Search - Beatundercontrol :: Cosmic Repackage

Since bursting into the world in the late 70s as a punk-driven bass evangelist, Sweden's Ulf "Rockis" Ivarrson has since been on a relentless voyage of musical discovery while paying his dues to pay the rent. Through early 80s bands like The Quiet, playing the blues with the Eivon Boogie Band, backing up Swedish guitar hero Clas Yngstrom in his group Sky High or a host of sessions, Ulf nurtured a growing desire to uncork an inner vision which sounded nothing like any of these lucratively-popular positions. After a stint with world music-techno marauders Hedningama, where he pioneered a new instrument called the bass mandora, Ulf took the plunge in the late '90s and started Beatundercontrol. Conventional song structures went out the window as he explored his fixations with the mighty dub, noise and experimental music which knew no boundaries, emerging with widely acclaimed first album The Introduction in 2003. 'Instead of writing banal three-minute songs with mindless expressions and meaning, I rather try to challenge myself through textures, noises and basslines,' he explains. This philosophy is explored with often stunning results on Ulf's second Beatundercontrol album, Cosmic Repackage, a colossal aural menagerie of space-jazz brass themes and solo flights, subterranean pulses and dark-hued banks of strings which dart between European avant textures to late 60s hypno-drone alchemists the Third Ear Band. It's a heady brew, ranging from the nocturnal back alley jazz of "Neighbourterror Blues" to the intense freeform scattershots and coruscating atmospherics of "Departure". If dub's shadow looms over the album, notably on tracks like the bottomless fizz-bombs of Interruption, it steps out and flashes its glorious sonic stiffie on the alien skank of "Subversion Dub", albeit lashed with dissonance and howling winds.From punk rock to the outer limits, Ulf Ivarrson has cause to celebrate quite a remarkable musical journey and does so with one of the year's most intoxicatingly uncompromising aural statements.