Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

At the end of 1997 Kristoffer Rygg brought the keyboard player and composer Tore Ylwizaker into the collective. Together they worked out a plan for what they called the Blake album. What came of it is a setting of the whole of William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The track divisions follow the plates of Blake's own engravings, and the titles are those plate numbers. What is in the music is electronics, industrial sound, progressive metal, experimental rock and ambient passages. Nothing of black metal's aesthetic is left. Rygg has called the record a second chapter, or a new beginning, and connected it to the period in which he learned how to work with software and computers, which let them do new things with music. It was produced by Rygg with Knut Magne Valle and Ylwizaker. Stine Grytøyr, Ihsahn and Samoth of Emperor and Fenriz of Darkthrone all sing on it. Critics were startled by the swerve and praised it anyway. Terrorizer, Metal Hammer and Rock Hard all made it album of the month, and it placed high in their end-of-year polls. The running order here is the original's as printed.