Limited Edition Digibook Handnumbered /999 copies
Firstly, this album is not for everyone. Landscapes come in well past the two-hour mark, making it seem like a considerable time investment. It's also totally composed of long, untitled tracks that all more or less sound the same. You can jump around on this album as much as you like, Ildjarn clearly picked a lane for this album and stuck to it throughout. Now with that out of the way, this album has without doubt found itself in my top 10 albums of all time. I love this album through and through and after some thought, I don't think I can give it less than a perfect score.
Landscapes's composition is nearly always just one, maybe two synth sounds at a time. There's no drums, no guitars and certainly no vocals. Landscapes is about as stripped down as an album can be. On top of that, it's mostly improvised. Those two factors give Landscapes this wonderful, flowing sound I've never heard done better. It's like the sound of your own thoughts; something totally stream of consciousness that constantly picks up and discards ideas like a living thing. It's utterly unique and after only a short while it totally envelopes you. This album is perfect to put on in the background while you relax or do other things, it's not something that's ever aiming for you to focus in on.
Landscapes is also very good at slowly pulling you into its thick atmosphere. I usually find myself putting it on and dreaming of grand adventures, fjords and beautiful landscapes while I focus most of my attention on something else like writing, doodling or getting on with work. Its helped me filter out distractions. There's lots of ambient/black metal albums out there that can do that but I've found nothing that does that better than Landscapes does. In that sense, it's very unique.
Another important aspect of Landscapes' sound is how unaggressive, warm and downright welcoming it comes off at times. I've heard this album compared to Filosofem but that album tended to lean more heavily into noise than this does, not to mention Filosofem is far colder sounding, like it wants to keep you at arms length whereas Landscapes seems far more willing to open up swallow you whole. Both are atmospheric but Landscapes never feels as static or repetitive as Filosofem does in places. Again, I think the improvised aspect of Landscapes stops it from ever feeling stale and help it glide along effortlessly. The warmth of this album also feels like a huge departure to most of the extreme metal coming out of Norway at the time, something I can't help but respect simply out of how against the grain it is.
The synth tones on this album are really well selected and perfectly utilised. Ildjarn clearly knew how to squeeze every last bit of synthy goodness out of whatever keyboard he used to record this and the result is some gorgeous synth tones. As I said before, this album has this wonderfully warm, airy vibe to it I can't get enough of and that's in large part down to Ildjarn's carefully curated collection of tones and settings. In conjunction with the album's loose song structure, the tracks on Landscapes seem to possess a depth you might not always expect from such limited instrumentation.
Lastly and most interestingly, I feel Landscapes is the most successful display of Ildjarn's outlook and ethos. I don't know the guy personally but from reading through old interviews, it's clear Ildjarn isn't the most social of people. Most of his music too clearly isn't made for a wide audience, through its sheer quality Ildjarn certainly has developed a cult following. Sometimes I wonder if this album is a distinct attempt to go just a little further, to make something only Ildjarn himself can ever really appreciate fully or reflect back on fondly. I know plenty of metalheads are into ambient music too but something about how stripped down yet warm and comforting Landscapes is makes me wonder if Ildjarn was deliberately trying to shake some people off by making such a dramatic change in his style. That's a pretentious as fuck reading of this album but I like how the album seems to welcome different interpretations. For an instrumental album, I think it has a lot to say. Going into a little more detail from my last point, Landscapes is impenetrable in a way Ildjarn's black metal albums always fall just slightly short of for me. Don't get me wrong, Ildjarn's other albums are great but they're clearly something a "metal dude" is going to love, assuming they're fine with it sounding like it was recorded in an actual forest on a broken 4-track machine. You can't headbang or tap your foot or really do much of anything with Landscapes, not to mention it's difficult to get all the way through in one sitting and that's something clearly intentional on Ildjarn's part. Landscapes feels like true "outsider art" or at least an attempt to break the mould a little; it's not something you can really slap on a patch or chop up to put on a "greatest hits" release, though I'm sure both have happened at some point.
At the end of the day, Landscapes is still a packaged, for-sale product but it doesn't feel commercial or tacky, it certainly doesn't sound like something that was made to impress anyone, which was partly what black metal was all about, right? As you can see, this album gets me to think in a way few others can and I'm very appreciative to have found something that's helped me do that.
Fingers crossed my nerdy ramblings haven't made too many of you run for the hills before the end of this review. I didn't want to make this review ridiculously long because Landscapes is something that should be experienced (not just read about but I hope I've convinced at least a couple people to give it a try) but honestly, I've found it difficult to condense why I think this album is so good. It's not at all for everyone and there's no shame in saying "this sucks" but I've found far too much comfort and enjoyment out of Landscapes to try encouraging others to check it out.
Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
