In November 1993 the drummer of a Norwegian band recorded an entire album alone in his bedroom on a four track cassette machine, then posted the tape to the singer, who was living in a different town. The singer put the vocals on it. Peaceville released the result on 17 February 1994 and thirty two years of argument followed, most of it about whether the thing is a masterpiece or an idea wearing an album's clothes.
Both readings have a case. The one that gets made least is the third, which is that Transilvanian Hunger is a genuinely great record and still not the best one its makers made, and that the reason it wins every vote is the machine, the bedroom and the story rather than the eight songs on the tape. The full shelf this belongs on, with the years and the labels, is where to start listening.
What was actually in the room
By late 1993 Darkthrone were down to two men who did not live in the same place. Zephyrous, who had played lead on the two previous albums, was gone. Fenriz wrote everything, played guitar, bass and drums, and recorded it over November and December in a room he called Necrohell, which was his bedroom with a four track cassette recorder in it. Nocturno Culto added the vocals afterwards. There was no studio, no engineer, no producer and no budget, and Peaceville, who had already tried and failed to stop this band making the record they wanted two years earlier, put it out as delivered.
The circumstances are not decoration. A four track machine gives you four tracks, so the guitar cannot be layered into a wall, the drums cannot be spread across eight microphones and the bass cannot be given a channel of its own to sit in. Every limitation you hear on the album is a limitation that was in the room, and the achievement is that Fenriz wrote to the limitation instead of fighting it. That is a different act from recording badly, and the difference is the whole subject.
| # | Title | Length | Lyrics |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Transilvanian Hunger | 6:09 | Fenriz |
| 2 | Over fjell og gjennom torner | 2:29 | Fenriz |
| 3 | Skald av Satans sol | 4:28 | Fenriz |
| 4 | Slottet i det fjerne | 4:45 | Fenriz |
| 5 | Graven takeheimens saler | 4:59 | Varg Vikernes |
| 6 | I en hall med flesk og mjod | 5:12 | Varg Vikernes |
| 7 | As Flittermice as Satans Spys | 5:55 | Varg Vikernes |
| 8 | En as i dype skogen | 5:03 | Varg Vikernes |
Half the words on the album were written by a man who was in custody while it was being made, and who was convicted in May 1994 of murder and of arson. He is credited on the sleeve. The fact belongs in any honest account of how the record came together and it does not need repeating twice; the courts, the fires and the whole chronology are set out in their own chapter.
The theory, stated plainly
The claim the album makes is that the tape noise is part of the composition. Not a defect the listener forgives, not a texture applied afterwards for atmosphere, but a layer with a musical function, laid over the songs the way frost sits on a field until you stop being able to see where the field ends and the frost begins. Nothing before it had used a bad recording as a compositional decision rather than as a limitation. Everything after it that tried has usually got the order wrong, adding the hiss to finished songs instead of writing songs that need it.
The rest of the method follows from that one decision. The drum pattern changes only a handful of times across the whole album, so the ear stops tracking it and starts hearing it as ground rather than as figure. The guitar plays long repeating figures high on the neck where the strings are thinnest and the tone is coldest. There is no chorus anywhere and there is nothing that behaves like a hook. Six minutes of the title track pass without a single event designed to catch you.
Nothing before it had used a bad recording as a compositional decision rather than as a limitation.
The songs, where the songs matter
Three of the eight carry the record. "Transilvanian Hunger" opens it at six minutes and sets every rule the rest obeys. "Slottet i det fjerne" is the best piece of writing on the album, four and three quarter minutes of a single figure that keeps almost resolving and does not. "As Flittermice as Satans Spys" is the one everybody remembers for its title, and underneath the title it has the most movement of anything here. The other five are variations, and two of them are thin.
That is the honest count, and it is the reason the album loses to Under a Funeral Moon, made eighteen months earlier in an actual studio, where the riffs are stronger, the pacing varies and the same argument about production gets made without anybody having to explain it. The follow up settles the matter from the other direction. Fenriz recorded Panzerfaust in the same bedroom on the same machine between February and April 1994, weeks after its predecessor reached the shops, and Moonfog Productions released it on 5 June 1995. It is a decent record made from the identical materials, and nobody has ever argued it is the important one. The method had already given everything it had.
What happened to it afterwards
The record has never been out of print and it has never stopped rising. Peaceville remastered it in 2003 and packaged it with a filmed conversation between the two remaining members about the first four albums, which is the closest thing to a commentary track this music has produced. AllMusic rates it four and a half stars out of five. Rolling Stone placed it eighty fifth in its hundred greatest metal albums in 2017, the only album made on a four track cassette machine anywhere on that list. None of those are musical arguments, but together they measure how completely a record made for almost nothing crossed out of the underground.
The other measure is the number of bands. From the late 1990s onward an entire wing of the genre organised itself around the principle this album established, recording deliberately on inadequate equipment, refusing mastering, releasing on cassette in runs of a hundred. Some of it is superb and most of it is unlistenable, which is the ordinary ratio of any method that can be adopted without being understood. Fenriz has spent the years since talking mostly about heavy metal records from the early 1980s, which tells you where he thinks the interesting problem went.
The case for minimalism, and the case against
What the record proved is real and permanent: that a genre can be built out of subtraction, and that removing the things which make music sound expensive can leave something more frightening than adding them ever did. Every raw black metal album of the last thirty years is downstream of this one, and a great many of the good ones were made by people with a four track and no money who took it as permission.
The case against is that a theory this clean is easy to copy and almost impossible to improve, and that the record has therefore fathered more bad albums than any other in the style. Subtraction gives you nowhere to go. Fenriz himself did not go there again, and the band spent the next twenty years working in the opposite direction, towards heavy metal, towards riffs with joints in them, towards songs. That is a verdict on the method delivered by the person who invented it.
The next record in this sequence took the same principle and pushed it somewhere else entirely, into distance rather than into cold, and that argument is filosofem and the Sound of Distance. For where all of this sits in the wider story, from the first wave to the present, there is the chapter list.
