Heathen Harvest Samhainwork I
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
HEATHEN HARVEST SAMHAINWORK I The event is here. The time is now. Ever since our inception, Heathen Harvest has concentrated fully and wholeheartedly on delivering thoughtful views and exposure to the post-industrial underground. But part of our responsibility also rests in passing the very best music to our readership. Now, for the first time ever, we are proud to deliver an album of entirely original creations, showcasing some of the finest artists that we work with. Samhain is the end of the land cycle of birth and growth, the culmination of light and life. A time of open reflection as we look back to our past and give honour to our lineage, but also a period for dreaming of our futures and what we want to truly make of ourselves. It is a time of strongest, palpable spiritual concentration. We hope you enjoy taking the time to experience the eighty minutes of this record: a companion for this turn of the Wheel, and a carefully plotted aural expedition to take you through and beyond the open gates of the Dark Half. Melena 01. Mulm – Deluge 02. Vemod – Vi er natten 03. Suveräna – Dembowski’s Duel 04. Aeldaborn – The Descent of Odin Baba Yaga’s Hut 05. Apoptose – Hexenring (im Herbst) 06. Herbst9 – Anzam Kušud 07. Desiderii Marginis – Equinoxe II Thagirion 08. Gnawed – Groza 09. Iron Fist of the Sun – Unrepairable 10. Theologian + Bain Wolfkind – Human Pony Girl (Samhain cover) Veriditas 11. Jerome Deppe – The Darkened Room 12. LeVant – Mindhole Candy 13. The Gild [Tony Wakeford] – The Hangman & the Highwayman 14. Inneres Gebirge – Holy Thursday Genres: Dark Ambient / Ethereal folk / Experimental / Noise / Industrial / Neofolk Total runtime: 80.33 OCTOBER OBITUARIES Throughout October Heathen Harvest dedicated a number of articles to artists and visionaries who have shaped us: not just as a webzine but as people. These individuals do not only exist as influences to us, but categories which help define our entire being. The Obituary feature articles culminated with the release of the Heathen Harvest Samhainwork I album on 25th October 2012. I. Quorthon ii. Rozz Williams iii. Bela Lugosi IV. Hildegard von Bingen V. Edgar Allan Poe VI. Atra Morgue"!arco Cor%elli VII. Per ”Dead” Yngve )hlin VIII. Damon Edge I*. Anton Szandor LaVe, *. David George Hallida, I. Quorthon In Memoriam 17th February 1966 – 3rd June 2004 “O, I am a man and I hold in my hand my fate Free as the wind as if even I had wings that carried me.” – Through Blood by Thunder, 1991 There may be only a handful of individuals who have had as deep and enduring an impact on heavy metal music as Quorthon, the founding (and occasionally the only) member of Sweden’s genre stalwarts Bathory. Certainly there aren’t many who can claim to have been directly responsible for codifying not one but two major subgenres of music, or to have made their influence felt throughout subsequent decades of imitators. Without Under the Sign of the Black Mark, black metal as we know it today would certainly not exist. Without Hammerheart, the very term “Viking metal” would probably never have been uttered, and the landscape of doom metal would likely look rather different also. Insofar as he was an influential figure, however, Quorthon was not unique, nor was his passing at the relatively young age of 38; neither of these are the reason I have chosen to commemorate his passing over any other deceased icon. The significance of his life and legacy is greater than just the sum of his aesthetic descendants; it is the humble opinion of this writer that no individual, living or dead, has ever expressed the potential depth and beauty of metal music as fully as Quorthon did. Quorthon (born Tomas Börje Forsberg, but as he was notoriously reluctant to give his real name in interviews and because I feel deferential towards the whims of a man I consider to be generally great, he will bloody well be referred to as Quorthon henceforth) was rather an enigmatic figure given the scope of his influence, and remained at arm’s length from the scene he played a key role in forming. Shortly after Bathory’s formation, the band ceased to play any live shows, and rather amazingly, despite having begun as a raw D.I.Y. black metal outfit as a teenager in 1983, he claimed never to have owned either a Venom or a Slayer record, as well as having been actively disparaging towards contemporaries like Kreator, Destruction and Possessed. When interviewed, he discussed his music in frank and matter-of-fact terms, voice quiet and demeanor unassuming, a far cry from the grandiloquent posturing of the militant black metal hordes that would descend on Scandinavia in the early ‘90s. To this day, rumours persist about various aspects of his personal life, from the possibility that his death from heart failure was on account of drug abuse, to the notorious urban legend that Börje “Boss” Forsberg (the owner of the Black Mark Production record label with whom Quorthon had a long and fruitful partnership) was in fact his father. This article, though, is not intended to shed light on trivia regarding Quorthon’s private existence, but rather to pay tribute to a musician who composed what may be the most singularly passionate and intimate body of work that heavy metal has to offer. For if it is possible to glean anything of an artist’s inner life from his works (and if it’s not, then what the hell is the point?), then it is transparently obvious that for his two active decades, Quorthon’s output, from the triumphs to the disasters, was the result of his uncompromising pursuit of his muse. From Bathory’s first three records and their filthy, primal expulsion of adolescent id, to the propulsive anthems of the career-topping Viking trilogy (Blood, Fire, Death is my personal pick for the title of Greatest Metal Album of All Time), the shaky, uncertain genre experiments of the mid-to-late ‘90s and the return to form with the Nordland duology shortly before his death, everything proceeded from a place of total emotional authenticity, divorced from any recognition of “scene.” This is evidenced in everything from the lo-fi production values he steadfastly maintained, to the gradual transition from screaming fury to elegiac spirituality independent of any larger cultural shift, to the funding of the video for One Rode to Asa Bay from his own pocket. Perhaps the moment in Quorthon’s discography which illustrates the profundity of his loss better than any other is his 1991 record Twilight of the Gods. It is not, by any means, Bathory’s most formally perfect outing, for the band were never quite as comfortable channelling the portent of Wagner and the pulsing rhythms of early Manowar as they were with the Motorhead – and GBH-derived black metal of their earlier outings. It is often languid in pace, straining against its lack of production value to evoke the enormous scale of its ideas, and suffers from Quorthon’s adoption of a pseudo-operatic clean singing style which his range could not fully accommodate. And yet these limitations augment rather than detract from the album’s tremendous poignancy. To this day, the album’s final track, a re-arranged version of Holst’s “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” sung from the perspective of a man with no regrets in the final moments of his life is one of the few pieces of music to bring me close to tears with its evocation of pride and dignity in the face of mortality. More to the point, it reveals the soul of metal music laid bare of the artifice that so often clouds it; not the hollow pursuit of catharsis through technically perfect instrumentation, but a triumphant emancipation and vindication of the Self. So much has always been made of metal’s potential to intimidate and overwhelm that its capacity to empower is often overlooked, but why does metal maintain such a loyal following if not for its ability to elevate the individual? In a post-modern world where mutually exclusive ideologies and perspectives jostle for position and nothing is true, metal can bring to bear the unabashed, unironic romanticism of Emerson and Coleridge in a primal scream, a declaration of one’s own existence, of the realisation that the universe is what we will it to be. No other figure expressed these principles with the sincerity that Quorthon did; without the genre’s ostentatious trappings, his music was not a means to shock, nor to stun, nor even necessarily to change the world, but simply to give representation to his passions. The soul of his art was not a statement, but an exclamation without rhetoric, pure feeling not mired in considerations of context. There is no sophistry to be found in Quorthon, none of the knotty politics or esoteric philosophy bound up with the contemporary black metal scene. He had only the unadorned will to use music as a means to impress significance, meaning, wonder upon this rotten old world of ours and thus to transcend it. He succeeded, without compromise, for his entire adult life, and achieved that rare kind of immortality that the poets of the 19th century sang of. We are all poorer for his absence. Written by Andrew Discography [as Bathory]: Bathory (1984) The Return…… (1985) Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987) Blood Fire Death (1988) Hammerheart (1990) Twilight of the Gods (1991) Requiem (1994) Octagon (1995) Blood on Ice (1996) Destroyer of Worlds (2001) Nordland I (2002) Nordland II (2003) Discography [as Quorthon]: Album (1994) Purity of Essence (1997) When Our Day Is Through (1997) II.