Release Date: December 19, 2025Label: Nuclear War NowHaving played bass in Thou Shalt Suffer, Vidar Våer was already a seminal figure in the burgeoning Norwegian black metal movement of the early 1990s. After they disbanded, and Ihsahn and Samoth began Emperor, Vidar continued recording in the same shared basement studio, adopting the alias “Ildjarn.” He self-released a series of demos between 1992 and 1994, after which he put out four full-length solo albums, as well as two EPs and two ambient albums with frequent collaborator, Nidhogg, and a single album with a band called Sort Vokter, featuring Nidhogg and two other members. (Ildjarn’s body of solo and collaborative work has been dissected and rearranged for various compilations through the years along with previously unreleased archive recordings resulting in a complicated discography.) While many of his Norwegian peers sought cleaner production and incorporated greater melody, theatricality, and structural sophistication in their music, Ildjarn pursued his uniquely misanthropic vision with a sound that was raw, primitive, and unrelenting, animated by the purity of his hatred for humanity and little else. Ildjarn represents the distillation of black metal’s essence, which, at its core, has never been about a particular sound or style. Black metal is a fundamentally anti-social movement, and very few artists have expressed so viscerally their contempt for society as Ildjarn. Indeed, Ildjarn’s intense disdain for bands that altered their style according to trends, desperately seeking adulation from fans, was one of his primary reasons for abandoning the black metal scene. Discordant, hypnotic, and repetitive, Ildjarn forces the listener to inhabit his malevolent ideology, to feel the pulsing surge of disgust with civilization. This boundless antipathy for humanity is one dimension of Ildjarn; another is reverence for the cold, dispassionate majesty of nature. This latter theme finds its most compelling expression in Ildjarn’s ambient works, the epic double CD, “Landscapes,” and the two-part “Hardangervidda” series—another collaboration with Niddhogg—that marked the culmination of his recorded output.
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