A few days later than intended, but last Friday Hammerheart Records released “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave”, the third single from the forthcoming Runemagick album After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil.
The delay feels appropriate in a way. I am not particularly active on the internet to begin with, and last week I spent some time away from much of the usual digital noise while hiking through Aurlandsdalen in Norway.
Mountains, rivers, old paths, changing weather, stone, water and long stretches where the surrounding landscape becomes far more present than anything happening on a screen.
A truly beautiful place.
Experiences like that inevitably connect with some of the thoughts behind this album. Not because Urðr’s Cosmic Weave was written about Aurlandsdalen, because it wasn’t, but because being surrounded by such a landscape reminds me of something that has become increasingly important in how I experience both nature and music.
We are not standing outside the world observing it.
We are within it.
And that brings me back to Urðr’s Cosmic Weave.
Deeper into the journey
As the third single, this song reveals another part of After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil, but within the album itself its position is even more important.
The journey begins with “After Chaos”, connected to Hagalaz (ᚺ), where the collapse has already taken place. The destruction itself is not the subject. We arrive afterwards, when the noise has faded and what remains is silence, presence and the first awareness of something beginning to move beneath the remnants.
From there, the journey continues through “Rune Magick Unbound” and into “The Nocturnal Vigil”, where stillness becomes something more than absence. The vigil asks us to remain awake within that stillness rather than immediately trying to escape or fill it.
By the time we reach “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave”, the perspective begins to change.
Awareness moves outward.
What began as standing within the aftermath gradually becomes an awareness of connection.
The individual remains present, but something much larger is becoming visible.
Or perhaps not visible.
Felt.
Eihwaz and the hidden weave
Each of the eight songs on After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil is connected to a rune. “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave” is connected to Eihwaz (ᛇ).
Within the context of this album I associate Eihwaz with the hidden weave.
As with the other runes on the album, I am not interested in reducing it to a fixed definition. The runes become far less interesting to me when they are treated as symbols with a simple list of meanings attached to them.
Protection.
Transformation.
Death.
Life.
Strength.
Whatever words someone chooses.
Those may provide entrances into understanding, but they are not the rune itself.
My relationship with runes has increasingly become one of experiencing them as living currents. Their nature changes depending on context, relation and perspective. A rune can reveal one aspect at one moment and something entirely different later.
Within “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave”, Eihwaz became connected to structures that exist beneath what we immediately perceive.
Roots beneath the visible tree.
Threads beneath the surface.
Connections between states of existence.
Something that remains present without demanding recognition.
This is the hidden weave.
Urðr and the question of destiny
The presence of Urðr naturally introduces another dimension.
Urðr is one of the Norns, and it would be easy to interpret the cosmic weave purely as destiny. A predetermined structure where everything has already been decided and each of us simply follows a thread towards an unavoidable conclusion.
That is not how I wanted to approach it.
The weave I imagined while writing the song is not a prison and it is not a script.
It is closer to an immense network of relationships, movements, causes and consequences.
Every movement touches something else.
Every action becomes part of another condition.
Every pause has weight.
Nothing exists entirely in isolation.
Yet there is no need to imagine some conscious authority controlling it all.
The weave can simply exist.
Neither merciful nor cruel.
Neither rewarding nor punishing.
It does not have to judge us.
It does not have to explain itself.
It simply continues.
That distinction became important when writing the lyrics. The individual within the song does not kneel before the cosmic structure, but neither does he attempt to conquer it.
There is acknowledgement without submission.
Awareness without the illusion of mastery.
To recognise that you are part of something infinitely larger does not necessarily mean surrendering yourself to it.
Perhaps it simply means paying attention.
The animistic current
This connects naturally with the animistic current running throughout After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil.
For me, animism is not primarily about constructing a belief system or attempting to recreate an ancient religion. It is much simpler and, at the same time, much more difficult to put into words.
It is a way of meeting the world.
A forest is not merely timber.
A river is not simply water moving from one geographical point to another.
A mountain is not just stone.
A place can carry presence.
Weather changes more than temperature and pressure.
Silence can contain something rather than merely being the absence of sound.
When you spend enough time away from constant human noise, these things become harder to ignore.
Perhaps that is one reason I am increasingly drawn towards forests, mountains and places where human activity becomes less dominant. The perspective changes. The idea that we stand at the centre of everything becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
We become one presence among countless others.
This does not require everything to be explained.
Quite the opposite.
I think part of the value lies in allowing some things to remain beyond explanation.
That perspective has gradually entered Runemagick more deeply as well. The runes within this album are not commands used to impose human will upon reality. They are not tools for controlling the forces around us.
They mark passages.
They reveal currents.
They remain.
Not everything needs to be controlled
That idea of remaining within something without attempting to dominate it is central to “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave”.
We have a tendency to believe that understanding something gives us ownership over it.
We name things.
We classify them.
We construct systems around them.
Then we sometimes begin to mistake those systems for reality itself.
The cosmic weave in this song refuses that.
You may perceive fragments of the pattern.
You may become aware of connections.
You may recognise that one movement affects another.
But the whole remains beyond you.
There is something liberating in that.
You do not need to understand everything in order to experience it.
You do not need to control something in order to participate in it.
You can simply remain attentive.
This is also why the lyrics describe being within the cosmic order without surrendering to it.
There is no struggle against the weave because there is nothing to defeat.
There is no worship of the weave because it asks for none.
There is only awareness of relation.
From words into music
Like the other songs on After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil, “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave” began with words before it became the piece heard on the album.
The earliest form was a shorter Swedish text, almost more like a poem or a collection of images than conventional song lyrics.
This has become an important part of my creative process during these last Runemagick albums.
Earlier albums often began with riffs, arrangements and musical ideas. With Cycle of the Dying Sun (Dawn of Ashen Realms) and now After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil, words, atmosphere and concept have gradually moved closer to the beginning of the process.
The original text provides a direction rather than a finished structure.
Then the music begins to appear.
As riffs and arrangements develop, the text changes with them. Some images need more space. Other words become unnecessary. New passages appear because the music reveals something that was not present in the original text.
Eventually it becomes difficult to separate the two.
The words shape the music.
The music reshapes the words.
Only towards the end of that process is the Swedish text rewritten and adapted into English. It is never simply translated word for word. Rhythm, meaning, sound and atmosphere all have to survive the transition.
By that point the original fragment has travelled quite far from where it began, but hopefully the original presence remains within it.
The end of the first vigil
Within the larger structure of After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil, “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave” also has a very specific purpose.
The album consists of two parts and four movements.
This song closes Movement B: Vigil Beneath the Weave, and with it the first half of the album reaches its final stage before the journey continues into Part II.
That position matters.
The first part begins in the aftermath of collapse. It moves through the release of previously bound forces, enters the nocturnal vigil and finally becomes aware of the larger weave beneath everything.
The perspective has expanded considerably since the opening moments of “After Chaos”.
But we have not reached a conclusion.
The album is only halfway through its passage.
What follows moves deeper.
Part II begins beneath the changing forms themselves, towards continuity, potential, dissolution and eventually something that no longer requires the observer at all.
In that sense, “Urðr’s Cosmic Weave” stands at an important point in the album.
It is where awareness of the self begins to become awareness of relation.
Where the vigil begins to reveal what exists beneath it.
Where individual presence encounters something vastly larger without disappearing into it.
The weave does not offer answers.
It does not tell us where to go.
It does not promise that everything happens for a reason.
It simply remains.
And for a moment, perhaps we become aware that we have always been moving within it.
Urðr’s Cosmic Weave.
ᛇ
After Chaos: Nocturnal Vigil will be released on September 18 through Hammerheart Records.
Listen:
https://runemagick.bandcamp.com/album/after-chaos-nocturnal-vigil
Pre order (CD, LP & Digital):
https://runemagick.lnk.to/afterchaos
Cassette:
https://intoitrecords.com
In stillness,
Nicklas Rudolfsson
ᛁᛚᚾᚱ