Six albums came out under the name Judas Iscariot between 1996 and 2002, and the early ones were made with nobody else in the room. Andrew Harris, who signed himself Akhenaten, wrote the riffs in DeKalb, Illinois, played the guitars, played the bass, shrieked over the top and left a machine to keep the time behind him. Only when he cut Heaven in Flames in December 1998 did a human being sit down behind a kit, and Duane Timlin, who did it, was credited as a session hire rather than as a member of anything.
That is not a story about one eccentric working alone in the American midwest. It is a description of the standard production unit of modern black metal, and it accounts for more of what these records actually sound like than any argument about corpse paint has ever managed.
The unit that replaced the band
Stripped of the rehearsal room, the argument over the tempo, the drummer who wants the fill and the bassist who wants it gone, black metal turned out to lose almost nothing it valued and to gain the one thing it valued above all others, which is a single unbroken point of view running from the first riff to the last fade. The precedent sits at the foundation of the genre. Bathory looked like a band on the sleeve and was not one: the names Kothaar and Vvornth, credited with bass and drums on the albums between 1988 and 1996, stood in for anonymous studio hands hired for the session while Quorthon wrote the material, sang it and played the guitars. Burzum released four albums between 1992 and 1996 with nobody in the room but an engineer, the last of them recorded in March 1993 with a domestic stereo amplifier where a guitar rig should have been.
What changed after 2000 was the price of admission. A computer replaced the studio, and this is the one branch of extreme metal whose aesthetics do not merely tolerate a recording made in a bedroom but frequently prefer it, since hiss, distance and a thin cymbal are heard here as weather rather than as failure. The barrier that had kept a lone musician out of the process was money. It fell, and it took the band with it.
Recording in series, and what it does to a record
The mechanics deserve stating flatly, because they are audible on every album made this way. One person records in series. The drums or the drum program go down first, a rhythm guitar goes over them, then a second one, then the bass, then whatever keyboard the piece needs, then the voice, and every part is played against parts that are already fixed and cannot answer back. Nothing is settled while the tape runs. A band pushes and drags against itself, and that friction is most of what people mean when they say a record breathes.
A band pushes and drags against itself. A record made by one person does not breathe. It advances.
The gain is a coherence no committee has ever produced. No riff on a record like this survives because somebody had to be kept happy, no bridge is there as a concession, and the atmosphere holds for forty minutes because one nervous system decided every element of it and never once had to explain itself. The loss is everything a second opinion buys. A cathedral raised by a single mason has nobody standing in the nave to tell him the roof does not meet the wall, and this genre is full of cathedrals with exactly that fault built into them.
What one pair of hands does to the drums
Percussion is where the format shows itself first. A drum machine holds a tempo no arm can hold, which suits a music built on repetition and on a blast that has to run for six minutes without sagging, and it also erases everything a drummer would have done with dynamics, so the kit stops behaving like a person and starts behaving like frost forming on a window, the same crystal repeated until the glass has gone white. Tobias Möckl, who has recorded as Paysage d'Hiver in Switzerland since 1997, alternates acoustic and programmed drums and buries both under the guitars on purpose, on the stated grounds that the atmosphere is the point and clarity is not.
Several projects turned the limitation into the position. Blut aus Nord has run since 1994 as Vindsval plus W. D. Feld on drums, electronics and keyboards, which is the smallest unit that still counts as more than one person, and the record it is known for uses that mechanical percussion and a detuned guitar to build something structurally wrong on purpose. Where a real drummer does arrive, the character of the thing changes at once. Heaven in Flames carries a swing and a variety in the fills that nothing Akhenaten had programmed before it possessed, and the final Judas Iscariot album, in 2002, kept the man on.
Nobody to say that the record is long enough
Left alone, these projects run long. There is no rehearsal to reveal that the third repeat of a figure has stopped doing work, no van full of people bored of playing it, and no producer paid to say so, which is why the one man record is the natural home of the eleven minute track and of the album that treats forty minutes as a warm up. Sometimes that is the whole achievement: a piece of music long enough for the listener to lose the thread of time inside it, which is difficult to write and impossible to write short.
The failure mode is not the long record. It is the empty one. For every project with a real body of work behind it there are a great many whose only finished component is the logo, and the reason is structural rather than moral: the format removes the last person capable of telling the maker that the material is not there yet. That is also why the strongest work in this form tends to come from people who have been at it for fifteen years. The filter that a band applies in a week takes a solitary musician a decade to apply to himself.
The records that carry the argument
The strongest case for the format belongs to a brewer. Austin Lunn founded Panopticon in Louisville, Kentucky in 2007 and played every part on it himself, and in 2012 he set banjo, fiddle and the labour songs of the Appalachian coalfields against tremolo guitar on Kentucky, with neither half asked to give ground to the other. No panel would have approved that combination. There was no panel. Lunn did not assemble a live band until 2016, nine years in, and the studio records stayed his own work.
At the far end of the temperament sits Scott Conner, who began recording as Xasthur in Alhambra, California in 1995 and made Nocturnal Poisoning in 2002 for Blood Fire Death. The quality of that album is airlessness: guitars with no room around them, a voice mixed as though it were arriving through a floor, and a refusal of every ordinary courtesy a second musician would have argued for. In March 2015 Conner announced that the name would carry acoustic music instead, and it has done ever since. Only a project with one member can turn that hard without a meeting.
| Project | Country | The person | First album | Where the drums come from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bathory | Sweden | Quorthon | 1984 | Hired hands behind the names Kothaar and Vvornth from 1988 |
| Burzum | Norway | Varg Vikernes | 1992 | Played by him, with an engineer at the desk |
| Blut aus Nord | France | Vindsval | 1995 | W. D. Feld, on drums and electronics, from the beginning |
| Judas Iscariot | United States | Andrew Harris | 1996 | A machine, until Duane Timlin was hired at the end of 1998 |
| Xasthur | United States | Scott Conner | 2002 | One man on every part of the record |
| Panopticon | United States | Austin Lunn | 2008 | Played by him, next to the banjo and the fiddle |
| Paysage d'Hiver | Switzerland | Tobias Möckl | 2020 | Acoustic and programmed by turns, buried either way |
What the format cannot do
It cannot play. A record made by one person has no live existence until its maker recruits four others and teaches them parts written with no thought for a stage, which is why so many of these projects never appear in front of an audience at all and why the ones that do arrive years late and sound different when they get there. It also cannot be inherited. When the person stops, the discography closes on the spot, with no line up left to carry the name, and the abrupt endings of Judas Iscariot in August 2002 and of the black metal Xasthur in 2015 are what that looks like from outside.
The last thing the format does is provide cover, and that is a separate subject with its own history: the solitary project makes it easy for a musician to publish work without ever attaching a face to it, which is one route into the wider practice of anonymous Black Metal and its reasons, good and bad. One person in a room is the cheapest possible way to be unfindable.
None of which makes the format a symptom of decline. It is the form the music arrived at once the equipment stopped costing more than a car, and it has produced a fair share of the records that will still be argued about in thirty years. It also runs through every chapter of the black metal story, from a Swedish teenager with hired session men in 1984 to a Swiss recluse issuing a two hour album through a company he runs with his wife. The band was never the point. The point was that nobody else got a vote.
