Voto:
Here I am, finally found a moment... so, I could spend rivers of words on filosofem, and end up saying nothing, so I will try to be as schematic as possible. First of all, we need to start from a broader perspective; it's no coincidence that I spoke of "music of unease" and not just black metal... by adopting this approach, we can identify a specific path in the history of 20th-century music that includes all those artists who have used the medium of music over time to express negative feelings. In this journey, I see filosofem as a culmination point—not, of course, the definitive terminus, but a very important conceptual junction (obviously "surmountable" in the future)... and it’s no coincidence that this is a work that has opened new avenues... in the realm of extreme metal, it’s difficult to talk about the "authenticity" of pain, since pain is often employed as a parameter, frequently developed through manneristic logic or simple attitude, pose. For example: screaming is undoubtedly a way to convey negative emotions, but by now, it has become a stylistic standard, a cliché adopted a priori as a foundational element of a certain type of music, to the extent that growling and screaming can be viewed in a positive light (after all, there are also "happy" extreme bands, or simply "intelligent" ones, just think of the use of this element in bands like Atheist, Therion, Misanthrope, or even in many nu-metal or post-metal nonsense). In filosofem, however, the adoption of certain standards of brutality is no longer the end but the means for the expression of a certain state of mind, a certain message, a certain conception of art. When the stylistic device is received, internalized, and metabolized, it becomes a starting point. And in filosofem, black metal is a starting point that leads to something else, which today we can call depressive black metal, but in '96 this something was not definable; it was something beyond. I agree that certain earlier works of Burzum can, in some respects, be considered superior (they certainly are in strictly metal terms, because they are better played and structured), but in light of the trajectory taken, they appear partial in the process of refinement that Burzum's artistic conception has undergone over time... take Picasso: if you look at his early works, closer to a more "canonical" style of painting, it is clear that Picasso knows how to draw, but compared to what comes after, they progressively diminish in value compared to the conceptual power of his mature works... the same goes for Burzum... and it's a shame that Burzum's journey was interrupted by the arrest, as I am convinced that subsequent works would have further shifted the axis: making a hypothetical projection (even mental masturbation), I find it easy to imagine a post-filosofem era increasingly distant from black metal... who knows, maybe it would have resulted in an abnormally electrified cocktail of singer-songwriter influences, electrified ambient, electrified folklore... all these tendencies were already present in filosofem; the drums were disappearing or taking on a marginal role, the distortion becoming more and more rarefied and intangible, the voice less and less screeched and agonizing, the structure of the pieces drowning in a rarefaction based on repetition and the vibrant sound waves of distortion...... take a (crazy) artist like Daniel Johnston and think about how the psychic collapse, in other forms, is the same: uncontainable, indomitable artistic arrogance that subverts all rationality... and all the post works are often present-day abortions, criticized or ignored, only to become standards in the future... back then, I also received filosofem with lukewarm enthusiasm, much preferring the releases that had just preceded it, but that is because one (physiologically) tends to judge a product with genre-related criteria, but especially with those of the present... over time, I felt the value of this album growing,
