Ildjarn

Ildjarn's “Ildjarn”, then. If you are familiar with the man behind the band, then you already know what is about to happen here. Power chords. 4/4 drum loops. Comical levels of distortion which hang from every intonation like so much damp seaweed on a shipwreck's corpse. Check. Now, throw them all into a body bag, shake well, pour out onto a CD, and serve.

Ildjarn's black metal output is abrasive, relentless and unforgiving. It is also utterly divisive like no other music could ever hope of becoming. Within an instant, the listener knows whether this assault to their ear canals is something valuable – an intangible quality which defines a whole ethos within its three-chord jumbles - or an abomination that will require medical correction in later years. The solo work of Mr. Vidar Vaaer is often called an “acquired taste”, though that is an over-simplification of the fact. There is no acquisition needed here: what is playing for the first 20 seconds of the album is almost exactly what is playing for the last 20 seconds of the album too. And just about every other 20 second increment throughout, to boot. So, twenty seconds in, you will have a pretty good idea of whether you like Ildjarn or not.

It is almost tempting to break “The Reviewers' Golden Rule” here and actually go for a track-by-track breakdown of this album, if only to witness the catastrophic farce that such a review would inevitably become. You see, Vaaer is an album man, most definitely. You can see it on his conceptualised later synth work where motifs return and evolve through the tracks, and you can see it here within his black metal records too. He blurs the micro in with the macro so that these tiny, shattered fragments of compositions begin to seem more like single elongated riff-chunks of a bigger, holistic composition which makes up the album. So rather than attempting a track-by-track evaluation, how about a relatively novel “instrument-by-instrument” instead? There are really only three areas to explore here: guitars, vocals and drums, (and “guitars” includes the bass as well, because it is impossible to differentiate between the two on most of the recordings).

Ildjarn barks rather than screams. His vocal patterns are steeped in the fine juices of cheap guitar pedal distortion and poor, direct-line mic'ing technique, thus making the lyrics no doubt as incomprehensible to a full-blooded Norseman as they are to the rest of us. Is the human voice really an appropriate inclusion into such alien sounds anyway though? Probably not. Despite the electronic crackle of the Filosofem-esque effects, the vocals belie the human touch involved in the recording process here, as they are the only musical facet to escape the attention-grabbing gravitational pull of the incessant percussion track.

The drums... Oh! The drums....

Even if you know absolutely sod all about music or musical production, you would have to be a dunce of some great standing to believe that this tippy-tappy racket is an actual drum kit being beaten here to a high-pitched, tinny pulp. Perhaps if Norwegians fashioned their drum heads out of pieces of flint, or mahogany, this noise could be described as approaching something close to "natural sounding". But they don't. Norwegians love to kill animals and to use their skins for rhythm sections in extreme metal bands.

The things do not stop. Ever. Ildjarn's drum programming is the black metal equivalent of sharing public transport with an unruly child who spends the entire journey whining “are we nearly there yet?” whilst ungraciously hoofing the back of your seat with his snot-nosed, Velcro-shod feet.

Enjoyable breaks come in the form of the few contemplative lead-in tracks which pockmark the album's track list. Songs which sadly I can't name, because my copy of this album is on cassette and I have never yet kept up to speed with its cloned, fast-flowing contents as they fly from one identikit mini-song to the next and then – seemingly - back to the first one again. But to help you out: these songs are those few tracks with the half-speed percussion or – Bog be praised - no percussion at all. These brief respites from the paralysis of the ratcheting treble clicks allows the listener the space to look into the melodic simplicities of the composition, and to hear as young Vidar naively struggles to pick out an open-ended progressive melody on his six-string, while the bass line plods gloomily through root notes in the background somewhere. A basic grasp of the fundamentals of harmony - and zero preparation - are the key ingredients of the Ildjarn oeuvre, and it is heartening to see them laid unashamedly bare here, with nary a returning chorus nor distinguishable riff for adornment.

The remainder of the album is left to hop from drum beat to drum beat; but pitched instruments are fighting a losing battle for attention against the percussion throughout. This creates a very odd and perhaps entirely unique effect whereby the listener engages with the songs as though they can hear only a single instrument – a weird sort of distorted, pitched drum instrument that, every now and then, emanates a disembodied voice through a gravel-filled larynx. Because, even when the guitars or vocals are sounding off between the drum strikes, you barely hear them. All sound becomes regimented into the rank and file of percussive quarter notes. There are similar effects produced by hard-compressed dance mixes and club muzaks perhaps, (where the gigantic kick drum literally squashes the other instruments into micro-seconds of silence), but that is not the same as what has been reproduced here by Ildjarn. Everything is at once distinguishable, yet framed so severely by the drums that its mechanised rhythms are all that remain.

At this point in the assessment there follows a paragraph of arbitrary personal opinion, which is divided into three parts, and proceeds thusly: One: you have not heard another band that sounds like Ildjarn. Any band that says they sound like Ildjarn is in fact just a rubbish band. Therefore, you should at least try listening to Ildjarn once. Two: when approaching Ildjarn's music, it is perhaps most rewarding to hold in mind the breadth of the entire discography. Knowledge of the later synthesizer albums contextualises the earlier black metal recordings to a significant degree, whilst the very contrast of styles is in itself both amusing and insightful. Three: Of the black metal recordings, this is potentially the greatest. Many would say Forest Poetry with its hyper-monotony, or one of the Nidhogg collaborations, but the recordings here capture the very purity of essence that is Ildjarn's reason for being. It is music that is practically unconscious; the synaesthetic result of wounds inflicted on the world by Man's own oppressive ego. Sounds bizarre? It is that, and more.