Fisters of God, welcome once again. I have been mulling over this posting a little too much today and I have decided to serenade you all with something that may leave you temporarily shadowless: Ildjarn.

Ildjarn was a very influencial Norwegian black metal project, founded in ‘92. It was the solo project of one Vidar Vaaer, the vocals on the Seven Harmonies of Unknown Truths demo were contributed by Samoth. This demo for me is as important in the second wave of black metal as anything by Burzum, Darkthrone, Immortal or Mayhem – for me, the four norsemen of ‘True Norwegian Black Metal‘. Let’s not forget the Grymyrk demo, but that is coming… Anyway, this was only ever released on cassette (25 copies apparently) and it has been dubbed and traded fuck knows how many times over until it reached the binary of this very page. If you’ve heard a rumour of a Uruk-Hai (Varg’s pre-Burzum project) demo, this is it. It just has some eerie synth opening each track. Ildjarn also features on the Burzum bootlegs Draugen and Svarte Dauen. The obvious reason for this being that both have a very similar Bathory-esque take on black metal. And slightly off-ish drumming. This is for me the ‘true’ sound of black metal – it’s brutal, grim, uncompromising and completely true in its approach. Shame he stopped recording because of a broken 4-track, huh?

Listen:

Ildjarn ‘I’

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†ROCKWELL†