Urgehal - "The Sulphur Black Haze" (Premiere)

December 16, 2015

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Listen.

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That is the first known recording of a human voice, from 1877, predating Thomas Edison’s phonograph. Hear the eerie thinness of the recording–I wonder if the early Norwegian black metal bands were aiming for this sound when they said ‘necro,’ and envisioned blasting heavy metal backward in time to the Industrial Revolution.

If you did listen, then you just heard music made by a dead human being. You just had an experience that only human beings from the past one hundred and thirty years, give or take, have had the opportunity to experience. And yet we take it for granted. How many terrabytes of data in Spotify’s databanks are filled with the sounds of dead men and women?

Still, there is room for more, especially sounds recorded in deference.

Trond “Trondr Nefas” Bråthen formed Urgehal in Norway in 1992. He sang and played guitar in the classic black metal project until his death of natural causes in 2012. Bråthen left several recordings of what were meant to be guitar tracks for a seventh Urgehal record behind. His bandmates Jarle “Uruz” Byberg and Enzifer have assembled those recordings into a new album, Aeons in Sodom.

Bråthen left no vocal recordings behind, so the final Urgehal record boasts a stellar roster of guest singers, including Nocturno Culto of Darkthrone, Niklas Kvarforth of Shining, and Ørjan “Hoest” Stedjeberg of Taake, who layed down vocals for “The Sulphur Black Haze.” Listen below.

—Joseph Schafer

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