The Idealist is Joachim Nordwall, known as a member of the Skull Defekts. This solo excursion may surprise people acquainted with the usually more extroverted, guitar oriented music that the latter band puts forth. I am the Fire consists of what might be termed industrial drone music, but beyond that, it defies description. It's not clanking industrial noise, nor is it of the ear-piercing feedback variety. It's quiet, almost silent at times. But underneath it all, there's a pall which hangs over this music which is hard to shake.

The disc starts off with a less than threatening track, oddly enough titled rather threateningly The Knives are My Eyes. A cloud-like drift of what sounds like keyboards are assembled in a painterly fashion over the course of its' few minutes. The next piece is the seventeen and a half minute To Make Exact Copies of Every Mistake Ever Made. It could be considered a micro-sound piece because it's quiet to the point of near silence, but it builds almost imperceptably toward the end. Its atmosphere is oddly malevolent. The classic micro-sound technique is to apply clean, highly digitized sounds at extreme low volumes. Nordwall's version is anything but clean, which is quite evident if you get close enough to the speakers or crank the headphones up enough to pore over the details. It's sublime in its resistance to beauty.

The rest of the disc runs the gamut from, again, shifting drone (I am not Here) to a more straight-lined industrial drone (My Head is On Fire) to the just plain creepy (The Declaraation of Independence). The latter track is yet another high point, an alien sound-world filled with manipulated, distorted spoken word, and background music which builds suspense, and a looming sense of dread. And as Clive Barker once wrote, "there is no delight the equal of dread"