Two years and ten months separate the tape from the shops. Filosofem was recorded in March 1993 at Breidablik and Misanthropy Records did not release it until January 1996, which is an unusual gap for a record made by one person in a few days, and the reason for it is not a musical one. In August 1993 its maker killed a man, and in May 1994 he was convicted of that killing and of a series of church arsons and sentenced to twenty one years. The tape sat in a drawer while that happened. That is the fact, stated once, and the rest of this piece is about the record.
What is on it is the strangest sounding album the genre has produced and the one whose central quality is not cold but distance. Everything on Filosofem arrives from somewhere else, at the far end of a corridor, through a wall, from a room you are not in. That effect was engineered on purpose with equipment nobody would choose, and it has never been convincingly reproduced by anybody who tried. The wider shelf this sits on, with the years, the labels and the studios, is where to start listening.
The equipment, which is most of the story
There is no guitar amplifier on this album. The guitar was plugged into the amplifier of a domestic hi fi stereo and pushed through old fuzz pedals, which is why the distortion has no body in it and behaves less like a guitar tone than like interference on a radio band. For the vocals the studio was asked for the worst microphone it had, and what turned up was an old helicopter headset. The result is a voice that sits underneath the guitars rather than on top of them, audible as a shape rather than as words, and mixed at a level most engineers would treat as a mistake.
None of that is an accident of poverty. The earlier Burzum sessions had taken place at the Grieg Hall in Bergen, a fifteen hundred seat concert hall with a proper studio in it and a working engineer at the desk. The stereo amplifier and the headset were chosen after that experience rather than before it, and the choice is the album's argument: that the distance between the listener and the sound is itself something you can compose with, and that the way to build it is to put obstacles in the signal path on purpose.
The label matters here too. Misanthropy Records was founded in England in 1993 by Tiziana Stupia for the specific purpose of releasing these records once no established company would touch them, and it went on to put out Mayhem, Arcturus, Ved Buens Ende and Katatonia before she closed it in 2000. Almost every argument in this article about how the record reached anybody runs through that one small company.
What distance actually sounds like
The record opens with its most famous piece, seven minutes built on a keyboard figure and a guitar that never comes forward. Nothing in it advances. The drums keep a pattern that could have been programmed and probably should have been, the vocal is a long way back, and the whole thing behaves like weather observed from indoors rather than like an event happening to you. Then "Jesu dod" runs eight and a half minutes on almost nothing, and "Beholding the Daughters of the Firmament" is the only track that moves at speed, and it sounds like it is being played in the next building.
The distance between the listener and the sound is itself something you can compose with, and the way to build it is to put obstacles in the signal path on purpose.
That is three metal pieces and about twenty four minutes. What the album does with the remaining forty is the part every argument about it turns on.
The twenty five minutes most listeners skip
Track five is called "Rundtgaing av den transcendentale egenhetens stotte", it runs twenty five minutes and eleven seconds, and it contains no guitars and no drums. It is a synthesiser piece: a simple figure repeated over a bass ostinato which changes about halfway through into a harmony ostinato, and that is the entire content. Played once with attention it is genuinely effective, a slow erosion of the sense that anything is going to happen. Played as part of an album it is where most people reach for the remote, because it arrives after twenty four minutes of metal and is followed by a reprise of an earlier track.
Defending it requires arguing that the album is not a metal record with an ambient appendix but a single long piece about emptiness with metal at one end of it. That case can be made and it is not stupid. It also does not survive contact with how anybody actually listens, which is the problem with structural defences generally. Sixty four minutes is a long album, and this one asks for its second half to be taken on trust.
Arriving late into a scene that had moved on
By January 1996 the second wave was finished as a going concern. The shop in Oslo had been shut for three years, the trials were over, and the bands still working had begun adding keyboards, budgets and clean singing. Into that arrived a record made in 1993 that sounded like none of the new production and none of the old, and it was received as a document from a closed period rather than as a new release. AllMusic rates it four stars out of five. It has been reissued repeatedly since and has become, by a distance, the most streamed thing in the catalogue.
Its afterlife is a tone rather than a style. From about 2000 onwards a whole wing of the genre, most of it recording alone at home, went looking for that guitar sound, and what came back was usually just thin. The thinness was never the mechanism. The mechanism was obstruction: a signal forced through the wrong equipment until what survived at the other end was an outline of a guitar rather than a guitar, and an outline holds its shape only when everything around it is placed with care. One practical consequence follows. Play this album quietly on small speakers and the effect collapses entirely, because there is no low end to carry it and nothing in the mix designed to grab the ear. It needs volume and it needs a room.
The verdict, and the record it loses to
Filosofem is over ranked, and it is over ranked for a reason that has nothing to do with the music: the equipment story is irresistible. A hi fi amplifier and a helicopter headset make a paragraph that writes itself, and a paragraph that writes itself will beat a well sequenced album every time. Hvis lyset tar oss, recorded in September 1992 and released in April 1994, does the same thing with repetition, has four pieces instead of six, keeps its keyboard piece to fourteen minutes and puts it at the end where it belongs. It is the better record and it is the second most famous one.
What Filosofem has that nothing else does is the tone. Two generations of bands have tried to get that guitar sound and have generally produced something merely thin, because the thinness was never the point; the point was the impression of a signal that has travelled a long way to reach you and lost most of itself on the journey. On that count the album is unrepeatable, and it earns its place on the shelf without any help from the story attached to it.
The case for the album that beats it is set out in full in hvis Lyset Tar Oss. The other great argument about production from the same two years, made with a four track machine instead of a stereo amplifier, is transilvanian Hunger and the Case for Minimalism.
