Early Emperor era

Emperor debut album 'In the Nightside Eclipse' remains a pioneering force in black metal. this masterpiece showcases virtuosic musicianship and lyricism that set the bar for the genre, add to the Atmospheric soundscapes and haunting melodies.

Emperor // I Am The Black Wizards

From the never ending mountains black, to the bottomless lakes I am the ruler and has been for eternities long My wizards are many, but their essence is mine Forever they are in the hills in their stone homes of grief Because I am the spirit of their existence I am them

Emperor  - The Burning Shadows Of Silence

Samoth (Emperor)

Live in London (July 1993)

source

In the Nightside Eclipse - Emperor (1994)

Artist : Kristian Wåhlin

People always talk about I am the Black Wizards but there are so many other bangers in Into the Nightside Eclipse. Into the Infinity of Thoughts... Inno A Satana...

I don’t rly have a hard-and-fast rule about not listening to music made by horrible people or whatever. But I don’t listen to Burzum anymore, bc on top of being a fascist he’s such an embarrassing dweeb that I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I gotta admit. Any time I get on a black metal kick again there’s the voice of my 15 y/o self in my head going “man....Hvis Lyset Tar Oss is pretty good huh? remember that one?” and I must remain steadfast

"We were too busy fucking around with music to chase girls. The three of us, if I remember correctly, we didn't have girlfriends at the time. We were so engulfed in the underground, planning this cool band and becoming part of the scene (...). Jesus, girls were the last thing on my mind!"

-Mortiis.

Interview by Chris Dick (2019)

(In the picture: Ihsahn and Mortiis)

A Lucky Lunar Eclipse - April 3rd, 1996.

"The full Moon would normally washout the spectacle of Comet Hyakutake's lovely tail, even for those far from light polluted skies. Except that on the night of April 3rd, 1996, comet observers were in luck - the dance of the planets called for a total lunar eclipse! Lunar eclipses are caused when the Moon passes through the Earth's shadow. Although dimmed, the eclipsed Moon may not appear completely dark. Sunlight scattered into the Earth's shadow after passing around the planet's edge and through its dusty atmosphere can make the Moon take on dramatic shades of red during totality, as demonstrated in the above photo of the November, 1993 lunar eclipse. With the April lunar eclipse, totality began at 6:26 p.m. EST and lasted about an hour and a half. Weather permitting, the eclipse would have been visible for all those comet and Moon watchers lucky enough to be on the Earth's nightside."

THE SCARLET LETTER

The always advised Ihsahn from Emperor told US on an interview with Metal Injection, and I quote: “You can’t compete with nostalgia.” and that’s why he doesn’t see a new Emperor album happening. Smart.

Besides his illustrious and differently themed solo career, his former black metal wizard group called it quits (as far as new music goes) in 2001 (Prometheus) , 23 years ago, but Emperor live activity never quite ceased and even in 2024 they still headline stages all over the world, playing what their fans “really like” which consist of their mere 4 albums run, kicked off by the monumental classic In the Nightside Eclipse, a game changer not only for Norwegian Black Metal but also in the way how extreme Metal and Symphonic came together.

Comparing to Moonspell’s own bumps on the road of our “not so smart” musical decisions  (according to thousands of our fans), the question emerges if new music and albums is merely a caprice of bands; a kickstart of a new touring cycle; new numbers on the bulky business of digital or if there’s something else, deeper and perhaps, more spiritual that goes against the common sense of Ihsahn affirmation and against the fans’ general coldness and anxiety/fear of a new album by band who meant so much to them in their “happy days”.

Even though Under the Moonspell, Wolfheart and Irreligious, were no piece of cake to write, release and promote on the road, our ordeal with unsatisfied fans  started with Sin/Pecado, the ever changeling third album. The 2ND SKIN EP was a true omen of times to come, and first reviews were not properly warm enough. They rather entertained the notion of the “why have they done that” and of “we don’t really know how to come to terms with their change”. This was symptomatic of those pair of years that kicked off with Paradise Lost’s One Second in 1997 and topped by “misunderstood” records such as Tiamat’s Deeper kind of slumber of the same year or My Dying Bride’s 34,788%... and of course our own sinful entry into our yet pristine gothic metal pedigree.

A little declaration of interest, before we go any further: I don’t intend to analyze here if  the album aged well, if people were foolish and unprepared or simply mean and vengeful to bands who dared changing and “disappoint” their fan base.

What interests me, for the sake of argument, are those underground metal  years and what happened to the actors involved.

As far as Moonspell goes, there has been no or little forgiveness. I dare to say that we never fulfilled our potential as a band destined for bigger success, as designed by our flamboyant debuts and we did shrug our shoulders and diverted our path through adjacent roads, unaware of Ihsahn later day wisdom and perfect timing.

A deal breaker was ,definitely, our cover of Depeche Mode’s Sacred.

The fans of the wolf and the eye of Horus’ simple but effective mysticism joined the ranks of magazines that ditched Sin and even our former bass player Ares was quoted in Rock Hard Germany, defending his split from the band with a loud and clear “Kein Boch Depeche Mode!”, even though it was his idea in the first place to “expand” our fan base and to cover the amazing British band.

We simply didn’t get away with it.

On the contrary, In Flames’ 1997 Whoracle Everything Counts met with praise and no beef and later, Lacuna Coil, would get lauded by their Enjoy the Silence version in 2006, having the dust settled.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m not the biggest fan of Sin myself and all the album making of and recordings were crooked from beginning to end, starting by the band’s horrible atmosphere back then and being topped by a, in my opinion, a faulty production that seen the band intentions clashing with the conservatism. That’s why I intend to re-record this one album in the future, so help me Goth.

It wasn’t all was good or bad with Sin (for instance, it still is our best-selling album in many countries such as France),  quite the opposite but this was the lesson learnt and, in that aspect, Sin/Pecado was the most central album of our entire discography, and, undoubtedly, the most influential in our personal lives and career as the songwriters, musicians and touring performers of Moonspell. Some say we never bounced back, others that it freed us and allowed us to make even better music. Maybe no one is right, or wrong, but I write from an inside perspective, thus beyond good and evil.

To wrap it up: I'm still left wondering with a couple of things:

What are new albums for? Would it have been different if we did Sin under a new band monicker (like many told us) being smart about it just like Emperor did dealing the subsequent Ihsahn music which probably wouldn’t please the die-hard Emperor fan base?

Has Sin and other aforementioned albums been a rebellious act of freedom which, ironically, paved the way to more cliched Heavy Metal forms like Hammerfall and all the “novelty acts” that followed, inaugurating sub-genres like pirate and dwarf metal that enjoy now their popularity peak?

Was the early Moonspell works et al so damn good or was it our very life that was so damn good when they came out, and we all fell from innocence when we ate the apple of experimenting and seeing our bands and songs under a different light?

I don't have all the answers but I genuinely keep asking.

Unkillable you say? What would happen if one were killed, hypothetically? — 💎

"That shouldn't be possible. But an "eclipse" would start. The separations of Dayside and Nightside would blur together and it would be chaos. But humans slip through, anything can slip through if it knows what its doing. That's why they have the nightlights."

"Abdiel, I think an eclipse is happening. This nightlight accidentally came here after chasing a bogeyman which jumped in Dayside and right back to Nightside. We've run into two humans, one deer, and one fox."

"That ain't normal! That's just us in the span of a few weeks!"

"Bad. Very bad."

"They shouldn't be killable, nor touchable. The Sun makes its rules--"

"And the Moon breaks them."

Webb Rules Out Thick Carbon Dioxide Atmosphere for Rocky Exoplanet An international team of researchers has used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to calculate the amount of heat energy coming from the rocky exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 c. The result suggests that the planet's atmosphere - if it exists at all - is extremely thin. With a dayside temperature of roughly 380 kelvins (about 225 degrees Fahrenheit), TRAPPIST-1 c is now the coolest rocky exoplanet ever characterized based on thermal emission. The precision necessary for these measurements further demonstrates Webb's utility in characterizing rocky exoplanets similar in size and temperature to those in our own solar system. The result marks another step in determining whether planets orbiting small red dwarfs like TRAPPIST-1 - the most common type of star in the galaxy - can sustain atmospheres needed to support life as we know it. "We want to know if rocky planets have atmospheres or not," said Sebastian Zieba, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and first author on results being published today in Nature. "In the past, we could only really study planets with thick, hydrogen-rich atmospheres. With Webb we can finally start to search for atmospheres dominated by oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide." "TRAPPIST-1 c is interesting because it's basically a Venus twin: It's about the same size as Venus and receives a similar amount of radiation from its host star as Venus gets from the Sun," explained co-author Laura Kreidberg, also from Max Planck. "We thought it could have a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere like Venus." TRAPPIST-1 c is one of seven rocky planets orbiting an ultracool red dwarf star (or M dwarf) 40 light-years from Earth. Although the planets are similar in size and mass to the inner, rocky planets in our own solar system, it is not clear whether they do in fact have similar atmospheres. During the first billion years of their lives, M dwarfs emit bright X-ray and ultraviolet radiation that can easily strip away a young planetary atmosphere. In addition, there may or may not have been enough water, carbon dioxide, and other volatiles available to make substantial atmospheres when the planets formed. To address these questions, the team used MIRI (Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument) to observe the TRAPPIST-1 system on four separate occasions as the planet moved behind the star, a phenomenon known as a secondary eclipse. By comparing the brightness when the planet is behind the star (starlight only) to the brightness when the planet is beside the star (light from the star and planet combined) the team was able to calculate the amount of mid-infrared light with wavelengths of 15 microns given off by the dayside of the planet. This method is the same as that used by another research team to determine that TRAPPIST-1 b, the innermost planet in the system, is probably devoid of any atmosphere. The amount of mid-infrared light emitted by a planet is directly related to its temperature, which is in turn influenced by atmosphere. Carbon dioxide gas preferentially absorbs 15-micron light, making the planet appear dimmer at that wavelength. However, clouds can reflect light, making the planet appear brighter and masking the presence of carbon dioxide. In addition, a substantial atmosphere of any composition will redistribute heat from the dayside to the nightside, causing the dayside temperature to be lower than it would be without an atmosphere. (Because TRAPPIST-1 c orbits so close to its star - about 1/50th the distance between Venus and the Sun - it is thought to be tidally locked, with one side in perpetual daylight and the other in endless darkness.) Although these initial measurements do not provide definitive information about the nature of TRAPPIST-1 c, they do help narrow down the likely possibilities. "Our results are consistent with the planet being a bare rock with no atmosphere, or the planet having a really thin CO2 atmosphere (thinner than on Earth or even Mars) with no clouds," said Zieba. "If the planet had a thick CO2 atmosphere, we would have observed a really shallow secondary eclipse, or none at all. This is because the CO2 would be absorbing all of the 15-micron light, so we wouldn't detect any coming from the planet." The data also shows that it is unlikely the planet is a true Venus analog with a thick CO2 atmosphere and sulfuric acid clouds. The absence of a thick atmosphere suggests that the planet may have formed with relatively little water. If the cooler, more temperate TRAPPIST-1 planets formed under similar conditions, they too may have started with little of the water and other components necessary to make a planet habitable. The sensitivity required to distinguish between various atmospheric scenarios on such a small planet so far away is truly remarkable. The decrease in brightness that Webb detected during the secondary eclipse was just 0.04 percent: equivalent to looking at a display of 10,000 tiny light bulbs and noticing that just four have gone out. "It is extraordinary that we can measure this," said Kreidberg. "There have been questions for decades now about whether rocky planets can keep atmospheres. Webb's ability really brings us into a regime where we can start to compare exoplanet systems to our solar system in a way that we never have before." This research was conducted as part of Webb's General Observers (GO) program 2304, which is one of eight programs from Webb's first year of science designed to help fully characterize the TRAPPIST-1 system. This coming year, researchers will conduct a follow-up investigation to observe the full orbits of TRAPPIST-1 b and TRAPPIST-1 c. This will make it possible to see how the temperatures change from the day to the nightsides of the two planets and will provide further constraints on whether they have atmospheres or not.