telemark

Ihsahn's Black Metal Interpretation Hits the Mark on the "Telemark" EP

telemark

I’ll admit to having a profound soft-spot for Ihsahn. I’ve mentioned as much in my decade-end list; his music, and not just his obviously great and epochal work in Emperor but also his solo material, is not just of a high caliber musically in my eyes but also of profound personal importance. Something like that can help me shoulder through when I think the decisions are a little bit iffy at first. I have trust in him and his work because of what it’s done for me in my personal life, the self reflecting on the self, and that trust translates to patience which in turn translates to appreciation.

One of the benefits of this kind of slow approach to his work is that certain trends start to emerge that seem sometimes to be obscured by the more loud and obvious points one can make about his work. For instance: the prog edge Ihsahn’s solo material took on somewhere around angL that flowered out fully in After and then never, ever went away was prefigured way back when, all the way in the initial split with Enslaved that Emperor put out that put their name on the map in the first place. There have been a lot of words spilled from fans and critics both, be it on forums or in record reviews, about the tremendous quality of those early Emperor albums, words that to be fair are right on the money, but sometimes ignore that the ambitions and shocking directional choices we saw on later records by the group and Ihsahn’s solo material were always baked in.

Those cheap but charming sounding synth patches and arrangements weren’t meant for the ends that dungeon synth and traditional second-wave aping black metal bands in corpse paint and black-and-white photos of skeletal trees on cassette demos built them toward; they were always meant to be the real thing, horns and saxes and strings and suite-like arrangements and technical guitar wizardry all. The opening two tracks of Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk form a ten-minute multi-part prog metal epic; it was just the production and approach to guitar that seemingly tilted things more exclusively to black metal than the prog metal he would later explore.

This all makes the announcement of his twin-EP plans for 2020 so interesting. Ihsahn stated that this year, instead of following his typical pattern of an LP every two or so years, would see instead two separate EPs with each focusing on a different aspect of his sonic identity. The second will, according to Ihsahn, focus on the prog material that has comprised the majority of his solo work. This first one, the Telemark EP, was meant to be his black metal record, a return to the genre after years of it being a spice rather than the main dish. By all accounts, that is not what we receive with this EP, which feels substantially more in keeping with some of the harsher tracks off of recent records like Das Seelenbrechen, Arktis., or Amr. The EP consists also of two covers: Iron Maiden’s “Wrathchild” makes clear sense in a black metal context, but the first, a take on Lenny Kravitz’s 1995 hard rock classic “Rock and Roll Is Dead,” doesn’t, at all.

But this isn’t a negative thing. Because, importantly, the songs work, both independently and as a set. They just aren’t precisely black metal. The album opener “Stridig” is a prog-black track in the same vein as has been Ihsahn’s main wheelhouse since starting his solo career, building off of the more technical and ambitious black metal ideas he was exploring around the time of IX Equilibrium and Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire and Demise which would become a focal element of his solo records up to and including pieces like “Wake” from 2018’s Amr. In fact, if anything, “Wake” comes across as heavier, with the bluesy vibrato and lingering background saxes in the middle portion of “Stridig” feeling like a deliberate pivot away from pure black metal thunder toward a more explicitly cinematic vision. Likewise, the rolling accented snare feels substantially more expressive than the typical unmediated blast beats you’d typically find in black metal.

“Nord” opens with the kinds of chord progression one might expect to find on a Virus record (or that eagerly-anticipated upcoming Ved Buens Ende reunion album). The vocals are admittedly some of the sharpest and most savagely black metal as Ihsahn has laid down in quite some time, but his performances with Emperor over the years have shown that, like Mikael Åkerfeldt when he puts his mind to it, he’d never actually dulled his capacity for truly savage vocals even if his compositional interests have drifted to more progressive waters. Longtime sax-player Jorgen Munkeby has more prominent positioning on this song, his sax takes stacked into a miniature sax section offering counterpoint to classic Opeth stacked clean vocal “aaahs” from Ihsahn. The song feels like it would be fittingly found on Arktis., the solo record Ihsahn famously said was compositionally themed around evoking coldness and isolation of fields of ice, even if it wasn’t necessarily always palpable in the finished project. The guitar heroics of the solo here likewise would feel deeply out of place in a black metal track but contain a very pure and thunderous rock and roll element to them, almost like the bluesier rock solos of early Judas Priest or even the more artful and ambitious glam rock/metal outfits like Blue Murder.

The final non-cover song “Telemark” certainly has the thunder in sections, but the lengthy instrumental introduction, lingering on that typical but lovely Phrygian-dominant vaguely Arabic melodic thing (you’ll know exactly what I mean when you hear it) feels immediately much more programmatic and theatrical than what we would typically associate with second-wave black metal. This sentiment only expands as the song passes through section after section, structured in miniature suite form over its seven minutes, linking each piece through emotional and imagistic continuity if not through perpetual black metal aesthetics. “Telemark” is perhaps one of the better examples of why, even as esteem for Ihsahn has dropped bit by bit with pure black metal fans over the years, he has managed to build equal if not greater esteem within the progressive music world.

It’s a tremendous song, one of the best of his solo career, and certainly a fitting piece to title the record after.

These three originals likely will leave Ihsahn’s initial statement that this was his black metal release a bit puzzling to a casual listener familiar with his work in Emperor and the shape of black metal as a whole. Granted, the shape and contour of black metal has expanded dramatically since those early days, but even with that sonic expansion off of the back of more cosmic, psychedelic, krautrock, prog, and avant-garde black metal groups, not to mention the ones that interpolate ideas from as far afield as screamo, post-rock, and minimalist orchestral music, they still sound quite clearly of a piece with Ihsahn’s more explicitly prog metal work. This might be enough to tempt that same casual listener to think that Ihsahn has perhaps, somehow, impossibly, forgotten what black metal even is. But this sentiment, aside from being mindbogglingly condescending, would also be wrong.

For one thing, Ihsahn’s personal definition of black metal, like many of those of the second wave of the genre, is quite different from the popular perception of the genre. He’s stated in numerous instances over his career, both when he was in Emperor and after, that the genre was more an ethos and methodology rather than a specific sound, with the claustrophobic and icy cascading tremolo picked minor and diminished chords and shrieked vocals simply the manifestation they took in the 1990s rather than the full and complete idea. Black metal to Ihsahn has definitionally always been more about boldness, the willingness to self-contradict as much as to contradict the general ethos of the scene, to take a Luciferian/Nietzschean sentiment of the radical self and apply it to music, whether that mean cutting to the avant-garde in one instant as he did with his wife in Peccatum and Starofash or toward the prog and even explicitly traditional hard rock within his solo work. This same sentiment has been echoed by compatriots of the second wave in Immortal, Enslaved, Ulver, Darkthrone, and Mayhem, often as a means of explaining why none of those bands sounded like each other for very long and why they all went off to explore the progressive territories they did (save for Darkthrone who, fittingly, also cut against this archetype by becoming radically punkier).

This sentiment of why this is black metal in the eyes of Ihsahn is answered well by the two covers. The first, Lenny Kravitz’s “Rock and Roll is Dead” from his 1995 album Circus, is perhaps the most perplexing on its face. In fairness, it’s a killer song, coming near the tail-end of Kravitz’s magical initial five-album run which saw him blend everything from the psychedelic soul of the 1960s and 1970s to surprisingly heavy hard rock to funk and pop. We have a cultural mental image of Lenny Kravitz now as an almost prototypical VH1 rocker, making “rock” music for the stay-at-home adult contemporary crowd, but this is steeply contradicted by those early records which showcased a more wild, exuberant, and powerful Kravitz. “Rock and Roll Is Dead” is a Led Zeppelin-style rock tune, here produced faithfully even to the intro extemporaneous guitar chugs of the original studio version, only differing in Ihsahn’s vocal choice of using harsh vocals in place of Kravitz’s soul-drenched cleans. The song would have come out when Ihsahn was 20; while we often have an image of black metal musicians as stern and joyless, we know from interviews that Ihsahn, much like Abbath, Euronymous, and practically all the members of Enslaved and Ulver, actually had a healthy appetite for prog, rock, and psychedelic records, making it not terribly unlikely that Ihsahn has quietly been a fan of those early magical Kravitz records for quite some time like many plugged-in rock fans have been.

The second cover makes more sense in the context of black metal. A teenage favorite of Ihsahn, Iron Maiden is, next to Judas Priest, perhaps the most obvious influence on black metal in specific not to mention heavy metal as a whole. The harmonized guitar approach of the group as well as the specific way they crafted instantly epic and enormous melodies was always present in the more technically-ambitious and capable black metal bands even back then, not to mention the fact that, well, Venom, the group that named the genre, were themselves a NWOBHM band. “Wrathchild” in particular is a sensicle choice, coming from Maiden’s 1981 second full-length Killers which features not only a necessary roughness to the instrumentals which seems clearly appealing if you are a budding black metal musician but also the rougher, more brutal vocals of Paul Di’Anno, which in retrospect seem like an obvious prefiguring for what early black metal vocalists would attempt to do with their voice alongside the usual cited figures like Cronos of Venom and King Diamond of Mercyful Fate. Ihsahn’s cover here is, like the Kravitz cover, a near perfect replication, expanding little on the original material of the song.

ihsahn

His choice of these covers seems to gesture to youth. His rendering of them as near-duplicates of the originals feels at first confusing, as confusing as the song selection, but later reveals itself as loving and sincere. There is no irony in his cover of Lenny Kravitz; he delivers it with the same care and conviction as Iron Maiden, a group that is much more intuitive to see played by him and his solo band. These tilt our understanding of what Ihsahn may have meant by calling this his black metal EP. It seems to draw on his association of black metal with his youth, constructing the album by returning to the mindset of his youth, with the rock and metal records he loved and found inspiring as a player as well as the county of Telemark where he grew up (and, coincidentally, still resides).

This final intuitive leap, that Telemark as an EP is perhaps less about pure black metal in the way that second-wave replicating acts of the genre might perceive it and more about giving an honest snapshot of the sounds, records, and environment that sincerely inspired him in his youth, makes this a compelling release.

The three original songs here are powerful contributions to his body of work. Ihsahn’s story cannot be told either as just his time in Emperor or just his solo material, not just because there are truly great records and songs in both eras but because the former prefigures the latter and the latter is partly built on perpetually recontextualizing the former. On the Telemark EP, Ihsahn offers something like an origin story, one that seemingly wants to live not in 2020 but in the years preceding even Wrath of the Tyrant. It cannot do so, at least not fully, or perhaps at least not in the way fans of his who would rather erase the existence of his various projects solo or otherwise in the years since the folding of Emperor as a studio outfit would like to imagine. This EP isn’t just a loving and sincere tribute to his roots as black metal fans would like to see them but as Ihsahn sees them himself, containing his love of hard rock, traditional heavy metal, and prog that he’s had since he was young just as much as his clear and career-defining love of black metal. It will be interesting to see how it is affected textually by the followup EP due to come out later this year, one which Ihsahn has stated gestures forward and toward prog more than backward. Until then, at least, the Telemark EP is a compelling love letter to the formative influences and passions that shaped and inspired Ihsahn as a player.

The Telemark EP released today via Candlelight Records.

Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.