On the music of Burzum
The transformative depths of Varg Vikernes' music
The foundational tunes of Burzum evoke the otherworldly, not in a vague way, not through words alone, nor even imagery alone, but by a careful sensitivity to musical arrangement, taken as that sensitivity which clearly examines its own reactions to adjacent tones, its reactions to the slight difference that a change in pacing, beat, or dissonance makes on the emotions, reverberating as they do across the nervous system, impacting the physiological state.
The terror coming through the music of early Burzum is just enough to signal the mind a shift, a shift that, if followed through and adhered to, situates the soul in an entirely different landscape than that of the everyday experience.
Behind the morose atmosphere there lies the open landscape to brave, a heaviness having for purpose that you cease your motion, that you enter a darker mode of being, away from the blinding light.
As such, and in start contradistinction with other music coming under the general tag of black metal, either before or after, the darkness of Burzum constitutes a meditation with an aim, the aim to cross a threshold, to become self-constituted, to realize separateness, so that will, genuine voluntary action, can take place.
Passed that threshold, there is a world made patent in the greatest portion of Burzum’s essence, a sense of forward drive and motion, a sense of great wonder, a sense of having been dropped, alone and naked, within the vast garden of physical experience, by the hand of a god.
Aside from a few moments of divine incursion in projects otherwise vice-possessed and bent on mindless reaction, most black metal is the varied showcasing of mental illness, escapism, and desperation. None of it, or almost none of it, reflects the wide worlds into which Burzum reaches its vision, from beginning to end.
This is not to say that a young Vikernes had nothing else in mind but to carry himself through transformation, sought in his life at large, and represented in concentrated form in his music, often to the detriment of others, often to self-aggrandizing, through blunder and indiscretion, but always in authentic reality-creation, always opening up paths as one who is awake, one of the few, and one who is at least somewhat aware of the nature of reality, and in so being, chooses what he will, though he may not have known where that choosing would take him.
In that affective and entirely subjective drive to make his way into himself, the young Vikernes entered many other realms, and in creating art along those stages, with experience filtering not just through his mind, but through his body, which is what art truly is, distilled soul knowledge, he left us a map and a set of keys, imperfect though they may be, a map and a set of keys which allow for the raising of many a young soul from apathy and into numinous wonder.
Although it may have been the case that Filosofem, Burzum’s fourth full-length album, was ready to go in 1993, the final arrangement in which the first four albums came out, with the self-titled coming out in 1992 and Filosofem until 1996, made it so that these locked together, offering a mythic awakening to the person who deciphers and pieces together their sequence, a sequence which can be entered in any order, for the nodes of experience lie beyond time, and through that sequence, accessing what lies beyond.
The late Burzum metal trilogy (Belus, Fallen, Umskiptar) presents a further mystery, and a heroic resurfacing which does not need the psychological veil of pure aggression or references to spirits of darkness, and instead unrolls a majestic welcoming of the night and the day, as a human filled with gods, a human in plain use of the full spectrum of its faculties, reason and intuition in the service of Being.