—V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (Anaal Nathrakh)
“To be a Finnish person that started to listen to black metal in the early nineties, there is no other name that could be as influential as Beherit.”
—Mikko Aspa (Clandestine Blaze/owner of record label Northern Heritage)
FORMED BACK IN 1989, Finland’s Beherit was another act that preceded, instigated, and then finally became a part of the second wave explosion. Even today their name carries enough cultish clout to rival almost any act in the extreme metal universe, thanks to the band’s fierce individualism, underground spirit, and refusal to follow prevalent trends. Consequently they have found themselves both revered and despised, which some might say is a true seal of black metal authenticity.
Originally called Horny Malformity, and then Pseudochrist, the band finally settled on the name Beherit—meaning “Satan” in Syriac, a dialect of the Middle Aramaic language—having found it within the pages of LaVey’s Satanic Bible. The group itself came into existence thanks to Marko “Nuclear Holocausto Vengeance” Laiho (guitars and vocals) and Jari “Daemon Fornication” Vaarala (bass), with drummer Jari “Sodomatic Slaughter” Pirinen joining the group soon after. All three musicians hailed from Rovaniemi, the capital of Finland’s northernmost province, Lapland.
“It was in the summer of 1989 when I met Daemon the first time,” Holocausto recalls. “That was at a midsummer festival at the Arctic Circle, we were seventeen years old. We were both playing in our friend’s speed/thrash metal bands, but looking for a more extreme and brutal expression. Before that I was playing guitar in a band called Frost, [playing] mostly Celtic Frost and Slayer covers. Beherit was the most northern band in the known scene—Rovaniemi, the most violent city in Finland.”
The country’s first black metal band, Beherit drew inspiration from acts such as Venom, Slayer, Sodom, Possessed, Rotting Christ, Samael, Sarcófago, Bathory, and also Blasphemy, whose song “War Command” the group covered and who influenced both the band’s sound and their lengthy pseudonyms. Given such a musical diet, it was unsurprising that the trio favored a primitive and hellish black metal sound, and during 1990 they proved prolific, issuing no less than four releases demonstrating this primal approach.
First released was the Seventh Blasphemy demo, followed by Morbid Rehearsals (indeed a recorded rehearsal, though three of the four tracks remain exclusive to the release), and the Demonomancy demo. The latter effort was a somewhat more sophisticated affair than its predecessor, though that isn’t saying a great deal; indeed, while the near twenty-minute opus did have something approaching a production, its crude and almost unrelenting Sarcófago/Blasphemy-inspired assault was still chaotic in the extreme. The end of the year saw the fourth and final release of 1990, a four-song seven-inch entitled Dawn of Satan’s Millennium, released on Turbo Music. Aside from a few seconds of synth that bookmarked the title track, Dawn followed a similarly unpolished and unholy blueprint.
Released the following year, the band’s debut full-length, The Oath of Black Blood, bore a fair few similarities to the two releases that preceded it—more than a few in fact, since it was the two previous releases, crudely welded together by Turbo and packaged with new sleeve art. Somewhat disappointing for fans, the release appears to have been even more of a letdown for the band themselves.
“We here think that it’s [a] ninety-nine percent shit release,” Holocausto told Bloodshed zine in 1992, elaborating somewhat in an interview with Robert Müller of Metal Hammer Germany early the same year. “I hate the album!” he had complained then. “It’s so bad, we never wanted to release it. The songs are from our demo and our label Turbo Music just used a regular cassette for the album pressing. Honestly, I never sent them the master tape.”
Quite why Turbo chose such a course of action remains unclear, though a long-running rumor states that the band were presented with the funds to record an album but, in true rock ‘n’ roll fashion, blew this advance on alcohol and drugs. On this subject Holocausto’s recollections are somewhat hazy, the frontman simply stating, “I cannot say where those dollars—which were sent by postal mail in a seven-inch box—were spent, or how much it was in total, but definitely it was not enough to record a whole album in the studio.”
Interestingly, in 2012 an album entitled At the Devil’s Studio 1990 was released and marketed as the “official Beherit debut album.” Featuring a number of rerecorded demo tracks and two new numbers, the sessions feature only Holocausto and Sodomatic Slaughter in Ala Ky Studio in Rovaniemi, and were apparently rediscovered by the drummer after being lost for two decades. To what extent it represents a lost album, however, is debatable; it seems unlikely, to say the least, that the debut would have opened with a track simply called “Rehearsal” for example.
Despite the continuing confusion, The Oath of Black Blood did manage to raise the profile of the band considerably. This was all the more impressive considering that Beherit was essentially swimming against the tide of metal fashion, combining eighties-inspired sounds with a similarly old-school aesthetic comprised of spikes, inverted crosses, pentagrams, fire-breathing, and heavy black face paint. (“Perhaps Sarcófago,” comments Holocausto when asked the inspiration for the latter, “It just felt a natural thing to do. Fire-breathing came from Black Winds [vocalist] of Blasphemy.”)
Demonomancy, 1990, later repackaged and released without the band’s consent as part of 1991’s The Oath of Black Blood.
Beherit was now one of only a handful of bands scattered around the globe who, in an age dominated by commercial death metal and thrash, were doing their best to resurrect the spirit of “black metal,” though the band themselves don’t appear to have settled on this term until a couple of years after their inception. The aforementioned article from German Metal Hammer highlights the parallels between Beherit’s own struggle and that of like-minded bands in Norway such as Darkthrone, and also rightly predicts the success of such efforts, as the excerpt below reveals.
“As his musical influences he quotes the early classics of the genre: Venom, the Death demos, early Slayer and, rather exotically, Brazilian bands like Sarcófago, Vulcano and early Sepultura albums,” Robert Müller wrote. “In 1992, Beherit seem almost like an anachronism. Either that, or you’d have to admit that Black Metal is not dead after all but is slowly and painfully raising its head again. The new Darkthrone album A Blaze in the Northern Sky can be seen as an indication: pure Black Metal. So would I be right in saying that classic Black Metal is coming back? The Finnish view on the matter: ‘Black Metal was never dead! Unfortunately there’s a lot of bands who start playing Death Metal because it happens to be trendy.’”
In the same article, Holocausto’s ambitions seem strikingly similar to those professed by Norway’s Mayhem, with whom he maintained strong contact throughout the period:
“We try to get across as much of an evil mood as possible…” Beherit founder Nuclear Holocausto Vengeance.
“We try to get across as much of an evil mood as possible … There are always some people who are shocked when we appear on stage with our faces painted black, heavy studs and chains; we confront them with the things they’re scared of. At a recent show I drank some blood on stage … It’s our aim to put on a show like Venom, maybe even more extreme with lots of pyros and fire effects.”
The same article comments that “The Oath Of Black Blood met with disastrous reviews, but despite that fact—or maybe because of it—sold remarkably well. In other words a cult band pure and simple.” Indeed, Beherit were doing their best to divide opinion among listeners and critics just as earlier pioneers such as Hellhammer and Bathory had done before them.
“People [generally] did hate us and our Satanic image,” recalls Holocausto today, “but we hated ’em and their weak bands. We were busy putting together the international network with people in Scandinavia, North America, Brazil, Australia, Greece and all over the world. It was a very fascinating time … to create something so new, dark, and brutal.”
Beherit’s imagery and lyrics in this period were indeed just as over-the-top and primitive as their music, especially in the early days. Yet while the lyrics of songs such as “Grave Desecration” (“We’ll cause your death / We’ll kill Jesus / Rape the dead / We’ll spread evil”) and “Sadomatic Rites” (“Black-haired witches / Bitches with their goats / Black robes and candles / Rituals can begin”) were almost a caricature of the occult—echoing the efforts of early Bathory among others—the band’s own interests were notably more serious.
“I applied for enrollment as a student to Collegium Satanas, a correspondence course in Satanism founded by New Zealand Satanist organization Order of the Left Hand Path,” Daemon told Sepulchral Voice, a Norwegian zine (produced, incidentally, by Stian “Occultus” Johansen, later of Mayhem, in 1991). “I should be qualified as a Satanist priest about in one month.”
“I have studied beliefs and cults,” confirms Holocausto today. “I have practiced several maneuvers, mostly based on Aleister Crowley’s. In the early nineties, we ordered a lot from a place called The Occult Emporium. Earlier, the most effective rites were of course to conjure demons, we [did it] a lot in early days of Beherit, later taking LSD and psychedelic mushrooms to alter the consciousness. Now lately, I am more toward the Vipassana and Tibetan death rituals. I’m all occultist. Ninety percent of songs of Beherit are occult.”
Holocausto’s interests in spirituality and the occult have clearly evolved as the years have passed but remain as strong as ever, and his interest in Vipassana meditation and Tibetan rituals has led him to travel the Far East quite extensively as part of a greater spiritual journey, one whose outcome may surprise many longtime fans.
Beherit’s debut album-cum-compilation The Oath of Black Blood, 1991.
“Since I was a teenager, I’ve been interested in the deeper side of life, searching for answers of our existence, a spiritual meaning,” he explains. “After my Satanist youth and years in Odinism, I went to experience various hippie new age movements, paranormal lectures, channeling, and read all possible esoteric books. They had valid points but were too often based on superstitious belief. In the late nineties I finally went to the East and found Tao and Buddhism and the Tibetan Book of The Dead, which was quite remarkable reading.
“I started to practice meditation and went to retreats in forest monasteries—a superb experience. I thought ‘Fucking hell, this dude who lived 500 B.C. had every single answer and logic in his teachings.’ I couldn’t do much else than become a Buddhist myself. Not a monk or that active in religion, but as a philosophy. The body is just a short-time container, at least before transhumanists manage to strengthen our parts and extend our lifetime to hundreds of years. But after all, it’s still just a temporary state, as is everything on Earth, heaven and hell. There’s a lot of beauty in this world, but one should understand that it’s not there forever. What was once young and sexy becomes weak and ugly. I would recommend people to study your self, the causality of life and dying.”
These days Holocausto’s beliefs are complex, but despite his passion for Buddhist ideas, he also describes himself as “more Satanic than ever.” In the early nineties, however, things were somewhat more black and white, and Beherit—like fellow Finns Impaled Nazarene—were primarily expounding the ideas of LaVey’s Church of Satan, even going as far as to include quotes from the Satanic Bible in their music. This position would eventually invite anger from the “pro-evil” Norwegian scene, who were increasingly attacking LaVey for his emphasis on humanistic values and self-empowerment, rather than literal devil worship.
“I believe in [a] horned devil, a personified Satan. In my opinion all the other forms of Satanism are bullshit,” Euronymous told Kill Yourself zine. Likewise, Varg Vikernes commented in Bård “Faust” Eithun’s Orcustus zine that “So-called Church of Satan is not in my views a church of Satan … It’s rather a humanistic individualistic organization who worship[s] happiness and life … I worship death, evil and all darkness.” The same Varg Vikernes would later claim within the pages of Kill Yourself that “the only true bands are from Norway,” deriding Finnish bands as “stupid clowns.”
A feud soon spread between the two scenes, which became known in black metal circles as the “Dark War.” This has undoubtedly become somewhat bigger in legend than in reality, being relatively short-lived (partly thanks to Euronymous of Mayhem and Mika Luttinen of Impaled Nazarene sorting out their differences in 1993) and today the only real lasting sign of this conflict is an amusing note on the reverse art of Impaled Nazarene’s 1992 debut album, Tol Compt Norz Norz Norz, stating “NO ORDERS FROM NORWAY ACCEPTED!!!!!!!!!!”
“I used to have many pen pals in Norway,” Holocausto explains, “but it evolved into a situation where you had to be on ‘their side’ or you become their enemy. I had my own interests, so couldn’t care less to belong to any ‘Norwegian mafia.’ There were a couple of anonymous death threats, I remember some guys from Enslaved threw shit over me and Varg was kind of pissed. I lost a couple of trades, but overall, I didn’t see Beherit as a major player of that war, if there was any.”
A bizarre project called Fuck Beherit is frequently cited as further evidence of the hatred Beherit had earned in Norway, although the fact that the band covered Beherit material, and had a song entitled “Beherit Are Gods,” casts some doubt about the intentions of the group. Equally bizarrely, Holocausto was later accused in Isten zine of stirring up paranoia and sparking the Norwegian/Finnish feud by making late-night drunken prank calls to Samoth of Emperor and Mika of Impaled Nazarene, something he strongly denies, stating, “That prank calls story is bullshit, written by liars of Isten magazine. Now a long time later, some dude perhaps saw that speculation important enough to add into such a reliable source as Wikipedia.”
Such amusing trivialities thankfully didn’t affect the band’s creative flow, and in mid-1992 they released a four-song demo that would showcase an entirely new musical approach, both for them and the movement. It would also win over a legion of new devotees. “For me personally, their old style wasn’t what made a big impact,” comments Mikko Aspo, “but Promo 1992 was something phenomenal and I kept listening to it over and over again for months, even years.”
The following year, through new label Spinefarm, Beherit issued Drawing Down The Moon, a truly groundbreaking masterpiece that featured rerecorded versions of the four songs on the demo, alongside nine entirely new numbers. Fittingly for an album named after an occult ceremony—in this case one from the Wiccan tradition (the band practiced witchcraft during this period)—Drawing was utterly ritualistic in nature, dripping with the atmosphere and primeval violence of the early recordings, while accentuating slower, more minimal songwriting and introducing synths and electronics to the mix, something all but unheard of at the time. Fulfilling—nay, exceeding—the promise of the 1992 tape, this release took rawness and primitiveness into almost avant-garde territories, showing contempt for traditional ideas of musicianship and production and in doing so crafting a truly powerful work.
“People [generally] did hate us and our Satanic image, but we hated ’em and their weak bands.”
“We had no budget at all back then,” reveals Holocausto. “We had no time to remake or tweak the final mix—that’s pretty much how metal albums were done before the money came in. I remember [drummer] Necroperversor was quite worried when we were listening to it the next day. I told him that perhaps he was right, but at least the spirit was there and that was more important.”
Certainly this was an album that prioritized spirit and atmosphere. Slow, hypnotic invocations such as “The Gate Of Nanna” (a reference from H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon) took the concept of a “stripped-down sound’” to new extremes, its ridiculously simple percussion and two-riff structure making it a challenging listen for many. No less challenging were the spacey instrumentals such as “Nuclear Girl,” which were also scattered among the more traditionally barbaric assaults such as “Nocturnal Evil�
� or the memorably titled “Werewolf, Semen and Blood.” The result was a varied and immersive listening experience, unlike anything else available then or now, and is still greatly admired by fans and black metal musicians alike.
“I didn’t hear Beherit until some years ago,” admitted Darkthrone’s Fenriz in an interview I conducted with him for Metal Hammer in 2009. “But Drawing Down The Moon must, for me, in hindsight, be one of the nineties’ ten most important black metal albums. Too bad when ‘black metal’ first had to take some distinct direction in the worthless nineties [no bands] went that way.”
“I remember the old Norsk bands doing interviews shitting on these guys,” recalled Blake Judd of USBM act Nachtmystium in the same article, “yet I don’t think a single one of those bands ever made something as nightmare-inducing as Drawing Down The Moon.”
LaVeyan Satanism had a heavy presence in the band’s influences at the time. All the same, Holocausto was clearly already painting from a pretty eclectic palette thematically as his cryptic run-through of tracks in Holland’s Masters of Brutality zine demonstrates:
“‘Intro’—The seventh satanic statement (Dr. LaVey). ‘Solomon’s Gate’—A trip to Israel’s history, Solomon’s occultism. ‘Nocturnal Evil’—Old song by the lord Diabolus, ritualistic vibrations by the black magic witches somewhere near Acheron, Hecate also featured here. ‘Sadomatic Rites’—lyrics included: black metal heathens, pagan sex. ‘Black Arts’—lyrics included. Nothing special, just old black metal spirit. ‘The Gate of Nanna’—lyrics included, based on the texts of Necronomicon, the moon calls us to sin. ‘Nuclear Girls’—no lyrics but the house 418. ‘Unholy Pagan Fire’—so-called unholy lifestyle is very holy for some people, dance with the wolves. ‘Down There …’—lyrics included, old black metal spirit. ‘Summerlands’—the land where’s eternal summer, after death, medium datum. ‘Werewolf, Semen And Blood’—black metal heathens, very old lyric … blood! ‘Thou Angel Of The Gods’—Angelos ton Theon, Crowley-influenced lyrics, pagan texts, a black rose beyond the mirror. ‘Lord Of Shadows & Goldenwood’—horned god Bran … based on the texts of pagan rituals.”
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