This is the best of the four Burzum albums and the second most famous of them, and the gap between those two facts is the most instructive thing about how the canon of this genre was assembled. Everything the more celebrated record is praised for is done here first, done in fewer moves, and put in a better order. The album list this belongs to, with years, labels and studios, is the album list.
Four pieces, forty four and a half minutes, recorded in September 1992 at the Grieg Hall in Bergen with Eirik Hundvin engineering, and released by Misanthropy Records in April 1994. By the month it appeared its maker was in prison, having been convicted in May of that year of murder and of arson and sentenced to twenty one years. He had no hand in the release. The record had been finished for eighteen months and belongs, musically, to 1992.
| # | Title | Length | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Det som en gang var | 14:21 | The long form piece, built on one figure held past the point of comfort |
| 2 | Hvis lyset tar oss | 8:04 | The fastest thing here, and the closest to a conventional song |
| 3 | Inn i slottet fra droemmen | 7:51 | Mid paced, keyboard led, the hinge between the metal and the close |
| 4 | Tomhet | 14:11 | Synthesiser only, no guitars, placed last where it belongs |
The session, and the room it was made in
The most hostile music made in Europe that decade was recorded inside the state's own concert hall. Grieghallen is a modernist building of fifteen hundred seats, home to the Bergen Philharmonic, with a studio in it that was let by the hour, and between 1992 and 1994 it took the money of a run of teenagers with no budgets and no interest in classical music. The engineer was Eirik Hundvin, who worked as Pytten, a professional with no investment in the ideology of the people in front of him and a great deal of patience for what they wanted.
What he gave Burzum is a specific quality of air: a lot of room, almost no bottom end, guitars recorded so thin that they stop behaving like instruments and start behaving like weather. It is not a badly recorded album. It is an album recorded with care to sound as though nobody was present, and the difference between those two things is the difference between this record and the hundreds made in imitation of it.
Repetition used as a form rather than as a texture
The opening piece runs fourteen minutes and twenty one seconds on material that would occupy ninety seconds in any other kind of song. A figure arrives, it is stated, and then it is held. Nothing is added to it for minutes at a stretch. The ordinary way to describe that is hypnotic, which is a word that explains nothing, so here is what actually happens: the ear gives up waiting for a change, stops tracking the melody as a melody, and starts hearing it as terrain. Once that switch has occurred the small alterations, a shift in the keyboard, a change of vocal placement, land with a force entirely out of proportion to their size.
The ear gives up waiting for a change and starts hearing the figure as terrain. After that, the smallest alteration lands with a force out of all proportion to its size.
That is a compositional decision and it is the album's real contribution. Plenty of records before this one repeated a riff. What this one worked out is that repetition has a threshold, that the threshold is much later than anybody had tested, and that on the far side of it the music changes function. The title track is the counterweight: eight minutes, faster, structured almost conventionally, and it is placed second so that the listener has something to hold on to before the long descent resumes.
The sequencing, which is where it wins
Four tracks in the order long, fast, medium, ambient is not an accident, and it is the whole reason this album holds together where the later one does not. "Tomhet" runs fourteen minutes with no guitars and no drums at all, and it is the last thing you hear, so it functions as an ending rather than as an interruption. Put the same piece in the middle of the record and it becomes the point where people reach for the remote. That is exactly what happens on Filosofem, whose twenty five minute synthesiser track sits at position five out of six.
The comparison is worth making precisely because the two albums were recorded six months apart by the same person with the same intentions. One of them was sequenced and one of them was assembled. The debut, cut at the same concert hall in January 1992 with Euronymous of Mayhem playing on part of it and released by his Deathlike Silence label that March, is rawer than either and shows how quickly the method was arrived at: three albums recorded inside fourteen months, and the middle one is the good one.
The long tail
Two small facts about the catalogue clear up a confusion that has followed this album around for three decades. The opening track shares its name with an entirely separate Burzum album, Det som engang var, which was recorded later and released in 1993, so the song and the record are not the same object and never were. And the four albums that carry the name at all were recorded across fourteen months in 1992 and 1993 and then released over four years, out of order, by two different labels, which is why the discography reads as though somebody was working steadily through the decade when in fact the work had stopped.
The influence is easier to trace than the chronology. Every band that has since built a long piece out of one held figure with a keyboard underneath and a voice pushed to the back is working with the tools assembled on this record: the American bands who took it into the forest, the French ones who added major keys to it, the entire Cascadian wing, and a large number of people recording alone at home who would not be able to name the source. What almost none of them took was the discipline. Four tracks, one idea each, nothing spare, and an ending placed at the end.
What it sounds like now
Thirty two years on, the things that dated fastest in this music are absent from this record. There is no corpse paint audible in it, no shouted ideology, no attempt to sound evil, and almost nothing that belongs specifically to 1992. What is left is a set of long, cold, slow moving pieces with a keyboard part running under them and a voice buried at the back, and that combination has been the template for the entire atmospheric wing of the genre ever since, including a great deal of it made by people with no interest whatever in where it came from.
The verdict is straightforward and it does not need hedging. Of the two records this maker is remembered for, this is the disciplined one, the better sequenced one and the one that does more with less. It is second in the reputation stakes because the other has an equipment story attached to it and this one has only four songs and an order to put them in. The other great production argument of the same two years, made in a bedroom on a four track machine rather than in a concert hall, gets its own accounting, and the album that beats them all is under a Funeral Moon.
