Foster Neville & Tim Didymus Ulla
Vinyl Catalogue Number: SUBEX00156
Download Catalogue Number: SUBEX00157
General Release Date: 13/06/2025
Ulla is a collaboration between two musicians, generative pioneer Timothy Didymus ("Kosmische Glass", Beatabet, 2017) and Foster Neville ("The Edge of Destruction", Subexotic, 2023). Their debut album as a duo brings together their contrasting but complementary working methods and compositional styles. It also references Alan Garner's "The Owl Service" and the Welsh legend of the Mabinogion. The owl pattern traced from a set of dinner plates, a remote Welsh landscape, the boundaries between past and present blurring, teenage obsession and transformation, as well as the mystical elements which permeate Garner's story, serve as the inspiration for these eleven electronic ambient tracks.
Neither the album title nor the individual track names quote from the novel, it was the intention of Didymus and Neville to produce something which would stand on its own, seeking to contribute rather than capitalize. Instead, the one-word titles mix common and archaic English (darkfall) with Welsh (crafangau) and reveal much about the developing narrative of the tracks. In spite of drawing on "The Owl Service" and having plenty to offer fans of the novel and the 1969 TV series, this beautifully crafted album isn't designed to fit or be reliant upon the visuals of the TV series, nor to be an imagined soundtrack. The work is fully self-contained – offering something to those who haven’t read the novel and at the same time hopefully allowing new readers to discover it who wish to explore the landscape of the album further.
Sharing an interest in the more tuneful and focused side of ambient electronic music, Didymus and Neville have created something that speaks of and interacts with the novel and the legend without simply replicating either, even delving deeper into the novel’s origins to explore it fully. Hence, in old Norse, an Owl was known as "ugla", and in old German, it was "uwila". Both of these words may have been created as sounds that described the unique call of an owl. The album title is therefore taken from the likely imitative origin of the word 'owl' in early European languages, being derived from the word for 'howl'.
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Further reading:
The Owl Service (Collins 1967), Alan Garner
The Mabinogion
‘I will not slay thee. I will do to thee that which is worse; that is,’ said he, ‘I will let thee go in the form of a bird. And because of the dishonour thou hast done to Lleu Llaw Gyffes thou art never to dare show thy face in the light of day, and that through fear of all birds; and that there will be enmity between thee and all birds and that it be their nature to mob and molest thee wherever they may find thee; and that thou shalt not lose thy name, but that thou be ever called Blodeuwedd. Blodeuwedd is ‘owl’ in language of this present day. And for that reason birds are hostile to the owl. And the owl is still called Blodeuwedd. (1)
1: Blodeuwedd: presumably ‘flower face’, no bad name for the owl.
The Mabinogion, Everyman, 1991. Translated by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones.
