won the Oslo Awards prize for album of the year 2007. The album was also voted best album of 2007 at the website Sonic Frontiers. In December 2014, Shadows of the Sun was released as a sheet music album by Raven Music Editions. All the songs, except for the Black Sabbath cover "Solitude", were included in the songbook. Background In an interview with Music Information Centre Norway, Ulver member Tore Ylwizaker commented on the album. He said it would be downplayed and inspired by chamber music in both style and crew. Ylwizaker also took a year off to study classical composers and composition techniques, and said he took a particular liking to Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird. Rygg described Shadows of the Sun as "our most personal record to date." Commenting in Unrestrained magazine in 2007, Rygg said, "I'm a diagnosed depressive, and should have been trying to focus on living, but instead I've immersed myself in some isolated, dark and paranoid place. It has no doubt helped make this album what it is, but it's a prison of the mind." Adding, “Sometimes all I see is darkness; it's overpowering. So this record is about venting out a lot of that stuff, the gloom, but it also represents some kind of quiet acceptance. Like this is how the situation is, and you're just gonna have to live with it. Use it for what it's worth." On the album’s evolution, Rygg commented, "I was pretty set on keeping it more bare this time. When we did Blood Inside, we'd been holding back with all that minimal stuff for so long — the soundtracks (Lyckantropen Themes and Svidd neger), the Silence EPs and all that. So Blood Inside was an outburst of sorts. I guess this record is a withdrawal again, so that's an inherent dynamic...flux and reflux." Commenting on the use of the Oslo Session String Quartet, Rygg said, "We worked a lot with simulating stringed instruments, so it's always good for us to get some people in and play the real thing. I suppose strings and piano are our instruments of preference; those are the sounds we like to work with. That timbre, you know? In terms of writing music — not that we really write music per se, but say we did write music, we'd write it for strings and piano." Adding, "A lot of times when we get musicians