• Released in conspiracy with The Devil's Elixirs
• 180 gram triple LP
• Limited to 100 on orange vinyl
• Separate jacket for each LP
• Outer embroidered (black on black) canvas bag

Having played bass in Thou Shalt Suffer, Vidar Våer was already a seminal figure in the burgeoning Norwegian black metal movement of the early 1990s. After they disbanded, and Ihsahn and Samoth began Emperor, Vidar continued recording in the same shared basement studio, adopting the alias “Ildjarn.” He self-released a series of demos between 1992 and 1994, after which he put out four full-length solo albums, as well as two EPs and two ambient albums with frequent collaborator, Nidhogg, and a single album with a band called Sort Vokter, featuring Nidhogg and two other members. (Ildjarn’s body of solo and collaborative work has been dissected and rearranged for various compilations through the years along with previously unreleased archive recordings resulting in a complicated discography.)

While many of his Norwegian peers sought cleaner production and incorporated greater melody, theatricality, and structural sophistication in their music, Ildjarn pursued his uniquely misanthropic vision with a sound that was raw, primitive, and unrelenting, animated by the purity of his hatred for humanityand little else. Ildjarn represents the distillation of black metal’s essence, which, at its core, has never been about a particular sound or style. Black metal is a fundamentally anti-social movement, and very few artists have expressed so viscerally their contempt for society as Ildjarn. Indeed, Ildjarn’s intense disdain for bands that altered their style according to trends, desperately seeking adulation from fans, was one of his primary reasons for abandoning the black metal scene.

Discordant, hypnotic, and repetitive, Ildjarn forces the listener to inhabit his malevolent ideology, to feel the pulsing surge of disgust with civilization. This boundless antipathy for humanity is one dimension of Ildjarn; another is reverence for the cold, dispassionate majesty of nature. This latter theme finds its most compelling expression in Ildjarn’s ambient works, the epic double CD, “Landscapes,” and the two-part “Hardangervidda” series—another collaboration with Niddhogg—that marked the culmination of his recorded output.

After riding the crest of black metal’s second wave, Ildjarnabruptly terminated his mission and ceased recording music in 1997, though he continued to answer occasional interviews and oversee the release of some of his archival recordings. He has remained silent since the release, in 2005, of the “Ildjarn is Dead” compilation, accompanying which was his infamous “final statement”—a 15,000-word, stream of consciousness manifesto steeped in nihilistic scorn. But the music he left behind speaks for itself. Ildjarn’s legacy has endured, and his hateful body of work has continued to echo in the years since his disappearance from the scene.

Ildjarn – “Landscapes”

Following on the heels of his self-titled full-length and “Forest Poetry,” Ildjarn used his Norse League Productions label to release “Landscapes,” a double CD set containing over two hours of instrumental ambient keyboard music. While his black metal releases were polarizing, this album has proven to be divisive even among those who value his other work. Although synthesizers and keyboards have long been associated with black metal, “Landscapes” reflects an even greater stylistic departure, as the album bears virtually no obvious aesthetic relationship to the genre. It does, however, bear something of the imprimatur of Ildjarn. Whereas most of Ildjarn’s peers were more inclined to blend synth sounds with black metal, he deliberately separated them—as if one might contaminate the other—using guitar-based black metal to give voice to his antipathy for man, and synths to express his reverence for nature’s majesty. Like his black metal work, “Landscapes” is militantly simplistic and hauntingly hypnotic. It is also decidedly uncommercial, too dark and repetitious to appeal to most fans of ambient/new age music, and too light and ethereal for the majority of black metal fans. It does, however, rest nicely within the context of Ildjarn’s entire catalog, as it showcases the dichotomy of these sonic manifestations of his world view.