As a genre, remix albums can be a queer bunch, but nothing I’ve listened to quite prepared me for the latest release from Norway’s chameleonic Ulver. By all accounts, Ulver used to be a good if unspectacular Norwegian black metal band. (Be gentle, readers, he’s new to metal and knows not what he says - "El Jefe" Roberto)

But I dug deeper. After tireless hours of research (i.e. I fell asleep in front of my computer and made it all up) I managed to ascertain that, back in the day, a typical Ulver week would consist of a merry mix of mead-drinking, church-burning, growling and the odd spot of impaling. However, after the boys managed to burn down both Arvo Part’s local church and Brian Eno’s mead hall in the same day, they became the victims of a sinister curse that radically altered their musical output. Out went the growling, and in came the musical eclecticism, creating countless nightmares for hapless clerks at record emporiums the world over.

Ulver’s pall-mall genre-hopping similarly infects 1st Decade in the Machines. A number of the remixes here remind me of the Aphex Twin’s "Lemonheads Remix" story. Let me explain: while enjoying his brief tenure as the remixer du jour back in the 90s, the ‘Twin was disturbed one day with a knock at the door. It was a motorcycle courier, there to pick up the master tapes of the remix of the Lemonheads track that he’d agreed to do… and subsequently totally forgotten about. Thinking quickly, the ‘Twin grabbed a random DAT from the shelf and gave it to the courier, caring not one iota about its content. The record was duly released, and upon hearing the remix some were heard to remark that it was terribly avant-garde of the Twin to turn the original slice of power-pop into a speed-gabba track, featuring not one frickin’ trace of the original. Others merely snickered. Evan Dando, the Lemonhead’s lead singer, was unavailable for comment.

So - has anyone pulled "the DAT trick" here? A less forgiving reviewer would perhaps say "yes." The majority of the remixers here come from the fringes of electronic music, with the rest camped uneasily between that label and the true avant-garde. I can say with absolute impunity that each track is absolutely different to everything else on the disc, and, from what I’ve heard, absolutely distinct from the Ulver track that it ostensibly uses as a source. If you came here for loud guitars and impaling, you are definitely in the wrong place. But don’t expect it to be all fractured beats and synths, either.

Stars of the Lid turn in a characteristically stellar track in their take on "I Love You, but I Prefer Trondheim Pts.1-4," which is easily as good as anything on their last album. Matt Elliott strips Lyckantropen down and makes a quietly blipping piece of melancholy out of the original’s doomed romanticism. On the other side of lunatic’s no-man’s land, V/VM, Jazzkammer and Merzbow drop some extreme noise terror into their remixes; to my ears, only Merzbow pass the "listenable" threshold. Elsewhere on the disc, everything from glitch to dark ambient to breakbeat is present and correct.

I can honestly say that, apart from El Jefe, I imagine that there are few people who could honestly say that they liked all of these tracks - the stylistic bases covered are just too different. On the other hand, everyone, from ambient buffs to noise gurus, is likely to be pretty happy with "their" tracks. So I’ll give it an 8/10, and hope that Ulver aren’t coming to visit the UK anytime soon. (8/10)

El Jefe adds: There is only one track taken from the first three, "ok" (GAAAAAAHHHHH!), black metal Ulver records (in this case, the middle parts of Bergtatt, mainly the section of the sounds of someone running in the snow/ a mic held up way close to someone eating granola, a piano, and that acoustic section with the stone hitting stone percussion).