Vàli
Skogslandskap

Damned Ulver.

Them again, everywhere. And let's not mention the electronic turn, a great success: absurd, considering that behind this was a metal band.

The metal origins, the black metal trilogy, culminated with that “Nattens Madrigal” (1997), the third act that not only closed a cycle for the band but significantly put the final seal on an entire epic, that of True Norwegian Black Metal: the definitive album, beyond which one could not go, and indeed no one did. It wasn't enough for Ulver to put an end to an era, nor, years earlier, to revolutionize the black metal universe itself by tinging it with folk and simultaneously laying the groundwork for those post-derivations that would flourish at the dawn of the third millennium. It was 1995, and “Bergtatt” was released, the debut of this band already perfect at its first cry.

Given those premises, even today I wonder in amazement how our friends found the guts to completely transform themselves already at the second act and dive headlong into the folk tout court of the beautiful “Kveldssanger” when they could have easily set up an entire career repeatedly producing copies, even inferior ones, of their superb first work.

But instead, here they are recalibrated as a trio, with acoustic guitars, in an almost instrumental album: the Evening Songs. The turn was so drastic that even I at the time (it was 1996) showed some resistance, but only at first, because “Kveldssanger” was too beautiful not to melt even the most diehard merdallaro into a state of bliss, who, in the dark and cold winter nights, secretly, away from prying ears, would immerse and mirror himself in that world of peace artistically recreated by the Wolves.

The fact is, if you are young, a metalhead, inexperienced, you tend to get excited about things that you will later discover to be the faded/gross copy of other stuff done better by someone else. “Kveldssanger” is not that: those thirty-five minutes are still the best possible Nordic folk, or at least the model you are obligated to compare yourself to every time.

2013: Vàli - “Skogslandskap" (Prophecy)

If “Kveldssanger” was about stories of simple people, living life in rustic villages immersed in the majesty of the imposing landscapes of ancient Norway (tradition and culture in symbiosis with Nature), Vàli goes further and strips these arcane chants of the human element: it is Norway naked, penetrated, portrayed in its naturalistic apotheosis, reproduced in elegant miniatures that honor the harmony and the imperceptible, slow transformations of an unspoiled nature.

“Skogslandskap” (“Forest Landscapes” in English), which follows at great distance the debut “Forlatt” of 2004 (after years of silence in which the only sign of life, in 2010, was the participation, with a couple of tracks, to the compilation “Whom The Moon A Nightsong Sings”), is the second precious discographic testimony of Vàli, a mysterious entity also Norwegian.

The strings of an acoustic guitar barely touched, caressed, loved, at times vigorously struck; behind, a quartet of musicians, an intertwining delicate and epic at the same time of violin, cello, flute, and piano – the latter being prodigious. Vàli is a spirit of the North that holds the keys to unlock doors, access secret paths that zigzag amongst the thick stems of conifers whose sharp canopies cover steep slopes; the fronds swaying in the wind, the dimming reddish, bleeding light, inside the black night that equally slowly gives way to the new day, dressed in blinding white. A magical journey that originates from the quiet of twilight and transports through the fragrances of wood and resins, the sharp taste of frost and snow, along the long shadows cast by the evening, to the prodigious awakening of the beings of the night: an underground scurrying of spirits and essences that populate a underworld made of tunnels that bloom on the surface, among the autumn's dry leaves, the gnarled roots of trees, the bed of placid mountain streams. It is the realm of Nature, the absence of Man.

A masterpiece in its genre.