Ildjarn - Strength and Anger (1996)

 

With rare exceptions, it has always been difficult for me to consistently enjoy any album that has a minimalist approach, going between amazed and underwhelmed while relistening to it. By definition, "minimal" music develops only a few ideas, so if one fails to connect with those, there are very few, if any, finer details to discover on subsequent listens that could change that person's opinion. Appreciation of simple music is almost binary in that way, so the type of listener who wants to understand why a piece of music that left them with bad or no impression matters to others will need knowledge external to the music. That external knowledge can include the state of the scene at that time, the artist's views stated in interviews or elsewhere, or insight from invested fans and reviewers.

I already knew Ildjarn by his reputation for raw and ascetic black metal and his misanthropic outlook (from what little is known about him as a person), which set correct expectations that any Ildjarn song is spontaneously recorded and not enjoyable in any traditional sense of the word. I knew to expect a really dry guitar tone, a lot of analog distortion and instruments bleeding into each other. What really made me invested in Ildjarn's music before even hearing him was the album "Strength and Anger" with its unique choice to have its first fifteen tracks share the same name, which made me want to know the purpose behind that artistic statement. The album has two "acts" - the first one is made of fifteen minimalistic black metal tracks by the name of "Strength and Anger", and the second consists of the "Hate Meditations" dark ambient/drone pieces with a guitarless intersection. If the majority of tracks are identically named, they should be designed as interchangeable in some way, and indeed, all of them are stripped down in arrangement and composition until there are just enough defining traits that they can still be recognized as black metal. Every track has one, rarely two, of the same type of two-chord riff over sloppy, low-tempo blastbeats and some d-beats, repeated ad nauseam before abruptly ending. These riffs carry texture but no melody and are made almost exclusively of eighth power chords, confined in a very narrow, isolating tonal space.

An overpowering wall of analog distortion and very dry guitar feedback permeate those first fifteen tracks, both of which lay strange artifacts over the bass and drums. All "Strength and Anger" tracks loop a single riff, but for different, likely arbitrary, durations, and with slightly different production across each (which must be caused by differences in the recording environment), which shows to me they were all recorded in a very present, unfiltered state of rage for however long that emotion burned at the time. I notice the lack of high frequencies, even in the harmonized sections. Normally we think of black metal as treble-heavy and shrill, where the high pitches are subconsciously associated with cries from pain, but this album is perpetually stuck in the lows and mids, as if the pain that would be caused by continuously reveling in hatred has been dulled by the intensity of that hatred. Although a few of the tracks have intros and outros tacked on, while others have minor shifts in their riff's contour or added harmony on top, these are fleeting nuances in the unrelenting barrage of blasting and power chords that remains faithful to its name - "Strength and Anger".

My enjoyment of "Strength and Anger" was mostly on this meta level where I consciously sought non-musical associations. Ironically, I had to intellectualize this stream of raw emotion of an album to eventually find value in it, because the actual content struggled to get to me emotionally. I interpreted the lack of treble as pain dulled by rage from titles alone, but I found the music itself underwhelming, weak, and hollow at first, which I could only explain by that same lack of treble - to me, it sounded more dull than harsh until I got myself in the right state of mind. For raw and unrefined music to convey the immediate passion of its creation instead of being over-intellectualized, it needs to make a quick impact through some combination of strong driving melodies and rhythm or rich texture. Black metal albums such as Paysage d'Hiver's self-titled or Ulver's "Nattens Madrigal" have both very memorable riffs and shrill high frequencies to give every note a sense of urgency. "Forest Poetry" (also by Ildjarn) has an appropriately harsh production (texture), with bludgeoning low-mid frequencies and piercing highs, but similarly to other Ildjarn releases, it's more of a collection of demos, while "Strength and Anger" is clearly deliberate in its structure, more akin to a concept album.

The one place where I could immerse myself in the music instead of pondering it from the outside were the two "Hate Meditations" ambient closers. After a prolonged road of monotonous distortion bordering on absurdity, the music shifts to an even more simplified form of single synthesized notes held for minutes at a time. Each individual note builds suspense through its persistence alone, as if ready to suddenly give way to an even more violent explosion of feedback and noise that always feels imminent but never arrives. Cued by the track titles, which act as hyper-condensed lyrics, I imagine the "Hate Meditations" ambient closers as a state of enlightenment achieved after a long and torturous exile, as if the already minimalist black metal had shed its last layers to reveal the source of the strength that let the listener endure until now. The loud and unfocused rage has been replaced by something quiet but much more potent.

It's hard to criticize this type of music for lack of impact without also criticizing its creator's character. By removing the planning and predictions of the audience's reactions from the creative process, art becomes more of a personal diary rather than a self-conscious performance. "Strength and Anger" is Ildjarn's righteous and unaesthetic disaffection with humanity. Any attempt to alter the music with a hypothetical listener in mind might improve its communicative purpose as art, but it will definitely be less truthful to who Ildjarn is.