Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the fourth studio album by Norwegian experimental electronica band Ulver.
Produced with Kristoffer Rygg, together with Knut Magne Valle and Tore Ylwizaker, it was issued on 17 December 1998 via Jester Records.
The album blends electronics, industrial music elements, progressive metal, avant-garde rock and ambient passages, following Blake's plates as track indexes.
[1] In late 1997, Kristoffer Rygg invited keyboardist, sound conceptualist, and composer Tore Ylwizaker into the collective, and together they devised a plan for The Blake Album.
[5] Rygg, commenting in Unrestrained magazine in 2007, said, "We spent a couple of years designing [this album], so that was by far the most serious and elaborate musical process we undertook at the time.
Writing for AllMusic, Jason Hundy commented, "Every single album they put out is almost a complete 180 from the last, which, although strange, is a very admirable quality to this band, and Marriage is no different.
The whole double album is very genre-schizophrenic, as there are also more moody, almost ambient-like acoustic tracks, and all the musical focus is put on each of Blake's inspirational shifts of emotions, so it basically changes all the time.”[8] Webzine Metal Reviews concluded "Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell may be messy and perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good, but yet it prevails because it's so damn brave.
Ulver's artistic vision extends beyond simply the area where they began.”[1] Given this diversity, the response from the metal media came highly unexpected: 10/10 points in Rock Hard (D); 7/7 points and Album of the Month in Hammer Magazine (D); Album of the Month in Terrorizer (UK); 15/15 in Deftone (D); 15/15 in Legacy (D); 10/10 in Psycho (IT); and 12/12 in Thrash'em All (POL).