Blurt is in the process of reposting reviews from the archives to clean up some nasty formatting problems, so it looks like my Ulfur review is up again (or maybe it never went up before)...anyway, it's a pretty good, mildly glitch, abstract-ish album by one of Jonsi's sidemen, so references to Jonsi and also Sigur Ros are not entirely out of order.
White Mountain
Ulfur
Western Vinyl
BY JENNIFER KELLY
These are gorgeous, atmospheric soundscapes, recorded in the interstices of Úlfur Hansson’s stint as Jonsi’s touring bassist. A few burble and pop with something like Jonsi’s electro exuberance, but most move slowly, weightlessly and without much of a grounding beat. White Mountain begins in the sound of birdcall (that’s miasmic opener “Evoke Ewok”) and proceeds as a sort of slow motion nature walk, soundtracked in turn by haunting synth overtones, stray guitar resonances and a chamber group’s piping woodwinds. Hansson made use of what he could find while travelling, building a fragile beat out of a cousin’s rock-skipping in Iceland and hooking up with Mountain Man’s Alexandra Sausser-Monning for the ghostly vocals in “So Very Strange.” The birds caught mid-squawk in “Evoke Ewok” were taped in Chicago. All very catch as catch can, this sound gathering, yet it coheres in a remarkably tranquil, remarkably lovely whole.
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