THE DARK WORLD
Fed up of the world being a shitshow? So are Enslaved. New album Utgard is about journeying into the realms of the unconscious instead, to rediscover yourself and your commonality with others
WORDS: JONATHAN SELZER PICTURES: ROY BJØRGE
In a world with all its bearings intact, Enslaved would have played the Fire In The Mountains festival this July just past. Set on a ranch in the vast Wyoming wilderness, it’s one of those events that binds environment and community into a bigger whole, the workshops and talks that were to take place alongside the live sets all guiding the attendees to rekindle rhythms too easily abandoned to our skittish, modern consciousness.
Ivar Bjørnson, Enslaved guitarist and, along with frontman Grutle Kjellson, founder member of a band whose musical and philosophical horizons are ever expanding, is taking the long view: “We’ve been around for almost 30 years, so what’s another decade?” he laughs.
“They had this incredible non-music programme,” he continues from his Bergen home. “We were looking into Grutle doing a fishing workshop in the nearby rivers, and there would be people nearby farming. The festival had a good connection with the Native American community around there, which was also involved. My friend Jonas Lorentzen, who did the wolf howls on Heilung’s live DVD, had looked at some Utgard myths, and put together a plan for cooking in accordance with food mentioned in the mythologies. It was a complete thing going on.”
That notion of finding resonances far from home, of deepening your own roots by seeing them in relation to other cultures, is a theme that runs throughout Enslaved’s latest and 15th album, Utgard. Named after one of the nine realms in Norse cosmology and the mythical, chaotic and primordial home of the Norse Jotun giants, it’s a journey into a metaphor-rich heart of darkness, but with all the grace, flint-edged determination and billowing, progressive wanderlust that’s made every album a celebratory step into the breach, transmuting their blackened beginnings into a kaleidoscopic quest for knowledge.