Ulver
Bergtatt: Et eeventyr i 5 capitler

His cheeks were fiery red, his head burning as if hot coals were blazing behind his eyes: Johann knew that his little son Werther would not survive that night, and that something needed to be done, to bring him as quickly as possible to the nearby village to try to somehow curb the terrible fever that had gripped the five-year-old boy for some days.

He wrapped him as best as he could in a warm blanket that had been hanging by the crackling fireplace until that moment, bundled him up thoroughly, and rushed out of the house with his son in his arms and mounted the horse, which reared like a wave in a stormy sea and bolted into the darkness of that February night. "The village is not far," Johann said to the child (who, feverish as he was, was suspended in a dreadful state of half-sleep, unable to distinguish what was real from what was a product of illness), "Hold on, my son"! With each jolt of the horse, the child jolted, muttered to himself, writhed, and tried to free himself from imaginary hands. "Don’t you see, father, the Elf King?" Werther said... Johann tried to reassure his son, telling him that there was nothing around them, only the cold wind blowing on their faces, the mist, and the bony branches of the trees along the roadside, but in the child, the fear of something the father could not see (or did not want to see) grew. The young boy muttered more loudly, more intensely: he spoke of a King who called to him, trying to win his trust by telling him of games, beautiful tales, castles, and delicacies that awaited him if only he would let himself slip into his gray arms.

The man, terribly frightened and filled with horror at hearing his son's dreadful ravings, sped up the race of his horse, and in no time they reached the village. Overwhelmed by effort and fatigue, he nonetheless managed to lift the child and run toward the doctor's shop: opening the door, he burst into the room like a hurricane, gently placing Werther on the cot. When he uncovered his face, despair took him as he saw that the child was no longer breathing, that his heart had stopped beating, that his mouth was twisted in a grimace of pain, and that his now cold little hands clutched a piece of embroidered gray cloth torn from who knows where, the last attempt to resist an assailant who was inexorably drawing him to himself.

The post black metal, so fashionable today, may have several prominent figures, some founding fathers, but as I have always felt and experienced it, a single root, which answers to the name of "Bergtatt" by Ulver. Released in 1995, this work combines the ferocity of Norwegian black metal (a dark flame that at that time was shining with greater vigor) with nighttime and nostalgic folk atmospheres, in which a clean and "distant" voice hovers like an insubstantial presence, then invests the listener with icy blind fury. An essential record in the collection of black metal lovers, and more generally, of those who like to explore its more "post" aspects, "Bergtatt" doesn't need many words, but only asks that one close their eyes and let themselves be carried away by its notes, surrender to them as one might surrender to the Elf King.