American musician, ornithologist, and writer Jonathan Meiburg released ‘The Great Awakening’ with his band Shearwater in the summer of 2022, neoclassical keyboardist Nils Frahm made ‘Music For Animals’ that same year, and Brian Eno also released a climate album.
The loudest, most direct, and most passionate statement of the year, however, can be found on Long Distance Calling’s ‘Eraser’. This album asks the question: Is the world better off without humans?
German rockers Long Distance Calling (Photo © Andre Stephan) work with the dynamics of heavy guitar riffs with psychedelic influences, interspersed with moments of restrained beauty. A driving rhythm section serves as their engine. On ‘Eraser’, the four musicians from Münster, Germany, stand up for the world’s endangered species. Each song represents a particular creature threatened with extinction by man-made climate and environmental crises.
‘Eraser’ is the four-piece’s eighth album and the follow-up to 2020’s ‘How Do We Want To Live’, a creative highlight in the band’s existence.
The question on their previous album is echoed on ‘Eraser’, and the answer is not hopeful.
The stream of misery that rushes by in the video for the epic title track, made with the help of Greenpeace, is deeply depressing. The images of the global destruction of nature are almost endless: pollution, toxic bubbles, plastic soup, forest fires, hurricanes, melting ice caps, gun violence, wars, refugees, suffering people and animals. This is the final track on the album. It is preceded by a cavalcade of fellow earthlings, animals threatened with extinction.
‘Enter Death Box’ is the title of the opening track. A piano melody that tinkles like a music box of timeless beauty, but time has run out, beauty is fading, in decline. The gates of the theme park that houses the last of their kind open, metal guitars explode and hack away like circling knives at the innocents who must die because of the insatiable greed of a species, for their flesh, their skin, their horn, their tusks, or simply for the pleasure of the killers.
Alternating between powerful crescendos and deeply melodic and wistful chords, the poignant single ‘Kamilah’ tells the story of the gorillas of the Central and West African rainforests and how their existence is threatened by poachers, timber companies and encroaching urbanization. It is also the story of the orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra. It is the story of the Amazon in South America, an area crucial in the fight against global warming and the home of the sloth, one of the animals passing through on ‘Eraser’. With his slow locomotion and perpetual smile, he is perhaps the most innocent of all. A jazz saxophone, slow and unhurried as a sloth moves through the rainforest canopy, blows a wistful tribute to this extraordinary, imaginative creature.
If the Amazon disappears, not only will the sloth disappear, but so will man.
Giants Leaving
Another impressive song and one of the strongest accelerating tracks on Eraser is ‘Giants Leaving’. The song is dedicated to the albatross, the mighty seabird that lives in the area of the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific. Albatrosses have the largest wingspan of any living bird, up to 340 centimeters. Their long wings allow them to fly long distances with minimal effort and muscle power. They use rising air currents to hover, alternating with long glides. Of the twenty-one species of albatross, nineteen are endangered. The biggest threat is longline fishing. The birds come off the bait on the line, get hooked, and drown. But there is more that threatens them, as shown in the documentary ‘Albatross’, filmed by Chris Jordan on Midway, an atoll near the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, the world’s largest floating garbage patch, between the U.S. West Coast and Hawaii. Images of dead birds from that film, their guts full of plastic, went around the world and can also be seen in the stunning animated video that accompanies ‘Giants Leaving’, which is visually and musically like a relentless death race.
Giants Leaving. It has happened before in the history of the world. Are we going to let it happen again? Isn’t it better for the world if this other species, the instigator of all this evil, all this madness, disappears itself? By the end of the album, the only thing left to man – the ‘Eraser’ video here is an unmistakable reference to Tarkovsky’s masterpiece ‘Stalker’ – seems to have been wiped out, like a plague the world is better off without. Or is there still a glimmer of hope for us, a future? We hold that in our own hands. As ‘Eraser’ ends:
This songs is a heartfelt tribute
to the gradual erosion of nature
at the hands of mankind.
Time is up.
Let’s act now
Meet LDC coming weekend in London, Utrecht and Eindhoven:
Deep emotions and epic adventures
These days, crossing genres is a normal part of the creative process for many musicians and orchestras. Such is the case with Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer Vegard Sverre Tveitan, known as Ihsahn in (progressive) rock, metal and avant-garde.
Vegard Sverre Tveitan is best known for his work with the black metal band Emperor. He is also a founding member of Thou Shalt Suffer, where he played guitar, keyboards and vocals. Tveitan also collaborated with his wife Heidi Solberg Tveitan, known as Starofash, in the project Peccatum. Since 2006 he has concentrated on solo albums and occasional guest appearances.
‘Ihsahn’ is also the title of Vegard Sverre Tveitan’s latest project. It consists of eleven songs, recorded in both metal and orchestral versions and released earlier this year on two separate albums. According to Tveitan, the orchestral parts are composed in such a way that they work within the metal versions as well as forming their own score.
Metal and heavy orchestral music have always flirted with each other. And in the ritualistic context of many metal bands, the devil is often seen as a “fair angel” or a “subtle beast”, as lutenist Jozef van Wissem (not averse to a pot of metal either) called the prince of darkness on his latest album, ‘The Night Dwells In The Day’.
Instead of hiring a real symphony orchestra to record ‘Ihsahn’ Vegard Sverre Tveitan decided to play everything himself, on the computer, instrument by instrument, using samples. It took him three years, but the Covid-19 pandemic gave him plenty of time. As with the metal version, Ihsahn played most of the orchestral version himself, with the exception of drums and percussion, which were played by Tobias Ørnes Andersen and Tobias Solbakk, additional percussion by his son Angell Solberg Tveitan, and violin by Chris Baum.
The respective storylines of the metal and orchestral versions of ‘Ihsahn’ run parallel to each other, but are so intertwined that the listener can switch between the two worlds at any time. Songs like ‘Cervus Venator’, ‘Anima Extraneau’ and ‘Sonata Profana’ are identical in both versions.
The metal version of ‘Ihsahn’ is an intense ride full of sharp turns, heavy rock and tribal drumming that leads past slashing guitar solos and vocals that bubble up from the depths of the earth. The orchestral version of ‘Ihsahn’ was inspired by film composers such as Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams and Bernard Herrmann.
‘Ihsahn (orchestral)’ is at least as densely layered as ‘Ihsahn (metal)’, but has more breath, more space. Where ‘metal’ takes the listener on a haunting journey through deep emotions, ‘orchestral’ offers a gripping epic adventure in which nature itself forces (destructive) man to understand. Check out the video for the atmospheric ‘The Distance Between Us (Orchestral Version)’.
In November 2023, the first single from ‘Ihsahn’, ‘Pilgrimage to Oblivion’, and the accompanying videos were released online. The video for the metal version was shot by Shaun Hodson from the UK, while the video for the orchestral version was shot by Costin Chioreanu from Romania.
Can musicians and artists help forest and climate scientists communicate with the world? Vegard Sverre Tveitan answers this question, if not directly, at least indirectly, with ‘Ihsahn’. And that includes a majestic listening experience.
Ihsahn – Ihsahn (metal)
Ihsahn – Ihsahn (orchestral)
