OLD PAPER: Myrkur (Terrorizer #252, Aug 2015)

The cover that launched a thousand basement-troll ships.

It’s downright sad that the thing that sticks most in our collective memory about the first years of Myrkur is the horrendous backlash Danish musician Amalie Bruun, the sole constant creative force behind the project (though she maintained some anonimity in the earlier times, namely around the release of the self-titled debut EP), suffered from a bunch of “offended” people in the black metal scene, including some musicians. Even today, after three remarkable full-length records which have even seen her distance her music - which was never fully black metal, or claimed to be even, in the first place - further away from the genre, any mention of Myrkur in the general cesspool of social media usually elicits the awakening of a cave troll or two, generally spouting the same tired rhetoric: usually something along the lines of “she’s a model” (which she isn’t, and never was, and even if she was, so what?), or “she made pop music before” (which she did, with Ex-Cops, and it was actually awesome, and so what?), or “this isn’t black metal”, an argument that will surely exist about a million bands until the end of time, but never with the kind of vitriol that it has when it’s launched against a woman, right? The overall conclusion is always the same, that apparenly this person has been single-handedly responsible for the utter destruction of black metal and all its “values”, or maybe with the help of Deafheaven or Ghost or something, and it’s funny, what a fragile fucking flower black metal must be if it only takes a couple of people doing music you don’t like to completely destroy it, right?

This Terrorizer cover feature that I had the honour of writing a few years back, when Myrkur’s debut full-length, the Kristoffer Rygg-produced ‘M’, was about to be released, has a lot to answer for in fueling some of the hatred, I know. Well, not the feature itself (because in my experience, about 0.1% of the screaming knuckleheads have actually read it), but the fact that Myrkur were on the cover of Terrorizer, and above all that tag line saying “The future of black metal is here”. To be clear, I wasn’t the author of that - and it’s NOT A QUOTE, as many people have apparently assumed - she never said that, okay? Quite the contrary, actually. During our conversation I asked her if she considered her music as Myrkur to be black metal and she said, very reasonably, “I wouldn't necessarily call myself a black metal artist. There's some roots, obviously, and some love of black metal that you can hear in my music, but I don't really follow any of the rules or expectations that come with it. In any aspect, either composition or image or behaviour. I think my music is sort of a hybrid. Even though a lot of people would like to keep metal to themselves and not have more people listen to it, I would be happy if more metal bands would be accepted and respected by larger and more varied crowds. It is an art form and it should be respected at the level of any other music, like classical music or any other genre." In fact, throughout the whole chat, she always exhibited a level of love and understanding for black metal that far surpasses the average fan. I loved the part where she reasoned that “most black metal actually reminded me of playing violin in the symphony orchestra, I found many similarities between classical music and black metal, and the two spoke to me in the same way. They're both very dark, and even technically speaking the bow technique is very similar to the tremolo-picking style riffs, also the minor scales and chord patterns that some composers used... it just spoke to me in many dimensions,” as well as her take on the typical black metal vocals, about which she says that “it takes some fucking guts to scream. Not all people can do the primal scream, it's scary to sound this way, and to hear what you find when you do the roar that animals do, what happens to your pathetic little self-image.“ See, knuckleheads? If you had bothered to listen to her instead of instantly lapsing into “name three songs”-mode because she wore a dress or whatever, you might have actually found an unusually eloquent, like-minded defender of the genre.

Anyway, I personally would have gone with something else for that tag line, but many people failed to realise how tongue-in-cheek and provocative it was meant to be at the time, as was usual with the editor of the magazine at the time. As I’m sure he won’t mind me revealing, on the email where he asked if I wanted to do this interview, he explained that “I love the album and she seems quite unique,” and also that “I'm bored of old men covers,” so she was on the cover for all the right reasons, that I also happened to agree with.

This issue was actually very special for me - not only I had this cover feature that I count among some of the most important in my career, especially looking back now and realising how far Amalie and Myrkur have come since and the incredible potential her music still has to grow and develop, but also the album of the month of that issue happened to be Chelsea Wolfe’s ‘Abyss’, that I was also fortunate to wax lyrical about. Tell you what, I’ll leave it here as a bonus.

So yeah, if you’re a fan of Myrkur, or even if you’re not - and if you’re not, have you actually listened to the magic of ‘Folkesange’? - I believe this feature is still a bit of a timeless read, from her exasperation towards all the misunderstandings and stuff that’s made up about her with the sole purpose of diminishing her value as an artist, to her resolve in just soldiering on and doing exactly what she wants to do with zero compromise - and her confidence in how good she is at it! -, right down to the admission that she had no idea what the project would lead to next, something quite obvious by the oblique turns taken on ‘Mareridt’ or ‘Folkesange’, for example, I think we could draw a very curious sketch of the amazing talent and determination of this fantastic artist. Thank you for the conversation back then, Amalie - hope we can have another one soon.

As a final curiosity before the jump, I was also asked to write the editorial for this issue, so here you go:

And now, here is the feature in full. Enjoy!

MYRKUR

She has performed and worked with black metal royalty and her debut album `M' is easily one of the most important records in the genre to be released this year. Welcome to the world of Denmark's MYRKUR

Words: Jose Carlos Santos

It was inevitable, really, that the identity of that mysterious, lone woman in the grainy photos in the middle of a snowy wood would quickly be discovered. Myrkur's 2014 self-titled debut EP was not exactly a black metal revolution per se, but contained every seed for it therein. Pastoral yet fierce, atmospheric yet staunchly to-the-point, it would have made the huge impact that it has indeed made regardless of whoever had been its author. The fact that it was apparently the work of a single Danish woman with no previous known connection to any extreme scene just made it all the more fascinating for most of us - and irritating, and even menacing, to a small but tiresomely persistent number of scene police - and explained the curious purity that emanated from it. A year later, and Myrkur is back with her first full-length, simply titled 'M', and although we now know she is in fact Amalie Bruun - a musician born in Denmark and currently residing in New York, mostly known for her presence in the noise pop duo Ex Cops - nothing has really changed. if anything, 'M' reinforces the growing importance of Myrkur in an increasingly stagnating scene, and this applies to any scene you want to try and fit her in. Its 37 minutes fly by as a fleeting spirit from a Scandinavian forest would, the eleven surprisingly (and refreshingly) short pieces that compose it replete with opaque, skewed beauty, both mystical and elusive, but also frequently harrowing, angry and raw.

"1 suppose you can say everything happened very naturally," Myrkur says, with a very discernible Danish accent, about the loss of her initial anonymity. "1 didn't really care too much about being anonymous in the first place, 1 really only cared about people getting introduced to the music through the music, and not in all kinds of shallow ways. But of course, with the intemet being what it is and me not really trying to hide anything, it just became that way. it was mostly writers who cared, really, it was more of a headline thing that everybody wanted to talk about. 1 don't want to lie to anyone, so 1 had no problem 'revealing' things in interviews, as long as 1 thought the questions weren't stupid or offensive, I've always replied to everything, no problem there. Sometimes, some people want to talk to me about things that have nothing to do with my music or with Myrkur, that I'm not interested in discussing, but otherwise it's all good."

So that's one thorny question disarmed, with the logical simplicity she employs in her songwriting. Let's keep myth-busting, shall we? You might have seen somewhere something about Myrkur being a supermodel or some such nonsense, which is simply not the case.
"l'd like to say that I've done one modelling job in my life, with Martin Scorsese, and that's about it," she explains. "1 don't really know where this modelling career reputation came from, what 1 do know is that if 1 was a successful model l'd have a lot more money and a lot more things published in magazines. I can't help but find it funny when people ask me about those things these days, if 1 was ever a successful model 1 can tell you 1 wouldn't be here living with my mother right now!" she says with a hearty laugh. "It's one thing that 1 did, and because I'm on an artist visa in the States, a musician's visa, I'm not really allowed to work as a model even if 1 got any offers. I could only do that one job because it was related to music, and l'd do it again in a heartbeat it was really fun and Martin is a really cool guy."

The initial question that prompted the previous reply was if having worked in the fashion industry, where image is a constant concern, that might have been a catalyst for the shadowy, almost incorporeal presence Myrkur adopts for this musical endeavours. The few press photos she's released focus more on the nature around her than on her figure, and while that fits entirely with the mood of her music, it's refreshingly unusual in this day and age. It also robs her detractors of one more argument they might look for, of her using anything other than her music to promote said music. While she rightfully corrected us on the "model" issue, she does admit her shying away from having a more present image.

"That comes from life, really," she reasons. “At some point, as a woman, you do get tired of the attention you get just based on your looks. Some women feed into it, and some women take a distance from it. It is tiresome be constantly valued as a human being based on different things than what you’d be valued by if you were a man. It's a woman's responsibility to not feed into that. A for me, l've played music since I was born, my parents and my grandparents all played music their whole lives, and I’m very good at it! I’ve practiced my whole life, I’ve written songs since I was born, and all I care about is my music. If you have a talent, if you practice, if you work hard at it and if you do things right, then nobody can fuck with you.
"What really rubs me the wrong way is that this hipster press like Pitchfork and other useless people, they put model before musician when they talk about me without knowing any facts, and that's really bad journalism," she continues. "It’s quite obvious that they do it tos shrink me as a musician, and not only is that disrespectful to me, but it's also disrespectful to models, because they work just as hard as anybody else. People have this thing, like, ‘you're not ugly, you're a model, right?', as if that's the only thing necessary, whereas 1 know for a fact that models work as much as any actor or musician or any other artistic profession."
Just to add another nail to the overfilled coffin of things that are made up about Myrkur, here's just one more.
"The other day someone posted something on my Facebook from some site, I think it was Metal Archives, where it said that the only member of the band is Danish, but the band was formed in the United States and it's an American band," she says almost exhaustedly at this point, throwing her hands in the air. "I honestly don't even know what to say to that, where did that come from? At this point I think I should publish my birth certificate and any other useful info so people don't just make up stuff about me. And that's a problem for me, because at the same time I don't want to respond to these things. I don't want to react to passive-aggressive stuff like that, I don't care to address it and that's maybe why there's still so many misunderstandings. I just want to do things."

These points need very little further elaboration – they're a fact and that's that. What is even more interesting is the fact that, while metal is often seen as a particularly male-centric community, as if that problem isn't transversal to our entire Western society, Myrkur couldn't have been more pleased with what she found in our own little world.

"The good thing is that through music, and particularly through metal and my life in the metal world, l've met equal-minded people, especially people who also play music," she says. "When you go into the studio or the rehearsal space, it doesn't matter what you look like or if you're a man or a woman, because you're just a musician. All musicians respond to other good musicians and you connect immediately. I've done other genres of music and worked with different people and industry people, and it was just until I started working with metal that I've felt this more true respect for music. There's so much image and almost role-playing in metal, that people in their basement with their computer think that the guys in Norway run around burning churches all day, but a lot of those guys take a role, almost like a movie, and even then the music is the only focal point. That's been a very pleasant surprise for me."
This is a rare opportunity we have here – a sort of outsider's view, filled with precious insight, into our often closed community of extreme music by someone who is already on the inside – in fact, more on the inside than most of us will ever be. She doesn't use the example of Norway randomly; as you're probably aware, 'M' was recorded in Norway under the wise guidance of Ulver's Kristoffer Rygg, and features the performances of musicians such as guitarist Teloch (Mayhem, Nidingr), drummer Oyvind Myrvoll (Nidingr) and violinist Ole-Henrik Moe (who has collaborated with Ulver), among others. For a long-time black metal fan like Myrkur, it's an experience that borders on the surreal.

"Once the EP was out, Relapse asked me about a full-length album, but at the time 1 wasn't really ready for that, I didn't even know if 1 wanted to do an album," she clarifies. "But then they asked what producer 1 would like to work with, if any, and that scared me because I did everything myself on the EP, and the thought of having to delegate work to other people was sort of unreal. So 1 just told them, I’ll only work with one producer an dthat’s Ulver, i.e., Kristoffer. I thought they couldn’t get him, but they could. When we started emailing with him, he told us he had heard the EP, that he had like it, and that he would very much like to produce the album, and that was mind-blowingly weird for me. So him and I started emailing back and forth with a few demos, a few new songs I had sketched and a few old things too, we started talking about sound and the approach to it. None of us wanted to do a throwback record, we both wanted to look to the future, with roots firmly planted in black metal and in Scandinavian old music. That's the mindset I went in with, but because I had such a hard time envisioning how all this could be possible, I just went into the studio not thinking too much about it, it was mostly 'let's just go' and see how it could go. Usually, when I've worked with other people in other projects in my life, I've mostly thought that working with other people can be an obstacle to get to where you were dreaming of going. But in this case, it was odd, because Kris was a facilitator for it to become even more than I was dreaming of, it was a very pleasant surprise, he absolutely knew what I wanted by listening to the demos and shared my vision very strongly."

So, for a while a few months back, a Danish girl was calling the shots with a bunch of Norwegian metal stars around her, a rather bewildering notion for some, but it went swimmingly nevertheless.

"Speaking strictly of the musicians, not necessarily about the community and the fans, if you're into metal, if you like to play it and write metal music, people do tend to get obsessed with it. Unless you're Metallica or some other stadium band, there's not that much money to be made in metal, so it also attracts people who don't go into music for that reason. Already there, you've ruled out pop," she laughs. "When I was recording in Norway with musicians from there, I was aware they're not very used to recording with women, or to taking orders from women, like `play this' and `this is how the riff goes' kind of thing, but they were incredibly nice and easy to work with nevertheless. I was very pleasantly surprised, it was the exact opposite of what I had been warned about. If I was to believe the urban legend about the gender issues in metal, I wouldn't have done anything. I would say there is much less objectification of women in metal than in pop. Far, far less. Unless you're in a shitty metal band, because then you're just shitty, no matter what, and people will make fun of you for every reason. But in pop people get away with doing pretty bad music by showing skin all the time, and that's just how human nature is, we like looking at naked bodies and that's fine. But in metal it's not applauded to just take off your clothes and then play a bad song. Why should we listen to you?"

Myrkur might be a recent name in the extreme metal circles as a performer, but not in music as a whole. Actually, Amalie has been playing music for longer than most of our readers have been alive. "My upbringing was not very orthodox," she remembers. "My father is a professional musician, he was quite successful in Demnark in the ‘80s and’90s, so we always had instruments everywhere, he'd teach me some things and I feel there was never really a separation between me and music. if I was not singing, I was playing piano and violin, there was never really a moment when I ‘started’ playing, because 1 don't remember ever not playing or not singing. My dad’s a guitar player, more into Rolling Stones and The Beatles than metal, but he has all these vintage guitars and just taught me stuff. Half of my time as a child I was in the studio with him, sleeping or playing darts with some band he was recording, that kind of thing. My grandmother was a classical pianist, and when she was fourteen she had saved up enough to buy a grand piano that she ended up paying for during a million years, and she gave us that piano, on which I've actually recorded some things for the EP, only heavily distorted and very deep notes. It's a very cool piece from the nineteenth century. So yes, music has always been around me, in me. I often wonder what will happen if I don't want to play music anymore, what will the real world be like for me, because I don't really know what it is. But I think that'll never happen, really." Metal was also an early discovery: "When I was a little girl, my brother had Metallica and Black Sabbath CDs, and I just remember my jaw dropping, having a very strong reaction to it, especially the slower, darker, doomier sounds, but also the thrashier stuff that 1 found so much fun. It's great when you're a child to feel a little scared of music, and it was scary in a way but also very appealing. Then as a teenager I discovered the black metal sound, which made my jaw drop yet again. How could something be so beautiful and yet so ugly at the same time?"

Myrkur's further plunging into extreme metal as she grew older also never clashed with any other principles she might have had, namely of a religious nature, a topic on which she is abundantly clear: "I don't believe in religion. Religion is a mental illness and it's time to realise that it didn't work," she states matter-of-factly. "I don't mind some religions that are more focused on nature worship and on respect for nature and for this earth, but that whole hiding behind religion, pretending to be a mental invalid kind of thing, 1 can't think for myself so somebody else will and they've made a law so I'll follow it and that other guy who follows another law is my natural enemy... that's just awful. That's an awful way to be a human being. And it also bothers me when church and state are mixed together, whether it's Islam or Christianity, it really rubs me the wrong way."

Also, black metal had other connections for her, that most of us might have missed ourselves...

"Most black metal actually reminded me of playing violin in the symphony orchestra, I found many similarities between classical music and black metal, and the two spoke to me in the same way. They're both very dark, and even technically speaking the bow technique is very similar to the tremolo-picking style riffs, also the minor scales and chord patterns that some composers used... it just spoke to me in many dimensions. Of course, the main thing that's hard for people to get used at first is the vocals, but I got used to them very fast, I thought it was so cool, it was a different way of expressing myself, just going into this place of total darkness, or evil, or sadness. It's also brave to do that, it takes some fucking guts to scream. Not all people can do the primal scream, it's scary to sound this way, and to hear what you find when you do the roar that animals do, what happens to your pathetic little self-image."

At this point, we ask her point-blank if she considers herself a black metal artist.

"I wouldn't necessarily call myself a black metal artist," she argues. "There's some roots, obviously, and some love of black metal that you can hear in my music, but I don't really follow any of the rules or expectations that come with it. In any aspect, either composition or image or behaviour. I think my music is sort of a hybrid. Even though a lot of people would like to keep metal to themselves and not have more people listen to it, I would be happy if more metal bands would be accepted and respected by larger and more varied crowds. It is an art form and it should be respected at the level of any other music, like classical music or any other genre."

This non-conformity and complete ignorance of the rulebook is exactly what we think makes a true black metal artist. We've said this before, but it bears repeating — black metal needs characters. It needs strong personalities, because it's on those personalities that the genre has been built, and we don't need to roll out the whole list again for anyone to figure that out. And with the notable exception of Erik Danielsson and Watain, the last decade has been painfully short on the sort of people that both concentrate attention, say meaningful things and make the scene move forward and reinvent itself with their genre-transcending music. Myrkur is clearly one of those, and this is only the beginning. We're just now digesting her first full-length, and we can only dream about what will come next. in fact, so can she.

"I’ve given up on trying to predict how anything will go relating to Myrkur," she says with a dry smile. "Sometimes 1 feel like, you know when you have a party and you go to sleep but the guests are still in the living room continuing the party? That's how this feels, almost like it’s something out of my control that lives a life of its own. I always think that this or that can’t happen and that it’s impossible – I felt that way about putting the EP together, I felt that way about going to Norway, with strange men recording this whole record based on my shit-sounding demos that turned out more than I could have dreamed of, and then I thought that there’s no way I can play this music live and now I’m doing it. I go with it where it leads.”

Leading, not following.