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 – “Strength and Anger”
Released in 1996 on Ildjarn’s own Norse League Productions label, “Strength and Anger” was his final black metal release before he quit recording and eventually dropped out of the scene altogether. It was Ildjarn’s third solo album that year, following closely behind “Forest Poetry” and “Landscapes,” and it is inarguably the most experimental of his three full-length black metal albums. It explodes in a fit of wrath and rage entitled “Strength and Anger,” followed by 14 additional eponymous installments of the “Strength and Anger” song cycle, of which nine are instrumental. In some ways, there is added complexity to the array of sounds Ildjarn draws from. His chord progressions and riffs exhibit greater complexity than some of his prior recordings, and there’s more variation in the production. Some of the songs are so blown out with 4 track distortion that the sound dissolves into fragments of noise that then somehow coalesce into a cognizable form. Ildjarn’s penchant for militant repetition is on full display on “Strength and Anger,” as many of the songs produce a hypnotic effect as pronounced as his ambient works, despite the violence of their sound. Following the conclusion of the 15 “Strength and Anger” tracks, the second half of the album consists of two approximately 15-minute collages of minimalist musique concrète and dark ambient called “Black Anger - Hate Meditation 1” and “Midnight Strength - Hate Meditation 2,” bisected by a stomping two-minute black metal instrumental called “Interchange.” Unlike Ildjarn’s other non-metal recordings, “Landscapes” and the Hardangervidda albums he recorded with Nidhogg, the “Hate Meditation” recordings do not call to mind majestic Norwegian vistas. They offer instead a survey of the bleak and misanthropic terrain of Ildjarn’s inner landscape.