Yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible.John Milton, Paradise Lost
July 1993, a concert hall in Bergen, four musicians from a small industrial town in Telemark and a booking paid for out of an English label's advance. Three of them were of an age to go drinking after the session and one was not, so the seventeen year old stayed behind in the control room every night with the engineer, learning what the desk did. That is the whole explanation for why this album sounds the way it does, and it is a more useful one than anything said about it since.
Emperor made In the Nightside Eclipse in a fortnight and then could not finish it for the best part of a year. The wider story around the band, the shop and the scene is the wider story; this is the record.
The band that walked in
Emperor had existed for two years, formed in 1991 out of the death metal group Thou Shalt Suffer by Vegard Tveitan and Tomas Haugen, who worked as Ihsahn and Samoth. A self titled release in 1993 had already put "I Am the Black Wizards" into the underground and had made the band's reputation before the album existed. Bard Eithun, known as Faust, was on drums. Terje Vik Schei, who signs himself Tchort, had joined on bass that year and would play on this record and no other Emperor album.
What separated them from everybody else in the country was not attitude, which was standard issue, but ambition about form. Where the Oslo bands were pursuing reduction, Emperor were writing pieces of six and seven minutes with three or four distinct sections, key changes, layered guitar harmony and an arrangement plan. The method underneath was the second wave method, unaltered. What sat on top of it had no precedent in the genre at all.
The keyboards nobody had
Emperor had no keyboard player. The symphonic parts that the record is famous for, and which founded an entire commercial subgenre, were written and performed by Ihsahn, largely inside the sessions themselves, on the instrument that happened to be in the room. Nothing about them is orchestral in any real sense. They are held chords and slow moving lines that sit under the guitars and give the tremolo picking something to be measured against, which is exactly the function a church organ performs under a choir.
Where the other records of the period cleared a building out, this one put a roof back on it and lit the thing from inside.
That is the whole invention, and it is small enough to state in a sentence and large enough to have supported thirty years of bands. Add a sustained keyboard bed to a black metal arrangement and the guitars stop reading as noise and start reading as a texture inside a chord. Dimmu Borgir built a career on it. Cradle of Filth built a different one. Neither would have had the idea without a seventeen year old improvising parts in Bergen because there was nobody else to play them.
Three songs that do the work
The record opens on "Into the Infinity of Thoughts", eight minutes that spend their first minute and a half refusing to start, and the delay is the argument: by the time the guitars arrive the listener has already been placed inside a space and told how big it is. Nothing in the genre had opened an album that way. "I Am the Black Wizards" is the one the band already had, carried over from the 1993 release, and it is the clearest single demonstration of the method, a riff repeated past the point of reason with the keyboard line moving underneath it until the repetition stops being repetition and becomes a state. It is also the song everybody who imitated this record imitated.
The album closes on "Inno a Satana", which is the strangest thing on it and the least often discussed. The tempo drops, the blast beat goes, and what is left is a hymn in the plain sense of the word, sung rather than shrieked in places, built on a chord sequence that would be at home in a nineteenth century choral setting. A genre that had spent three years insisting on ugliness ends its most important album with something close to devotional music, and does it without a trace of irony.
A year between the tape and the mix
The album was recorded in July 1993 and not mixed until well into 1994, and the reason had nothing to do with the music. Faust was convicted of a killing committed in 1992 and Samoth of arson against a church building; both served prison sentences, and those events belong to the crimes chapter of this history rather than to this page. The consequence for the record is the part that belongs here. Only Ihsahn and Samoth were present when the album was finally mixed, and Faust sent his notes on the drum sound from prison, by letter.
Candlelight Records released it on 21 February 1994, into the same four weeks that carried Vikingligr Veldi and Transilvanian Hunger into shops. Emperor could not tour it. The band that had just made the most ambitious record the genre had produced was, at the moment of its release, unable to put a line-up on a stage.
What it actually sounds like
Thin is the wrong word and cold is the wrong word. The guitars carry the standard treble bias of everything cut in that room, but they are stacked in harmony rather than left alone, the drumming is busier and more musical than the genre had any use for at the time, and the vocal is a shriek pushed into a reverb large enough to imply a building. Steve Huey, writing for AllMusic, credited it with demonstrating that there was real musical substance and ambition in black metal, and the site gave it five stars; Sputnikmusic gave it five as well; Chronicles of Chaos, which was reviewing it against the same year's rawer records, gave it six out of ten. In 2021 Metal Hammer put it top of a list of the best symphonic metal albums ever made.
The flaws are real and worth naming. The bass is inaudible for most of the record. Several transitions are joins rather than developments, the work of writers who had the ideas before they had the craft to connect them. And the keyboard sound itself has dated harder than anything else on the album, which is the price of having got there first.
The verdict
It is the most complete piece of composition the Norwegian second wave produced and the one with the worst descendants. Everything ornamental and expensive that the genre spent the following decade doing, the orchestras, the choirs, the budgets and the corsets, has a line running back to a teenager filling in parts on a borrowed keyboard because the band could not afford a fifth member. That is not the record's fault, and the record survives it: played today it is patient, strange and considerably less comfortable than its reputation as the accessible one suggests. The country that produced it, before and long after these four years, is the Norwegian Black Metal Scene.
