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''Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' is the fourth studio album by Norwegian experimental collective Ulver. Produced with Kristoffer Rygg, together with Knut Magne Valle and Tore Ylwizaker, it was issued on December 17, 1998 via Jester Records. It is a musical setting of William Blake's poem ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''. The album blended electronics, industrial music elements, progressive metal and avant-garde rock, adding ambient passages, following Blake's plates as track indexes. Stine Grytøyr, Ihsahn, Samoth and Fenriz all feature as guest vocalists. The album received widespread acclaim from critics within both the rock/metal and alternative music press - being awarded ''Album of the Month'' in several high-profile magazines such as ''Terrorizer'', ''Metal Hammer'', and ''Rock Hard'' and ranked very highly in their end of year's best polls. However, the album’s transitional nature perhaps alienated many fans of the band’s first three albums - causing a backlash from the black metal scene. Controversial director of films ''Kids'' and ''Gummo'', Harmony Korine, recently commented, alluding to ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'': "There's a real lineage from a composer like Wagner to a band like Ulver." ==Background== In late 1997, Kristoffer Rygg invited keyboardist, sound conceptualist, and composer Tore Ylwizaker into the collective, and together they created a strategy for ''The Blake Album''.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Ulver Biography )〕 Musically, the album transcended black metal’s aesthetics to create a genre-defying work and employed everything from ambient and classical sounds to industrial, prog metal, and art rock.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Ulver Biography )〕 The title alone being a loud signal that Ulver had changed somewhat. "For me," says Garm, "''the Blake record'' kind of signifies the second chapter or the new beginning – newer if you will – and not only from an ideological or lyrical perspective, but also musically because by that time I had acquired knowledge on technology and how to work with software and computers so we kind of had the knowledge to do new things with music. In a way it's quite natural that we wanted to explore other things almost from the beginning, which I think the second album, ''Kveldssanger'', is a good example of. So we were never, like, strictly into black metal. It's actually pretty natural. I think a lot of people tend to think of it as very weird or very strange that the focus shifted so radically, but I don't."〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Ulver )〕 The album and the band in general got a great deal of back-lash from the black metal community for abruptly changing musical styles, though the band expressly claimed to not be part of the "so-called black metal scene" in the liner notes of the booklet. While genre purists were taken aback by the violation of their boundaries, a new audience now discovered the band.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Ulver )〕 The shift in musical direction caused a certain amount of discord between Kristoffer Rygg and German label Century Media, resulting in the band being dropped from the roster and Rygg forming his own imprint, Jester Records.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=Jester Records )〕 Rygg, commenting in ''Unrestrained'' magazine in 2007, said, "We spent a couple of years designing (album ), so that was by far the most serious and elaborate musical process we undertook at the time. I had started getting into computers and how you could use different softwares to manipulate sounds, and that led to the expansion of the palette, and how we made music. That was an interest which was there from the beginning. I think the whole perception that we just made a 180-degree shift towards something else is not entirely correct. I think we just wanted to leave the black metal thing because we felt it was limiting. Our perspectives on religion and society had started to become more difficult as well. That's why Blake was hugely interesting to us, because it was just so much more of a meticulous vision than the dissentient perspective we were part of at the time. You're always more angry when you're young and you become more moderate as you grow older so that's why Blake was fascinating to us. That was the start of chapter two, if you will, of our history." Continuing, "I was hugely into Coil and I found their music to be immensely fascinating. I checked out all their references-Chaos magick, Alfred Jarry, Austin Spare and Blake and so forth. I was in London in '96 on a trip together with Ihsahn of Emperor and we went to this place, Atlantis Bookshop, a quite legendary bookstore for occult literature and stuff like that. I picked up a beautiful copy of ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' and it just blew me away. I totally identified with his (William Blake) way of seeing things, even though it is profoundly personal stuff." The avant-garde electronic and progressive metal approach and vocal style of the album parallel those used by Garm for the Arcturus album ''La Masquerade Infernale'', released the year prior. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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