Artist: Ellfor
Title: Uhgluk
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Self Released
When I was young (yes they had invented the wheel and steam power, no there was no ‘internet’ just letters costing less than 10p to post…) I remember even now when a school mate played me Vangelis’ ‘Heaven & Hell’ and I heard ‘Aries’. I was hugely absorbed in fantasy and sword and sorcery books, creating my own world (Cho’n, which persists to this day) and there suddenly was what I could only feel was the soundtrack to my world of anti-heroes and rogues, high adventure and low skullduggery. Even now, apart from the opening music to Oblivion, I doubt there’s much that immediately can take me back to that place.
The opening passage ‘Thrargluk’ opens in slow and sombre fashion but then the rich melodic sound opens up, the delicate horn and sting sounds, the rise and its like the years have found me yet another portal to my inner world. We get the shift to those thinner horn sounds, Dead Can Dance circa Aeon and the low beautiful percussion striding forward with waves of darkness billowing in their wake. Four minutes in, barely a step, and Ellfor have pushed away the walls and allowed me to traverse their world.
The sound and production here is exemplary; deep, rich and lush whilst still retaining and edge if you will. That certain something that makes it grip not slide away on a too polished surface. It has presence.
The atmosphere has shifts. Never less than enveloping it is at turns simply beauty before you but the darkness always seems to spread from the shadows just beyond your senses. Magnificence and majesty often shown to be grey and dust covered, stained by rituals, by acts that you have no wish to know off. Beliefs that you would prefer were left undiscovered.
But then there is the truly imperial and epic. The beginning of ‘Vragluk’ towers above you and I almost see rank upon rank of priests and soldiers making slow approach to their holy place. Are they shades of the past or here in the bright and the magnificent present will be up to your imagination. Do you see grey shadows or sun glinting from gold? Celebration, worship, commemoration or memorial? Spoken words, half heard, perhaps have the answers but, alas, their words are fleeting and elude my mind. But this is a magnificent world, though one suffused with shadows and danger as the screams in the title track show, leaving tendrils in our minds.
With twenty seven years of unbroken musical creation, you expect the confidence and the experience to show. However with Elffor in this form what you should never expect, but always hope, is that they can create such a place and bring its history to you. Uhgluk is simply real.
Beautiful
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 