The music of the Norwegian one-man black metal band Ildjarn is harsh. Every aspect of the project's output has always been unwelcoming and inaccessible. Some may call it unlistenable, while others will swear the music represents the pinnacle of black metal art. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all, but no matter which way you slice it, there's nothing pretty about Ildjarn. That said, starting with Ildjarn’s best-known albums from 1995 and 1996, Season of Mist has taken it upon themselves to rerelease the project's back catalog (including the short-lived Sort Voktor side project). These will be available on CD and limited edition vinyl with new artwork, which will likely delight some longtime fans, disgust the purists, and thoroughly bewilder newcomers.
To consider oneself an Ildjarn fan requires a certain suspension of belief, or at least, of any expectation that it will sound like anything but what it is. The polarizing effect of Vidar Vaaer's project, which started in 1991 and continued until the 2005 Ildjarn Is Dead compilation, stems from an unwillingness to compromise on anything, from recording quality (zero) to vocal style (singular). Unbearable or irresistible are the only two options, and the former camp is far more populous than the latter. Whether one is reacquainting oneself with these three albums or encountering them for the first time, it’s important to bear in mind that Ildjarn’s heyday was in the early 90s. The recordings come off as brutally minimalist and lo-fi when considered within a modern context, but are honestly fairly par for the course when compared with what many of his peers were doing when Vaaer first began.
Vaaer was an early member of Norway’s Second Wave black metal scene, appearing on a 1991 demo from the pre-Emperor project Thou Shalt Suffer and acting as a live bassist for Emperor themselves in 1993 before splitting off to continue expanding upon his own vision with Ildjarn. Trivia nerds will remember how his former bandmates repaid the favor, with both Ihsahn and Samoth contributing guest vocals on several of Ildjarn’s releases. Though Vaaer definitely takes things to an exceptionally primitive level, the sonic quality does not deviate much from that found on similar recordings from the same time period. Listen to any Beherit demo, or even Mayhem’s Deathcrush.
Unlike his peers that eventually evolved and became more acquainted with a soundboard, though, Vaaer remained loyal to his long-suffering 4-track tape recorder. Ildjarn embraces the singlemindedness of raw punk, bashing away at three chords or less and keeping song lengths taut for maximum impact. He aims for brute force. Most of his songs flirt with the three-minute mark, and come and go in quick, ugly spasms. The result reeks of misanthropic hate.
It’s not hard to see how the likes of Willing Feet, Bone Awl, and even Raspberry Bulbs could owe a hefty debt of gratitude to albums like 1995’s Ildjarn. Nearly every song is populated by simplistic distorted power chords and strong bass lines that bleed together into one steady monotonous drone, broken up by occasional ambient passages a la Burzum's Filosofem that make more sense when his latter-day synthesizer fixation is taken into account. The uniformly coarse vocals are almost always buried low in the mix. As for the percussion, even the most casual of music listeners would have a hard time believing that human hands are holding down those beats. Vaaer works his rickety kit into a lather of constant, unapologetically simple 4/4 beats that serve as both metronome and, often, inadvertent focal point and an absurd number of drum count-ins serve to further disorient. The majority of its 27 songs follow the same rough format, but Vaaer does throw his listener the odd bone on dense, hypnotic tracks like the slow, punishing “Krigere” or uncharacteristically well-developed melody on “Blikkets Storhet”. Here, he proves that he can write compelling, nuanced material. He just doesn’t particularly care to.
Strength and Anger was released barely a year later, swiftly followed by Landscapes, the Svartfråd EP, and then Forest Poetry. Strength and Anger is short by Ildjarn’s standards, with only 18 tracks crammed into its 70-odd minutes. The song largely remains the same, but there are a few hints of progress. Vaaer continues to browbeat his listeners with barbaric lo-fi black metal, but tracks like “VI” and “XV” show melodic development, and the 14-minute dark ambient piece “Black Anger (Hate Meditation 1)” is a total 180. Its harsh noise proclivities carry over onto “Interchange”, and devolve once more into a long, unsettling ambient outro “Midnight Strength, Black Anger (Hate Meditation 2)”.
Forest Poetry was released only a few months after Strength and Anger, and it shows. Comparatively speaking, and in regards to his straight-up black metal period, this 22-song beast is probably Ildjarn’s most accessible album, though typing the word “accessible” in any sort of Ildjarn discussion is farce. Thanks to a minute increase in sound quality and the strangely catchy “Visions of the Earth (2nd Returning)”, the dominant bassline in “Deepening in Grey”, and fuzzy dirge of closing track “No Place Nowhere” it’s more consistent and slightly more listenable than its predecessor. Even for a humorless Scandinavian, the whimsical title is so tongue-in-cheek it hurts.
Ultimately, on these records, Ildjarn achieved what Norwegian black metal ostensibly set out to accomplish in the first place, by creating the most resolutely unlistenable, anti-human, supremely hateful and altogether foul creation possible. Whether you want to listen to it or not is another matter entirely.
