The text above, the lyrics for the most iconic song from Filosofem, and perhaps Burzum’s whole career, has likewise become emblematic for black metal as a whole. I’ve always felt that they capture majestically the essence of what we could call, bearing in mind all the limitations of the term, the “worldview” of heavy metal, in particular the aforementioned subgenre. Like the music that accompanies them, they bring to mind images and impressions that characterize another time and a forgotten mode of existence, like that of the nomad who finally settles in some corner of the woods as darkness comes to reveal her mysteries, or the pagan cottager contemplating the daughters of the firmament in a moment of rest and reflection or maybe preparing for some act of battle. There’s a sense that they have awakened something primordial and mysterious inside the listener, even if just for a brief moment.
Despite its overuse, and frequent misuse, the descriptive “mystical” is appropriate here. “Life has a new meaning” – this meaning is felt in living experience, for it refers to a new spiritual state and its corresponding mode of action. It is the realization of the divine immanence in the harsh world of becoming, nature and its hardships; that fundamentally pagan sense of wonder before life in its uncompromising totality.
Of course, this being black metal, and in the Romantic tradition of Novalis1, this revelation must be associated with the night. The withering of day is the fading away of illusions, of the world of values and petty comfort, thus the unveiling of reality in its true majestic face; the reality of struggle and reverence.
Despite the fundamental thematic congruity (or perhaps even continuity) with previous albums, one can easily see that the music has gone down a very different path in terms of style and composition. At the time of its release, this was the most minimalist Burzum had ever been (which has unfortunately encouraged generations of imitators, particularly in the “atmospheric” or “ambient” black metal genres, to raise their bar for meaningless repetition and stagnant structures in their misunderstanding of what is happening here). The hypnotic quality of the songs – already present in previous albums but combined there with riffcraft storytelling2 – here becomes their essential foundation, as does the goal of inducing in the listener a state of trance propitious to the advent of mystical understanding and flights of nostalgic imagination. Although this is probably most apparent in the famous 25-minute ambient piece, we would be gravely mistaken if we didn’t attribute this quality to all of the songs and the album as a whole comprised of their unity.
Through all of these characteristics, we can sense the preoccupation with communicating, above all, not a particular idea or emotion but a state of mind – hence the mystical and psychedelic labels –, that is, the one that we have described above and which perfectly sums up the hessian ideal and the resulting way of life.
1 See Hymns to the Night, by Novalis.
2 This is recognized by Varg Vikernes himself:
“I wanted the music to be more epic, like storytelling” (from the “Until the Light Takes Us” documentary)
“As you might have noticed, there is no traditional structure (verse & chorus) in most Burzum tracks. The Burzum tracks were structured as stories instead, with a beginning and an end very different from the beginning.” (from a video uploaded to his “Thulean Perspective” youtube channel)
