Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “He thought that our name is offensive on his beliefs,” concludes Sakis, “but he didn’t think that we live in the twenty-first century and that these ideas belong to other centuries. Originally living in a fundamentalist religious country—as Greece was when we formed—we wanted to show our resistance to this sort of conservative attitude. Black metal is a punch of resistance—or at least was back then—so what better than to choose a name that expressed our opinion about religion? Religions are rotting worldwide in our philosophy. Okay, it sounds extreme for many people and it closes doors, but our goal was never to be Metallica. Despite the many shows that were, and still are, cancelled, and the problems that occur with the distribution of our CDs, we kept this name. We are still proud of it. I do consider myself as a spiritual individual that has searched his personality in so many ideologies, including Satanism. I do consider myself more as anti-religion than a Satanist, but still believe that Satanism influences me in my everyday life. Back then we were rebels without reason. But nowadays we are with reason, and this name still represents our band philosophy.”

  11

  TORMENTOR

  “Tormentor made me think, ‘Holy shit! This is darkness. Why didn’t I understand this when I was listening to Destruction and the likes?’ And I got out my Destruction albums again and I didn’t hear what I heard as a kid. Then I heard mainly thrash, but now I heard lots of darkness in that thrash, I heard a super distinction between that kind of thrash and stuff like Testament.”

  —Fenriz (Darkthrone)

  “Tormentor was such a unique band and some of the attraction was that they were from Hungary. Not that Hungary is the most obscure place on earth but at that time it was. Kinda like the Brazilian bands—the right influences but still making everything their own.”

  —Metalion, Slayer Magazine

  “I always thought Tormentor offered something different. They were somehow exotic coming from Hungary and I found them very inspiring. Their sound was rather unique… a mix of black and heavy metal I guess you could say, but it also had some of that true dark Eastern European feel to it. The musicianship and production was also good. I think to this day Anno Domini is a true classic and I’m proud to have released it through Nocturnal Art Productions.”

  —Samoth (Emperor)

  FOR REASONS UNKNOWN, the name “Tormentor” has been adopted by an unbelievable number of bands (at least twenty to date) throughout metal’s history, including, as we’ve seen, the trio that would eventually become Kreator. Of all the many bands calling themselves Tormentor, however, it is the Hungarian outfit that most black metal fans associate with the name, due in part to their charismatic frontman and vocalist Attila Csihar, who would later become the singer for Norway’s Mayhem.

  Of course, there is a reason that Mayhem’s main man Euronymous thought to offer Attila the position of vocalist in the first place. Tormentor had earned the respect of not only that band, but much of the Norwegian scene, who had discovered the group via the humble format of dubbed cassette. That these cassettes were able to make it into Scandinavia in the first place was no small achievement: Based in Hungary—a country then behind the Iron Curtain and thus under the control of the Soviet Union—the members of Tormentor faced restrictions that resulted in an almost total isolation from the global music scene. That said, Hungary was relatively liberal compared to many other countries in the Eastern Bloc, with music less heavily clamped down upon than in some neighboring states.

  Tormentor’s The Seventh Day of Doom. Recorded in Budapest, it was originally released in 1987 as a demo cassette, before later being granted a re-release.

  “I got into music with AC/DC, Kiss and Motörhead,” begins Attila. “However Kiss was just one song, and I still don’t know what song, ’cos my brother-in-law just recorded it from the radio. Hungary was separated back then, but he lived close to the western border so could get Austrian radio. Like most of us [black metal musicians] I was the kind of person looking for more and more extreme stuff, so I got into Iron Maiden, then the punk stuff like GBH and The Exploited, whatever I could find in Hungary back then. I remember I went to the store—Hungary was a little bit more open than the other countries and there was a private record store—and I said to the guy, “What’s the most extreme thing here? I have this hardcore music already, do you have anything else?’ And one guy was like, ‘Okay, give him the Venom record,’ and he put it on and within ten seconds I was like ‘Okay, I like that!’”

  The Anno Domini album, originally released on cassette in 1989. Pictured is the 1995 re-release on Nocturnal Art Productions.

  Meeting like-minded young musicians at his school, Attila and his new bandmates were soon playing regular live shows as Tormentor, drawing on the likes of Venom, Celtic Frost, Destruction, and Kreator, and making a name for themselves with a blend of covers and original material. With local audiences hungry for any live music they could get their hands on, the band soon built a strong following, their shows attracting a wide collection of individuals including punks, skinheads, metal fans, and other miscellaneous troublemakers, a volatile combination that often resulted in bloodshed.

  “There was no way to think about touring the West—though we played one show in Slovakia and one show in Vienna—so we played a lot in Hungary,” Attila explains. “We were a ‘trouble’ band originally, almost like the Sex Pistols. People who liked trouble came to our show, so it was not just a metal audience, it was a ‘wrong people’ audience. There was no security back then either, but somehow it shaped out and of course we got famous. We had a lot of fans in Hungary actually, our crowd was always five hundred people and up in the eighties.”

  In 1987 the band headed into a garage with a homemade mixer and recorded what was technically a demo tape, though one that boasted a surprisingly lengthy collection of material (nine songs over fifty-one minutes). Entitled The Seventh Day of Doom, it proved well-received by listeners, blending elements of thrash bands such as Slayer and Metallica with the more heavy metal leanings of Mercyful Fate and even Iron Maiden. Soon the band began work on a “proper” album, investing a year in the writing and recording of their debut, Anno Domini, which benefited massively from being recorded in a professional studio.

  A remarkably powerful and forward-thinking recording given the youth of the band, and the musicians within it, Anno Domini was a heavier and more direct assault than the previous year’s efforts, combining frantic and malevolent thrash riffs and violently precise percussive assaults with slower, icier melodies and a taste for eerie, majestic atmospheres. The short, keyboard-dominated intro drew liberally from the horror film Phantasm (complementing the Evil Dead samples present later on the album) but the track that most embodied the group’s more grandiose leanings was the fourth song, “Elisabeth Bathory,” based around one of Hungary’s most famous historical figures. One in a long line of black metal tributes to the serial killer countess (following in the tradition of Venom and Bathory), the song is a melodic and mid-paced number, rich in dark feeling and deliciously epic thanks largely to a simple three-chord, synth-accentuated, verse and a sinister, yet highly memorable chorus. Elsewhere songs such as “Heaven” and “Damned Grave” demonstrated the angrier, rawer, more chaotic side of the band.

  An ad for the Nocturnal Art Productions re-release of Anno Domini, a cause of no small amount of excitement at the time given the rarity of the cassette.

  Hailed as a classic by the underground, the record would provide no small amount of inspiration for the nineties black metal explosion that was only a few years away. Tragically, however, the album never saw official release—or at least not before the band split up. For reasons unknown, the head of the record label that was set to release the album vanished, taking the master tapes for Anno Domini with him. The band were left with nothing more than copies of the original recordings, which were issued on cassette tape as a self-release. In fact, it wouldn’t be until some seven years later that the album would finally receive an official relea
se courtesy of Norway’s Nocturnal Art Productions. Understandably disillusioned, the band split as the eighties came to a close, unaware that their work was picking up a legion of fans in other countries.

  “We didn’t know we had a following abroad at all, it felt like it was going down for us if anything,” sighs Attila. “We were very young, I was fifteen when we started and maybe nineteen when we stopped, and all the other members were the same age, so we were just going with the flow. Now I would say it was a mistake to stop of course, but back then we felt it was over; we saw bands change in the West, Celtic Frost changed and became strange, Bathory had changed… even Destruction, and then all this glam metal and white metal was coming up. It was maybe two years after we split that I heard from Euronymous—in ’91—and also this friend of mine sent me stuff from Mexico, [I thought] ‘What is this? Someone from Mexico writes about us?’ So we realized then there was something in the air, but the problem was the guitarist had to go to the military, so in the end we just fell apart.”

  Attila Csihar, pictured shortly after the millennium. Something of a revered figure these days, his numerous appearances and collaborations stand in contrast to the obscurity and isolation of Tormentor’s early years.

  Attila would go on to work with countless other acts, both within the black metal scene, such as Norway’s Keep of Kallesin and Italy’s Aborym, and outside of it, such as American drone kings Sunn O))) and singer/pianist Jarboe. He would also reform Tormentor some ten years after they first split, Csihar once again working alongside original guitarist Attila Szigeti and two new members. However, the material on 2001’s comeback album Recipe Ferrumi 777 proved to have very little in common musically with the earlier recordings, instead taking a decidedly experimental approach. The appreciation of their earlier works would only grow as the years went on, however, and in 2008 Anno Domini even received a re-release via Csihar’s own Saturnus Productions, featuring noticeably improved sound compared to the earlier release—supposedly due to the sound being taken from the original master tapes, which were finally located by Attila after many years missing.

  12

  MASTER’S HAMMER

  “When the Ritual album came out we were all rejoicing. The vocals are of course fantastic and a lot of the music was very inspiring, especially for bands like Enslaved. I often say—more like a joke, but it’s true—the first Norwegian Black Metal album is Ritual. It is in that style; the atmosphere, the types of riffs, a bit of the way to handle vocals …”

  —Fenriz (Darkthrone)

  “A fantastic band, Master’s Hammer were without any doubt innovators and way ahead of most of the underground back in the day. Franta Štorm has one of the most—if not the most—insane vocals in all of extreme metal, extremely expressive and raw. Anyone interested in something unique should check out Master’s Hammer, there is nobody else quite like them.”

  —Dolgar (Gehenna)

  HAILING FROM PRAGUE—then the capital of Czechoslovakia and now of the Czech Republic—Master’s Hammer never once toured or appeared live outside of their home country. Despite this, they would become immensely respected within the international scene thanks to their forward-thinking and hugely influential take on black metal. Indeed, as the quote by Fenriz above suggests, in many ways Master’s Hammer can be considered the first band in what is now seen as black metal’s second generation.

  Originally formed in 1987, the group was created by František “Franz” Štorm and Milan “Bathory” Fibiger, school friends who were attending the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, Štorm studying typography and graphic design, and Milan studying illustration, fields the two men still work in today. With Štorm handling guitar and vocals and Milan taking care of bass, the duo were joined by drummer Franta, Fečo, an individual Milan knew from their mutual home city, Mladá Boleslav, located some fifty kilometers north of Prague, where the band would rehearse in their early days.

  “We never learned to play any instruments before,” admits Štorm, “I don’t know about notes [even] now. We fell in love in Bathory about 1986, King Diamond and Motörhead, and in our childhood we used to listen to ABBA and Kiss. But later on, we wanted to be the most radical of all bands, I’m not sure for what reason, perhaps as a subconscious reaction to a then-formed—and already glorified—underground scene. Here I don’t mean strictly the metal one, but [more] rock and folk. We [also] liked dark things in general.”

  The Master’s Hammer logo/coat of arms. It was designed in 1987 by founding member František “Franz” Štorm, who is still a designer by trade.

  “Radical” is certainly an apt adjective for the band’s first demo, The Ritual Murder, which appeared soon after the band’s formation and was recorded by the aforementioned trio—though confusingly the cover features six individuals (“just our friends,” explains Štorm, “mostly’s Fečo’s brothers who wanted to have a photo”). A demented and frantic half-hour effort, it remains a challenging listen, frequently threatening to overwhelm even the seasoned extreme metal fan with its fuzzy sound, thrashy riffing, and sporadic, eccentric vocals.

  While the music on the tape might not always sound much like it by today’s standards, it’s interesting to note that the band had already begun using the term “black metal,” a decision inspired, Štorm explains, predominantly by Bathory. Czechoslovakia had at that time contributed only one band to the genre, Törr—with another, Root, forming later that year—making Master’s Hammer one of the first within Eastern Europe to really fly the flag for the movement. Not only does the demo include a number entitled “Blak Métl,” but the tape’s sleeve features a burning cross and the first appearance of the iconic and almost regal Master’s Hammer logo, complete with horned skull, inverted crucifixes, and pentagram. “It represents the essence of my idea of [a] brutal band logo,” Štorm explains of the design, “quite naive after so many years, but naturally we’ll keep it forever.”

  An eccentric bunch to be sure: Master’s Hammer circa 1988. Note the King Diamond makeup on the left.

  For the 1988 follow-up—another half-hour tape entitled Finished—the band would go one stage further, inverting an entire church for the cover design, hammering the point home with a woodcut image of Lucifer on the inner sleeve, a song of the same name, a “Satan Records” logo (which was there purely for design reasons, this being another self-release) and a backwards recording of the Lord’s Prayer.

  “The inspiration was quite simple,” explains Štorm, “there was no true Satanic band in our country, and we made an effort to fill the gap. Except for some beer drinking with Root members, I haven’t noticed any Satanic circles and I’m in doubts if there even were any in my country. But [Root founder] Big Boss soon became a local head of The Church of Satan and I’ve illustrated LaVey’s Satanic Bible for my diploma work at the Academy in Prague. In my personal point of view, Satanism is a cultural and literary phenomenon featured in works of many authors like [French poet] Baudelaire or [Czech writer and artist] Josef Váchal, who all referred in a certain manner to those supernatural moods. It never had typical features of a social movement in Czech lands. Books and films are full of descriptions of rites, but I’ve never seen one for real.”

  The Finished demo, 1988, the first (and probably last) cassette inlay to invert an entire church in its design. In this case it was the one located next door to Milan’s grandmother’s cottage, which in turn was used as a recording studio by the band.

  Musically speaking the Finished demo was a far less bizarre listen than the first effort, and also a notably darker one. Kicking off affairs with a winds-and-church-bells introduction (by now a familiar formula within the genre), while adding some disturbing vocals for good measure, the opus was a move toward more cavernous, Bathory-esque territory and somewhat more traditional metal vocals, though a certain degree of eccentricity was preserved thanks to a number of odd, almost random-sounding guitar leads.

  Another self-recorded effort, the demo was actually created next door to the ver
y church used for the cover photograph, in the home studio of a cottage belonging to Milan’s grandmother. Beneath the church, the cover featured five musicians, all of whom this time actually appear on the recording, the band having expanded to include second guitarist Míla Krovina and “Ulric For” (Olda Liška, a schoolmate of Milan and Franta) who handled timpani, an instrument that would play a regular role within the band.

  Soon after Finished was released, Ulric was replaced by Charles R. Apron, real name Karel Zástĕra, and it was with this lineup that the band played their very first live show, on May 18, 1989. Taking place not long before the peaceful revolutions that overthrew the country’s communist government and eventually led to democratic elections, the show was organized without permission from the authorities, and resulted in the band being summoned to explain themselves soon after.

  “That was rather funny,” Štorm recalls, “the secret police took me for some three hours’ interrogation before letting me go. The asshole behind the table was rather interested in the students’ movement, and sideways he showed me a huge collection of underground metal fanzines; today, he could have a very valuable, rare collection. I don’t believe that black metal ever really attracted the attention of authorities in our country though, this is not Norway.”