I remember making compilations of stuff from late night metal radio shows taped onto cassette. Usually odd songs interspersed by interviews and some introductory effects, that was about the best I had back then. I imagine the process of finding material worthy of listening to was much different than today where everything is downloadable, before it's even released.

Now I tend to listen to one type of music for a few days and gradually move onto something else, ideally making this transition as smooth as possible. Sometimes it might relate to seasons or phases of the moon. Certain albums I can only listen to at night (like Ildjarn-Nidhogg - Hardangervidda). But I guess over time I've also realized that the absence of music can be as valuable as music itself in order to fully defrag the mind prior to immersion.

If production has any legitimate value at all, it is surely when it helps enhance the compositional material in question. So in the case of something like Transylvanian Hunger or any of the Ildjarn albums, I think it's also a matter of there being no more appropriate a production than what they achieved given the compositional material.

But there's also some oddball albums that are not so easily separated in these terms. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless strikes me as more than a little dependent on that twisted, blurry production to carry the material through. It's a great album nonetheless.

The problem seems to be that a band will find a unique sound and others will think 'we're going to play innovatitive music in the style of x blended with y'. This is just a contradiction. Either you end up playing innovative music or you immitate; the choice is yours but don't lie about what you're doing. Reading interviews from seminal bands one can see that they simply played the music that they loved and let it grow naturally into something unique. There's too much forcing it going.

The thing is though, some music developed a very unique, unmistakable voice i.e. Satyricon (or maybe even a composer like Mahler) but it still doesn't amount to anything. Whereas a band like Darkthrone only ever admits to paying homage to Bathory/Celtic Frost.

This is true. In my case I have to restrict myself to maybe 1-2 hours every second day otherwise it takes over and totally derails the body-clock.

The question of whether metal should jump ship or go back to its roots is somewhat oversimplified in my opinion. But I think genre-evolution (including composition and instrumentation) is inevitable; moreso genre is merely a vehicle for ideas, it changes when the vehicle is depleted of energy and/or when it can no longer accomodate the expansion of ideas. And yes ideas need to expand, not that metal ever required an era-specific voice, as its outlook is mostly romanticist, realist i.e. eternal truths. But the interpretation of outlook must to some extent acknowledge the changing times.

Soulside Journey gets my vote in terms of the most enduring (twisted yet logical) song structures.

Hvis lyset tar oss is also unrivalled. Filosofem has been done with little success.

Godflesh - Streetcleaner, much to be learned here in terms of ambient metal.

To the originator of this topic, I would say, unless you yourself are planning on making a metal album where drums are not used, then just put this entire idea on the shelf for the moment.  What I have learned from all the metal coming out in the last few years is that there is nothing wrong with the instrumentation or even styles of playing in metal, but rather that no one had anything interesting to say with it.  No one had any spirit in their music or inspiration.  It was just a massive game of stupid cross-overs.  For a while, because of these defects, I believed maybe a new genre of metal needed to to be created or a new way of making metal.

But then with all the better albums that have come out lately, I now know that the people who are making great music right now are just doing the same old things great metal bands always did, in instrumentation, playing styles and even lyrical imagery.  The missing component was spirit and quality and not origininality.  Substance before form, as is the popular saying around here.  These thoughts that I am relating are not original and you are probably seeing a lot of this kind of talk lately.

I more or less agree. And I didn't want the suggestion to sound like an artificially imposed idea on something that has evolved naturally, rather it's an already existing direction that should be more thoroughly understood and explored by upcoming musicians. Pure Holocaust certainly occured to me as well as Transylvanian Hunger and a fair amount of examples exist in early Burzum works also.

Either would be awesome. It's about time now and a lot of bands are well overdue to release new material so it should be a great year.