Blut Aus Nord

France’s Blut aus Nord offer an idiosyncratic vision of black metal at once loud, dissonant, and intense, as well as gloomy, haunting, and melodic. Their constants are musical experimentation and evolution. They employ everything from medieval liturgical music and gothic folk to noisy progressive metal, industrial electronics, and more. That experimental approach was taken for 1996′s Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Ages and garnered an international fan base. 2003′s The Work Which Transforms God ecstatically proved to be the first wholly industrial black metal album. 2008′s Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars and 2014′s Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry offered striking stylistic variances to their earlier output, while the 2011-2012 trilogy 777: Sect(s), 777: The Desanctification, 777: Cosmosophy stood apart conceptually. 2018′s Deus Salutis Meæ engaged with post-punk and 2019′s Hallucinogen connected melodic black metal to futurist psychedelia. 2022′s Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses offered an aesthetic return to vanguard black metal and industrial sonics. Its sequel, Disharmonium: Nahab, arrived in 2023.
Blut aus Nord is the creation of Vindsval, a singer/guitarist who got the ball rolling in Mondeville, France in 1993. At first, it was known as Vlad — as in Vlad the Impaler — and for a few years, Vindsval was more of a project than an actual band. Thanks to technology and a thing called overdubbing, Vindsval was able to record two demos by himself as Vlad (In the Mist in 1993 and Yggdrasil in 1994) and function as a “one-man band” in the studio. After about a year, Vindsval changed his project’s name from Vlad to Blut aus Nord, and when labels started showing some interest, Vindsval began to employ some other musicians, gradually turning the project into an actual band. After working with various session players on Blut aus Nord’s albums, Vindsval ended up with a regular lineup that consisted of himself on lead vocals and guitar, Ghost on bass, and W.D. Feld on drums and keyboards.
Ultima Thulle, Blut aus Nord’s first official full-length album, was released in 1995 on Impure Creation Records (a small French label that later changed its name to Velvet Music International). Subsequent European releases included 1996′s Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age (ICR) and 2002′s The Mystical Beast of Rebellion. None of those ’90s or early-2000s discs were released in the United States — they were only sold in North American stores as imports — but in 2004, Blut aus Nord finally enjoyed North American distribution when The Work Which Transforms God, which had come out in Europe a year earlier, was released in the U.S. by Candlelight, a British label with an office in the Philadelphia suburbs.
Due to critical and commercial success (relative to black metal, of course), Blut aus Nord’s back catalog was reissued in the United States in 2004 and 2005. Beginning with 2005′s Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity mini-album, their material became increasingly experimental, relying on layers of textured, industrial, and ambient sounds as well as a more open musical environment. Indeed, 2006′s MoRT was considered — even by many fans — to leave the realm of black metal entirely and become alternative with its elongated dissonant tones, shimmering backdrops, murky vocals, and deliberate absence of blastbeats. While the album was heralded by many for its innovation, it was considered too far off the beaten path for some.
They furthered their experimental reputation with the decidedly heavier Odinist: The Destruction of Reason by Illumination in 2007 and with 2008′s near-progressive Dialogue with the Stars. In 2009, the band re-released Dialogue as a double-disc package with a brand-new record, a follow-up of sorts to Memoria Vetusta I, simply entitled Memoria Vetusta II. Listening to both recordings, it’s easy to hear that Blut aus Nord had created a new, all but trademarked form of extreme avant-rock.
The band began to issue experimental EPs in their “Existential Series” scheduled to run parallel to their main body of work. The first one, What Once Was… Liber I, initially appeared as a limited edition in 2010. The idea was taken to the next level with a trilogy of album-length recordings set around the number 777. The pummeling 777 Sect(s) (allegedly the long-rumored sequel to The Work Which Transforms God) was issued in April of 2011, followed in November by 777: The Desanctification, a much more atmospheric and ambient — yet no less blackened — series entry in November of that year. What Once Was… Liber II appeared in the spring of 2012, as did 777: Cosmosophy, the final chapter of that album series, in October of 2012. The next entry in the EP series, What Once Was… Liber III, was issued in November of 2013, as were the reissues of its first two volumes.
As a next step, the group issued Triunity in June of 2014, a split with French industrial doom metallers P.H.O.B.O.S. In October, Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry arrived on Debemur Morti.
The following year saw two separate retrospective volumes called The Candlelight Years. Codex Obscura Nomina, a split album with American blackened death metal band Ævangelist, appeared in the early summer of 2016. BAN’s half featured a four-track suite entitled “Sonic Waves (The Sound Is an Organic Matter).” In early 2018, the band released the doomy full-length Deus Salutis Meæ (God of My Salvation). In the fall of 2019, Blut aus Nord issued the post-psychedelic Hallucinogen, their most melodic, progressively realized record to date. Despite its wildly experimental nature, fans and critics embraced it uniformly.
In May 2022, just after the band’s 28th anniversary, Debemur Morti released the full-length Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses. The seven-track set re-engaged with vanguard industrialized black metal, shot through with bleak, maximalist harmonic dis-ease.
In 2020, Debemur Morti and Blut Aus Nord began a collaboration. Called “The Order of Outer Sounds,” it was a subscriber-based forum that ran for over two years — between 2020 and 2022. The Order provided an inventive new playground for experimentation. Lovecraftian Echoes, recorded/mixed by Vindsval at Earthsound studio, was completed in installments for subscribers, and issued between April 2021 and February 2022 before being released digitally to the general public later that year. The band went to great pains to explain that Lovecraftian Echoes was not a Blut aus Nord album per se, but a compilation of custom-made pieces continuing the musical exploration started with 2003′s The Work Which Transforms God. Blut aus Nord issued Disharmonium: Nahab, a “new” album that continued the musical and production ideas first asserted on Disharmonium: Undreamable Abysses. ~ Alex Henderson