuine artistic achievement, each band bringing out the very best in the other with the result that ‘terrestrials’ offers both sublime beauty and nerve-shredding terror across its all-too-short, thirty-minute run time. Subtle, haunting, quite unutterably beautiful, this is a stunning record that will delight fans of both bands in equal measure whilst restoring faith that there are still artists in the world prepared to put their hearts and souls in to the music they create. A mesmerising piece of work, this is one of those rare collaborative efforts that is surely an essential addition to the collection of anyone who considers music to be an art form.
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