(Photo Credit: Stormvild)

One-woman black metal music project Myrkur, created by Danish musician Amalie Bruun, has released a new live version of her single called “Onde Born”. “Onde Born”, which translates to “Evil Born”, can be listened to below:

This new version takes the raw ferocity of the original black metal track and replaces it with slow, ethereal melancholy. The cold, lonely feel of the song is offset by the echoing choir, adding an eerie and interesting duality to the track. The song has been stripped down and re-purposed into an acoustic, dramatic, and vulnerable piece. While discussing the writing process and significance of this version, Bruun stated,

“Onde Børn (Wicked Children)“ is a song that I wrote as a tribute to my supporters and it feels powerful to play it live, for them, with them. Performing it with the girls choir in the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum was a beautiful experience, the dark mood in the cold tomb, the crystal clear voices of the girls. There is room for very few people in the Mausoleum, but my whole Norwegian “family” was there, people who worked on ‘M’ and so forth. A night I will never forget and which I’m excited to share with you.”

The music video for the black metal original version can be viewed below:

The word “myrkur” means “darkness” in Icelandic. However, it would be a gross oversimplification to call her music dark. She grabs inspiration from second-wave black metal artists and infuses their sound with her vulnerable, crystal clear voice, greatly altering the sound sonically but not tonally. Her voice, along with all of the choral and string arrangements, allows for a sense of delicateness within all of the chaos. Bruun laces her music with themes from both Scandinavian and Norse mythologies, giving her music a mystical quality.