Ildjarn
Ildjarn - Ildjarn (1995)Ildjarn - Det Frysende Nordariket (1995)
Ildjarn - Forest Poetry (1996)
Ildjarn - Strength & Anger (1996)
Ildjarn - Svartfråd (1996)
Ildjarn - Landscapes (1996)
Ildjarn-Nidhogg - Hardangervidda Part 1 (2002)
Ildjarn - Son of the Northstar (2002)
Ildjarn-Nidhogg - Hardangervidda Part 2 (2002)
Ildjarn - 1992-1995 (2002)
Ildjarn-Nidhogg - Ildjarn-Nidhogg "CD 2003" (2003)
Ildjarn - Nocturnal Visions (2004)
Ildjarn - Forest Poetry (re-release) (2004)
Review: Like a consciousness asserting itself with the joy of awareness of its own creation, the first release from Ildjarn splashes forth energy in a self-organizing form through riffs which are a codex of motions, textures and silences hiding a vast array of internal symbolism. This meme of subconscious instruction captures the essential motivations and fears of human existence and orchestrates a flight between them toward an expression of essential contentment and growth in being.
So natural is this mood that the music while perceptually jarring, distorted and confrontational remains intuitive to listeners who can exceed their conditioned boundaries of aesthetic. Song structures shift like scenery around a running escapee and the undulation of strumming between instruments forces a surprised grasp as a blast of cold water in the face will make an individual inhale sharply. Micro-riffs made of a few chords and the configuration of their texture and placement dominate this album, merging in groups and emanating essential themes through a selection of simple but insightful views.
Vocals are of the vigilant warrior school of black metal, harsh and barked at a rough cadence to shove forward rhythmic focus. As Burzum once did, Ildjarn invokes dissonance and texture in both vocals and guitars, sometimes bending a monotone into uneasy harmonies or letting a howl unleashed scatter into chaos. Guitars press corrupted chord voicings to move melodies into phrasing like an earthquake under sand. Although drumming originates in a machine and is based on the alternation of two instruments within the drumkit, its construct of consistent rhythm like a heartbeat is a constant reminder of an enduring living being within the experience.
Where conventional black metal aimed for narrative of clearly defined dynamic structure, Ildjarn encodes narrative within consistent arrangement to create a sense of the sublimated, embedded and secretive which matches the language of concept and shaping to each piece. The result instantiated a divergent school of metal in which an ecosystem of details conspire to shape a larger vision.
Review: As if capturing pure motion from the majestic presence of wind, Ildjarn crest the wave of trance black metal with something so essential and unprocessed through social filters that it exceeds the limits of emotional directness for most individuals. Its selfless motion through natural patterns enforces a mathematics of reason in which the partial visions of life shown in the digital instructions of riff and battering mechanical percussion construe a force arising from its own absence to idealize existential transition alone.
Thematically coherent rows of riff variations move the listener between sloping landscapes of rising or falling sound, changing in structure without measurably altering the motion of the piece to a different dynamic, synergizing slowly into motions which like life itself burst forth in connections across space and time to begin the process of existence. Screaming like a dying bird guitar is the motion of seasons toward closure like a narrowing of awareness, insurgent and returning in the generation of a new whirling projectile of self-shaping sound.
Energy transfers gently or abruptly, as many songs end, interrupted; storms of seeded destruction and creation anew wash through the album as conceptual unification to the disparate riffs and their insistent, human, bloodline pumping rhythm. Liquid in harmony tones emerge from the one, divide and fuse or shatter, returning to the singular through a journey of abstract subconscious narrative in motions represented through rhythm and sequence of change in shape of riff.
Where human perception represents the necessarily artificial, Ildjarn explores the unitive in a natural sense where destruction and creation are the same hand and individual judgment is suspended for an organic will arising from the ecosystem as a whole. In this case the ecosystem is music that resembles the motion through a forest of a human without agenda but in the crush of mortal time. Where the physical meets the metaphysical, this raw and unrepentant sound expresses the lost art of passion like no other musical nihilism.
Review: In the style of older Bathory black metal is reformed as a droning, techno-basic attack of riffs changing rhythm and structure over a fixed, energetic, repetitive beat. Without the trance-inducing effects of Burzum the insidious nature of black metal's nihilism is less inductive than confrontational in an album of fast blasting material in which the major beat never varies. Relentless violence becomes beauty in the evidence of melody emerging behind the chaotic and droning battery, which reveals the core of an evil understanding: the structure within the aesthetic.
Making beauty from brutality requires a focus on abstract structures, here represented by the guitar riff as the only variable structural element for most of these songs. The predictable drumming establishes a basic variance to which counterpoint is introduced, anchoring a sequence of changing phrases into the same inflections of a riff. In the haze of four-track garage-and-radio distorted pulsing savage noise the ordinary listener is lost to any consistency but the beat, feeling the riff more than perceiving it change as a melodic slant rearranges all of the atmospheric harmony of the song. With precision and poetic metrics a windhowling voice in a backdrop of reverb, a la middle Darkthrone, scorches ice with clarity of the obscure in esoteric and harmonic addresses to the rhythm of each measure.
For most listeners this music is almost unlistenable: unrelenting and mostly unchanging basic flickbeats through a drum machine trot past a fiercely, cheaply, grossly distorted guitar power chording riffs built of the same basic ideas and reacharound counterpoint tendencies. Barring that aesthetic restrainer, a careful listener will find the insecurity of a will behind seemingly random, simplistic music; with interpretation, one can see why this music walks heir to the throne of Hellhammer, Bathory, and Burzum: it breaks down in order to show melody and structure in the cracks of an aging order, and retaliates with a virulent nihilism and ideological anti-aesthetic textural synthesis. Where it is brilliant it is, and where else it is nonetheless reflective.
Review: In a ferocious assault on music itself, Ildjarn move a trademark style of raw and hypnotic information symbolism in riff form into the realm of both extremity and noise, in which all cycles return to their origins in either peace or abrupt destruction. Melted by unfinished friction layers of strings and mechanical percussion interweave with a hoarse and horrified scream of morbidity which cadences the unravelling of the cryptogram to each song.
Small bursts of variation on streams of intense and primal rhythm with one- and two-chord riffing to match an undulating bass/guitar throb that paralyzes small animals caught in the road, probe into the consciousness of the listener with the expansion of each song. It is both pop and aggressively removed from social appearance, inverting the easy listening of mainstream music to infectious but malevolent ear viruses. On this album the guitar becomes a bashing grind which gallops to a pace of escape before regressing, uneasily, into dark mood inducing rhythmic noise baths or slowly evolving ultimate minimalism in a chord, note or rumble being escalated to central metaphor.
The resonant use of harmony to code out melody through serial transmission of information or silence creates an abstract symbologism itself, in which an emphasis like the repeated motions of a dance and the transfer of energy within the kineticism of the dancer through reference and development swings forth variations that foreshadow or absorb elements of theme. As tones saturate a new mood emerges in which change is vital and from that Ildjarn wield strength like warriors, inching alteration toward a language for each song in which a brief message of strength, will and growth like that of the transcendental consciousness of trees performing its own exegesis stabilizes before evaporation.
The crashing dive of black metal into conformity was thwarted by the development of this band among a few comrades and its inertia provided resistance and an adherence to the sensibility of the primitive and streamlined reductionist aesthetic of underground adversarial music. Its spirit immanent in the work generates an afterimage sensation of both energy toward change for will and a nihilistic, observant determination slipped under the curtain of sleep by the imperious demands of consciousness.
Review: In advancing the point of perception beyond the sublime arising from stunned sensory overload, Ildjarn-Nidhogg traded its wall of blasting sound approach for a traditional electronic/ambient instrumentation, in the process elongating its compositions with detail enhancing each theme in refractions of a central viewpoint, allowing a depth to the whole arising from the familiarity of concepts instead of their novelty. Where most music keeps user attention through a flat hierarchy of unique combinations of notes, the music of Ildjarn-Nidhogg finds familiar patterns which represent those emotions to which each piece refers, and within layers builds layers, creating logical but natural motifs which like thoughts at the horizon of sleep are accepted into consciousness as normal regardless of context. Thus the brain assembles the composition after hearing it, and it becomes alive in memory, a three-dimensional object of a path and its alternates and their variations, all discursive of one idea reflecting one take on a viewpoint endemic to Ildjarn-Nidhogg.
This disc, one of two, tracks the progress of a day in the part of Norwegian wilderness known as Hardangervidda, reaching from sunrise to night with each song adapted to the styles necessary to portray such a time. Early songs begin in ingenuous simplicity and rise in symmetrical recursion, while later pieces drift into silence between languid thematic divergences, spreading obscurity with not insubstantial but inspecific statements of the direction of melody relative to any form of centralizing structure. Like a postmodern movie, perhaps even a Vedic version of a David Lynch film, these songs do not attack linear time but stretch a narrative sequence across time as space, so that the listener wanders between scenes in an activity which have no specific order, but are always variants on the same motif, with motives collected forming a trellis of tangentially relevant metaphors to the dominant figure which defines each song. Hearing this album is like crossing the terrain of Hardanger as the sun slowly climbs the sky, but in each hour being able to visit any minute by going to the place where one was at that time, where a recombination of the same activity is occurring and despite its different shape from its parent, leads back into the same gesticulation of direction that was immanent in its parent. There are some obvious "ambient music typecast riffs," which exist because of their simplicity as devices for the types of mood presented by ambient music as introduction, but they fade quickly and are almost entirely absent in the final stages of this work.
What will alienate most ambient/atmospheric listeners is the lack of keyboard voice variation; the keyboard is not used as an instrument of many voices, but as an instrument in the way a Hammond organ might be: with a distinctive, predictable tone (albeit here: several "standard" voices). Similarly, when drums occur, there is no attempt to fool the audience with the novelty of slight variations in percussive pattern, as most ambient music attempts, nor any distractions caused by production effects. If it has a Achillean disadvantage, it is the hastiness of some parts of this album, as if they were either never rethought or written quickly to fit still-unconceived parts of the songs, but this also contributes a freshness in unresolved tension between the deliberate and cleanly-delineated and the messier, more chaotic segments from which occasional gems of subconscious wisdom emerge. This reviewer would suggest that Ildjarn-Nidhogg entirely discard the concepts of pop music style percussion, or even percussion except accentually, and the concept of "normal length" songs; these musicianss are easily better (and fare more honest and artistic in intent: revealing the transcendent in life and the values that esteem it) than Hollywood's soundtrack masters, and their tendency toward metaphoric structure and mimetic aesthetics means that any music they create in this century will be compared to a soundtrack anyway. It would be a new dimension on their work to see a full-length work, especially if it continues in the excellent vein of concept and diligent, idealistic and forthright creation with which it is rendered incarnate.
Review: The repackaging of older material has always been a difficult business, since it usually leaves a void of purpose in which the listener is left to surmise commercial motive; however, the dauntless team of Ildjarn-Nidhogg have released older material in a "framing" which unites the past of extremely rudimentary music with the future of sweeping ambient soundscapes. This is done through new songs centrally located to divide up the remaining content on this album, but these can only be discussed in the context of the signature music for which Ildjarn (and Ildjarn-Nidhogg) is known.
Popular music, including underground black metal, is composed for the most part of riffs, distinguishing it from classical music, in which melodies emerge through a series of motifs, or variations on the structure of the melody which hint at its development. Foregoing any of the more elaborate dressings given to popular music, most notoriously in progressive rock and jazz, Ildjarn distinguished itself by creating music barely distinguishable from pure noise. Three note riffs build ambience like early Tangerine Dream albums, using the simplest allure of tonal and rhythmic differential as hook, and then slowly build an atmosphere in which microscopic variations can over time redirect the entire sense and sensation of the piece toward a new direction in its evolution. Constant percussion underlies each arrangement, with vocals off the rhythmic grid screamed like an afterthought commentary, inflecting in timbre and syllabification what is unclarified by audibly indistinguishable content. The result is like morse code tone poetry, with an infectious rhythm pulling the listener into a dark world which like a snake in fire mutates into a retinue of permutations directed toward an ultimate mood, or theme, which both reinforces the literal reality of basic music making (a connection to the now: the unchanging, ultimate, all-pervasive immanence of existence) and tunes it to the fleeting fragment of emotion that motivates each piece.
The earliest works from Ildjarn, and Ildjarn-Nidhogg, the artist plus one valued collaborator, capture these micro-atmospheres with the breathless sense of unexpected insight that suggests these were concepts penned in sudden moments lost in the beauty of a forest, or in the quiet insensible seconds before sleep overcomes. They are as a result beyond any kind of manipulation except for their desire to maintain an addictive and energetic rhythm which becomes the framework for their self-alteration. From these unselfconscious works the artists moved to a style of ambient electronic music that was at first hasty, with the double-disc "Landscapes" resembling their guitar-based music slowed down and rendered through keyboards, but then grew to a studied and emotive maintenance of atmosphere with the Hardangervidda series of two volumes. On the self-titled "Ildjarn-Nidhogg" release, three tracks are added as a means of transit between blocks of older recordings. The magnificient "Existensens Jeger" opens the CD, and catches as if in a morning ray of sunlight all that was black metal when the genre was healthy: an aggressive independence, a feral naturalism of emotion, a transcendental idealism of vision, and most of all, a playful sense of creation and destruction that exceeds the bounds of mortal fear that hold most ensnared.
This track, and the mid album "Svart Dag (the Nothingness)", conduct the static ambient nature of early Ildjarn with the narrative, fully motif-driven compositional language of Ildjarn-Nidhogg atmospheric material, using a device long forgotten to most black metal musicians: the second guitar track. Much like the distorted chiaroscuro haze of Burzum's Filosofem, these tracks have one guitar track iterating the lead riff over a machinelike racing constant, unsycopated drumbeat, with additional guitars layered in the background using both noise and counterpoint melodies of a few notes' difference to accent and reinforce the dominant phrase, alternatingly. As on Darkthrone's "Transilvanian Hunger," four notes are repeated in two forms comprising complementary riffs, but here, in the background a feedback squeal melts into a guitar track playing single notes to the chords underlaying it, dropping into slightly dissonant, subtly beautiful harmonies which like the first realizations of the vastness of life in the waning years of childhood, are both full of energetic wonder and epically isolated.
Unlike any other black metal band for its tenacity in reducing music to its absolute basics without falling into monodimensional repetition, Ildjarn weaves perception and feeling together in a mixture of aggression, melancholy, heroism and humor, creating micro-pieces that show wisps of different views to a central truth, without attempting to record that truth itself; this creates the final dimension of ambience, one on an intellectual level within the receptive listener, and culminates a building pyramid of moods which brings the listener into a world both alienated and hopeful in the strength of its own action. For a compilation of works ranging over such a span of time, this compilation unites the past with the remaining breath that "black metal" has in the current time, demonstrating both that there is a path outside the droning directionlessness and that spirit is eternally resurgent where one cares to look, even in the smallest of symphonies.
Tracklist
1. I Anmarsj Gjennon Grangrunn
2. Ved Tjernets Bredd
3. Vintermark
4. Skogens Hatefulle Skapning
Length: 10:40
Tracklist
1. Landscapes 1
2. Landscapes 2
3. Landscapes 3
4. Landscapes 4
Length: 134:13
Tracklist
1. Kronet
2. Fjerde Dag
3. Minnesjord
4. Mot Kveld
5. Hafsval
Length: 14:39
Tracklist
1. Overture (part 1)
2. Overture (part 2)
3. Highlands (part 1)
4. Highlands (part 2)
5. Spring
6. The Troll Dome
7. Nature's Church (part 2)
Length: 21:06
Tracklist
1. Intro
2. Dark December
3. Kronet
4. Strength and Anger 1
5. Himmelen Svartner
6. Der det Skjulte Lever
7. Whispering Breeze
8. Inanimate
9. Mørket Slynger seg
10. Skogrommet
11. Blackened Might
12. Strength and Anger 2
13. Dead Years
14. Taakeheim
15. Chill Of The Night (returning)
16. Strength and Anger 4
17. Skogssvinet
18. Visions of The Earth - Returning (Part 2)
19. The Blade Flares in Red Light
20. Utsyn 3
21. Svarte Fjell
22. Away With The Dawn
23. Utsyn 6
24. Clashing of Swords
25. Et Glimt
26. Cold and Waste
27. Tildekket og kald
28. Krigere
Length: 72:10
Tracklist
Nocturnal Visions I-III :
1. Nocturnal Massacre
2. Nocturnal Gathering
3. Death Dynamics
4. Strength and Anger V (Winter Recital Version)
5. Nattens Skyggesider
6. Strength and Anger VII (Hammer Torture Version)
Ending :
7. Solitary / Nocturnal Visions Rev. / Closing Recital
Length: 21:56
Tracklist
1. Whispering Breeze
2. Blackened Might
3. Clashing of Swords
4. No Gleaming Light
5. Blazing Eye
6. Sinking Deep
7. Chill of the Night (Returning)
8. The Blade Flares in Red Light
9. Deepening in Grey
10. Midnight Interval
11. Descending
12. Away with the Dawn
13. Before my Eyes Forever
14. Reflecting Mountains
15. Brother of the Forest
16. Dead Years
17. Dark December
18. Untitled 1
19. Cold And Waste
20. Visions of the Earth (2nd Returning)
21. Risen Seeds of Time
22. Untitled II
23. Untitled III
24. Winter Embrace
25. Untitled IV
26. No Place Nowhere
27. Entering/Descending
28. Deepening in Grey
29. Away With The Dawn
30. Brother Of The Forest
31. Der Moerkner (Darkening)
32. Atter En Gang (Once Again)
33. Skogssvinet (Beast Of The Woods)
34. Taakeheim (Home Of Mist)/ Leaving
Length: 78:02