Solefald

Solefald is a Norwegian Avantgarde/Post-Black metal band that was formed by members Lars Are "Lazare" Nedland and Cornelius Jakhelln in August 1995, with Lars singing and playing keyboard/piano and dr

Solefald is a Norwegian Avantgarde/Post-Black metal band that was formed by members Lars Are "Lazare" Nedland and Cornelius Jakhelln in August 1995, with Lars singing and playing keyboard/piano and drums, and Cornelius singing and playing guitar and bass. The meaning of the band's name is best explained in an interview from Century Media Records website. Lazare states "Solefald is an old norse word for sunset. We "stole" it from a painting by the Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen. His two paintings "Soleglad" and "Solefald" portrays the cycle of being, and we found it to be a very fitting idea for our band." Cornelius also states ""Solefald" means literally "the fall of the sun", or just "sunset"; the way we spell it is Danish, from the 19th century, but in Icelandic and Old Norse you find the name with the spelling "solarfall", meaning the same."

Their first official rehearsal together was in 1995 with the song "When The Moon Is On The Wave." They released their first, 5 song demo, entitled Jernlov (translated to Iron Law in English), in 1996. Jernlov was the band's most traditional black metal release, but it was already quite evident that the band had an experimental edge, incorporating Lazare's choir like clean vocals and lush piano passages into the heavy and intense black metal formula. They were a rare breed of band, that was able to successfully fuse two opposing feelings of music, beauty and ambience and intensity and rage. They were one of the first (and only in some cases) bands in the black metal world to incorporate bizarre new elements into the style, including a bag pipe passage in one song.