Iljdarn - Forest Poetry 2LP

• Released in conspiracy with The Devil's Elixirs
• 180 gram green vinyl
• Limited to 100
• Quality gatefold jacket with flood black inside pocket
• 24" poster with an alternate art from the same artist
• Original cover art and additional art as the NH edition

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 – “Forest Poetry”

In 1996, Ildjarn embarked on a year-long flurry of activity after which he ceased recording altogether. The first of three full-length releases from that year, “Forest Poetry” is arguably the most orthodox of the black metal albums in Ildjarn’s divisively unorthodox solo catalog. Unlike his self-titled debut, on which all the song titles (and presumably the lyrics) were in Norwegian, the songs on “Forest Poetry” are all distinctly and evocatively titled in English. (The lyrics also seem to be written in English, though it’s impossible to discern many of them, and Ildjarn has since stated that he destroyed all his written manuscripts.) Like its predecessor, “Forest Poetry” was captured on a 4-track cassette recorder, but the production is not as thin as on the debut. The song-writing is also more complex, though not exceedingly so. As with all his releases, Ildjarn’s power lies in the austerity of his approach. Through self-imposed limitations—working alone using primitive 4-track recording technology and basic instrumentation—Ildjarn forced himself to creatively arrange, dissect, and rearrange the constituent elements of his sound to accentuate the distinct character of each track. Most of the songs on “Forest Poetry” alternate between two different riffs (though occasionally are there more), often augmented with tempo shifts, mid-song drum cutaways, and his signature abrupt tape cuts to end the tracks. “Forest Poetry” closes with the only instrumental track on the album, the plodding, ominous outro “No Place Nowhere,” a single slow riff that fades out after about 90 second