It seems almost instinctual to want to see your favorite band live. With the act onstage and you in the house, you can become part of their music, feeling the rumble of the bass as it's played, becoming a tiny part of the very big chorus by singing along with it, standing close-by, like an extra member of the ensemble itself. While it's one thing to experience a good show, the sensation of becoming part of one-- especially when it's music you really care about-- is an entirely overwhelming phenomenon. That feeling never satisfies with just one concert; it's a mainline addiction, demanding repetition.
But Blut Aus Nord, the long-running and ever-challenging French black metal project of Vindsval, has never played live. In 2011, Norwegian magazine Metal Hammer asked the leader if, despite his previous live reluctance, Blut Aus Nord might ever consider the transition to the stage. "Our music," he replied tersely, "is a solitary experience."
Truth be told, it's also an incredibly complicated experience, using black metal's torrents of drums and sheets of tremolo guitars as a starting point for all kinds of musical excursions and infiltrations-- industrial, gothic, noisy, liturgical, murky rock'n'roll all among them. To reproduce this music live, you'd not only need a choir and a militia of drummers, keyboardists, and guitarists but also the chance to see the same gig several times in succession. That's because Blut Aus Nord's records key on heavy studio layering, where one vocal comes trailed by several ghosts, where the lead guitar line works only as one of many, carefully building an immersive atmosphere of sound. Every listen to a Blut Aus Nord album, no matter how familiar, seems to reveal a new pattern or seam that you've missed only because it's so well integrated. If black metal was once the primordial punk rock of some angry and infamous kids, it is, for Blut Aus Nord, the foundation for a very ornate institution.
That's the abiding lesson of 777, the three-album, two-hour trilogy that the band's released through French powerhouse Debemur Morti Productions during the last 18 months. The series opens with 777: Sect(s) and "Epitome I", an eight-minute track that blasts from the gates like pure, primal black metal. Almost instantly, however, the sound starts to bend, with strangely warped meters leading to interstitial instrumentals that suggest the machinations of hell. "Epitome V" pushes blast beat expectations until they break, shards of rhythms and riffs firing off in different directions. Indeed, across the trilogy's 18 tracks, all titled "Epitome" and numbered according to their sequencing, Blut Aus Nord mutates the metal expectations with ever more force. The staggering 777: The Desanctification, released late last year, includes passages of halcyon instrumental drift and riffs that wind and surge over layered drums and drum machines until they match the peak of post-rock. "Epitome VII", eight of the strangest minutes in the entire set, superimposes one set of ghoulish vocals above a math-rock instrumental, creating a palimpsest of strangely clashing colors. For a moment near the end, all of the parts briefly sync, instantly redeeming the song's sense of vertigo. Like the best of Blut Aus Nord, or like everything in this series, "Epitome VII" demands and delivers upon repeat listens, proving itself over time to be less a forced oddity than a deliberate twist on how and when we expect music to deliver its payload.
That's a fundamental attribute of "Epitome XVIII", the final track of the trilogy's final third, the new 777: Cosmosophy. The second longest piece of the series, "Epitome XVIII" might appear at first like a lugubrious take on kosmische musik, fitting for a French band with a German name. But above the steady electronic patter, the guitars depend upon that trademark black metal brittleness, serrated tones falling from riffs that suggest an action-adventure soundtrack. Beneath it all, a din that could be a soft-singing choir or repetitive keyboard intones in waves. That sound helps turn an instrumental into an environment, the kind of musical expanse into which you'd like to settle down and explore. More layers steadily identify themselves, too, from the seismic bass to the small guitar army lurking just in the margins.
Of 777's 18 tracks, the five on Cosmosophy best show the scope of Blut Aus Nord’s influences and intentions. The more prototypical heavy metal elements serve as textural support for songs that take separate aims, making this record less punishing and more accessible than its predecessors. Opener "Epitome XIV", for instance, arches through a melody and winds around a riff grand enough for rock radio; think Alcest with the gusto of Godflesh. And with its girder of major-key keyboards and relatively clean vocals, "Epitome XVII" recalls the grandeur of similarly audacious French band M83. It slinks into a murky instrumental midsection, though, and reemerges with one of the most gnarled spans of the trilogy. Vindsval's voice has again gone cold, his pop softness swapped for a stentorian bark.
Listen again to that track's first half: You'll spot the threat of the coda in the way the guitars roar just a bit too much, or how the drums trip over themselves as though searching for a chance to go heavy. The same approach holds for "Epitome XV", which begins with several crisscrossed voices delivering spoken-word incantations, all submerged beneath a ruptured beat that suggest the recent slow stutters of Salem, Purity Ring, and the like. Beneath that beat, though, another glitchy signal rises and falls, slows and speed; when the song leaps into a more traditional full-band arrangement after three minutes, it actually matches the pattern of those electronics. Across all of 777, but especially on Cosmosophy, these moves are so carefully considered and nuanced, it's almost impossible to conceive of a band attempting such transitions on a stage, let alone the subtlety that allows it to cohere. Still, perhaps because of their intricacy, they hit me much in the same way as a concert might-- all-consuming and ever-rewarding, demanding that I return again and again for another experience.
Earlier this year, the book Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness attempted to extend the general boundaries of the form's perception past its usual Scandinavian creation myths. It succeeds in part, with articles about other international loci, essays on the relevance of the stuff in art and fashion, and through interviews with and manifests by genre practitioners with views that don't reflect those stereotypically associated with the sound. Strangely, the book didn't mention Blut Aus Nord, not even in a lengthy "Selected Discography" that includes Liturgy, Krallice, and Wold. Let that be little worry: If there's a definitive 2012 statement about the boundlessness of what's customarily considered black metal, it's the now-finished 777 trilogy, capped at last by the brilliantly inclusive Cosmosophy. Rarely do so many sounds come together so seamlessly and convincingly, and rarely do three long albums released in short order emerge with so few missed. Here, they do, completing a statement that deserves to resonate for a while.
