In July 1993, four musicians from Notodden carried their equipment into a Bergen concert hall that Eirik Hundvin had converted into a studio, and over the following weeks they recorded a debut that would furnish the next thirty years of the genre: the tremolo line held so long it stops being a riff and becomes weather, the keyboard used as a second guitar rather than a garnish on one, the blast beat treated as a texture the ear settles into instead of an event it flinches at.
None of those three ideas was invented in that room. All three were arranged there, and arrangement was the thing the second wave had been going without.
Emperor released In the Nightside Eclipse on 21 February 1994 through Candlelight, nine tracks and forty eight minutes, the first full length after the Emperor EP of the previous year. Ihsahn took vocals, guitars and keyboards, Samoth the rhythm guitar, Tchort the bass, Faust the drums. Hundvin, who everybody calls Pytten and whose Grieghallen room had already printed its character onto half the Norwegian catalogue, produced. Tim Turan mastered it with the band.
The scale of the thing is the first clue that these were not four teenagers taping a rehearsal. The opening piece runs past eight minutes. The album runs to forty eight. Nothing about that was normal in a scene whose founding statements were mostly under half an hour and proud of it, and it is worth remembering how compressed the timeline was: the material for the Emperor EP and for the As the Shadows Rise EP that appeared in August 1994 both came out of a single session in December 1992, which means the band wrote, recorded and shelved most of its early catalogue inside eighteen months while its members were being arrested.
The circumstances in which it was finished are worth stating plainly, once, without decoration. Faust was arrested in August 1993, weeks after the sessions, and confessed to the killing of Magne Andreassen in Lillehammer the previous summer; he was convicted in 1994, sentenced to fourteen years, and released in 2003. Samoth was convicted in 1994 for the arson of Skjold church. The line-up on the sleeve could not play the record it had just made.
What the four of them actually built
"Into the Infinity of Thoughts" states the method within a minute of the intro clearing. The keyboards do not sit behind the guitars waiting to be noticed at the chorus. They answer the guitars, take the melodic line off them for eight bars, hand it back roughened, and the effect is a cathedral bolted onto a garage: two buildings that should not share a wall, holding each other up. This is the part later bands copied and mostly got wrong, because they heard the keyboards as grandeur rather than as counterpoint and put strings on top of ordinary songs.
"I Am the Black Wizards" is the one that does the dirty work, six minutes of harmonic minor tremolo that never resolves where the ear expects, and it is the track Sputnikmusic's reviewer reached for in 2015 when he wanted a single example of how obscenely heavy the record is under the fog. "Cosmic Keys to My Creations and Times" is the mould-breaker, the track where the keyboard carries the hook outright and does it without the cheapness that would sink a hundred symphonic bands over the following decade. "Inno a Satana" closes on a hymn structure and a clean vocal, which in 1994 took more nerve than any of the blasting.
The argument that has followed it since
Every generation of listeners arrives at this album and has the same fight about the mix, and the fight is not stupid. AllMusic calls the production a thick wall of noise that takes several passes before the melodies surface. Sputnikmusic, admiring the record without reservation, still concedes that the guitar sound muffles the more distinctive riffs. Angry Metal Guy argues the opposite case, that Pytten took unusual care for the era to keep everything audible and that the trebly result is precision rather than murk.
The mix is not incompetence, it is a decision, and the decision costs the record several of its best riffs.
Both sides are hearing the same thing and valuing it differently. The guitars are set back and the treble is pushed until the wall reads as one instrument, so the atmosphere arrives instantly and the detail arrives on the fourth listen, if the listener stays for a fourth listen. Nightside is a record that hides its own songwriting. Three years later the same band would prove the point by making Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, which is better written, better played and better recorded, and which could only exist because this one had already invented the language it is written in.
Reputation is a poor reason to keep a record in rotation, and this one does not need the reputation. It needs a good pair of headphones and patience through the first side. What it offers in return is the founding document of symphonic black metal, made by a band that would be scattered across courtrooms and prisons before it could tour a note of it, and which nonetheless got the sound of frost and ceremony onto tape before anybody else worked out that the two belonged together. The second album is the better album. This is the important one.