Music and Artwork
The music of Filosofem continued Vikernes' experimentation with minimalism, repetition and ambient music within black metal. The tracks are all quite long (the shortest being just over seven minutes), and are typically composed around very few musical motifs. For instance, "Jesu død", a track of over eight-and-a-half minutes, is primarily based around variations of a single riff. Opening track "Burzum" features a prominent melody played by a synthesizer, and the two "Decrepitude" tracks consist of sound effects over very sparse guitars. The album also included Burzum's longest ambient track to date, the twenty-five-minute "Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte".
The album cover and booklet contain artwork by Theodor Kittelsen. The front cover is named Op under Fjeldet toner en Lur (Norwegian for "up in the hills a clarion call rings out").
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“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)