Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “I must add that it was interesting to be able to study (half) a human brain and rigor mortis,” he explained in one letter. “The pictures will be used on the Mayhem album.”

  “I think the way people took it was absolutely wrong,” recalls Metalion. “No one really had an idea what was going on, so it was hard for people to deal with this in a proper way. [There was] a lot of stupid stuff, like Euronymous and Hellhammer wearing those necklaces of his brain. I think that people put on a tough mask and really went with the black metal lifestyle.”

  Notorious Mayhem live bootleg The Dawn of the Black Hearts, featuring on its cover a photograph of Dead’s suicide taken by Euronymous. It is perhaps the most bootlegged black metal release of all time.

  “It’s like the whole black metal scene was traumatized with Mayhem and Dead and all that,” considers Snorre Ruch, the pioneering founder of Stigma Diabolicum/Thorns who also became the second guitarist in Mayhem. “There were a lot of unfortunate things happening to a group of people who were already on the sideline. Øystein was a key figure in the scene [and] he handled it by sending skull fragments to his friends. I received a skull fragment with a letter saying, ‘Now Dead has gone home,’ writing it like it’s something positive, something to take advantage of and he was trying to sell the story to the tabloid press, it was really dragging him down I think.”

  The disrespect Euronymous showed toward Dead proved to be the final straw for Necrobutcher, who cut all ties with the guitarist.

  “First of all I grieved like hell ’cos I loved the guy, he was my brother, one of my best friends. But the reaction from Øystein was not treating him like a friend, but as a piece of shit. He wanted to portray him as a crap idiot motherfucker. Didn’t want to go to the funeral, wanted to exploit the photos, all shit like that, so we were very divided in that way. Dead wasn’t just a fucking idiot, he was a really good friend, a really good guy, a lot of people loved him, so it devastated a lot of people. Pelle’s brother called me recently for the first time—he had plucked up the courage to call me eighteen years later—and the whole family is still completely traumatized.”

  Euronymous arguably did represent Dead in a particularly cynical and callous manner, treating his death as a sort of statement of intent against the rest of the metal scene, and one that appeared to fit in and promote Euronymous’ own ideals. He even told The Sepulchral Voice, “When Dead blew his brains off it was the greatest act of promotion he ever did for us… It’s always great when someone dies—it doesn’t matter who.”

  “We have declared WAR,” he also told Orcustus zine. “Dead died because the trend people have destroyed everything from the old black metal/death metal scene, today ‘death’ metal is something normal, accepted and FUNNY (argh) and we HATE it. It used to be spikes, chains, leather and black clothes, and this was the only thing Dead lived for as he hated this world and everything which lives on it.”

  “I’m not into this business for FUN, so of course I wasn’t scared,” he explained to Kill Yourself the following year, supposedly only a week before his own death. “It’s not every day you get the chance to see and touch the real corpse. And it’s important to learn one thing when you are dealing with the dark side: There is NOTHING which is too sick, evil or perverted… Dead wanted to make evil music for evil people, but the only people he saw were walking around in jogging suits, caps, baseball shoes, and being into peace and love. He hated them so much, and saw no longer any reason to waste his time on them.”

  For his part, Necrobutcher explained to Euronymous that he didn’t wish to communicate with him as long as he was planning to use the photos of Dead’s corpse. In fact, these photos were never used on any official artwork, but did appear on the notorious live bootleg Dawn of the Black Hearts, released originally in limited-edition vinyl by Columbian label Warmaster Records—a label owned by the now-deceased Mauricio “Bull Metal” Montoya, drummer of Columbian death metallers Masacre and a contact of Euronymous’.

  The fact that Necrobutcher was gone merely seems to have accelerated Euronymous’ process of reinvention. In seeking to redefine himself, he also began to lay down his philosophy and beliefs about what metal—and black metal—should be, a move that, thanks to his influence, allowed him to both redefine and relaunch the black metal movement and the so-called second wave. This was new: in the eighties Mayhem had not claimed the black metal tag, and nor had Euronymous, who actually described the band as “brutal, extreme death metal” in an interview with a South American contact.

  “Black metal was something Venom came up with so we couldn’t steal that,” explains Necrobutcher, “we just called our music ‘aggressive metal,’ ‘brutal metal,’ ‘total death music,’ words like that. The only band who could legitimately say they played black metal were Venom.”

  “There was no black metal scene in 1991 when Darkthrone and Burzum revolted against the death metal trend and did something else instead,” Burzum’s Varg Vikernes explained to me in an interview for Metal Hammer in 2010. “Euronymous called it black metal, because he—unlike me—was a Venom fan and they had used that as an album title, and that name has been used ever since.”

  “Soon as all the Mayhems and Burzums started coming out, I was like, ‘Yeah this is fucking great, another load of young mad kids,” recalls Venom frontman Conrad “Cronos” Lant. “It was off-the-wall, dirty, nasty, out-of-tune, out-of-time, exactly where we were coming from. [But] I just kept thinking, ‘Why have these guys not come up with their own title for something they created themselves?’ I don’t believe they sound like Venom—they were influenced by Venom, but I was influenced by Bowie and Jethro Tull and I don’t sound like them—so I just thought those guys should take more credit for what they’ve done. It’s great to hear you’ve influenced someone’s career, especially if they’re doing well, but at the same time I thought they could have had a title like ‘Norse Metal’ or something, that would have given them the respect I think they deserved for creating their own style.

  “I think those bands are very unique and amazing, heavy as fuck, [but] when some of the Norwegian bands called themselves black metal I thought, ‘Well, you’re not.’ Because for us it was sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, Satanism, and it was death metal, power metal, thrash metal; all these qualities make black metal. What I don’t hear in any of these bands is songs like ‘Teacher’s Pet’ or ‘Poison’ or ‘Buried Alive,’ it’s having that diversity within the style that makes it black metal. In my opinion that’s what I created when I called something black metal, it’s because it has all those other styles in it. When I hear a death metal band calling themselves black metal I feel like, well, that’s death metal, it’s all one speed more or less, where’s the tongue-in-cheek that we had?”

  As Conrad points out, Venom had used plenty of other phrases—perhaps most notably power metal, a term which has a very different meaning these days—but the eighties were a time when extreme metal subcategories weren’t as well developed. In the early nineties, however, thrash and death metal had broken into the rock and metal mainstream (a fact highlighted by the rise of bands such as Sepultura and Morbid Angel and major label Columbia’s brief love affair with Earache Records), and many in the scene longed for the darker, more obscure vibe of the eighties.

  What Euronymous arguably did was help resurrect the term “black metal” before bringing it into wider use, using his own ideals to redefine it, taking qualities selectively from eighties bands he admired while adding a few of his own. The most notable of these was a level of seriousness certainly not present in the early bands; he would famously claim in Kerrang! magazine (along with a certain Count Grishnackh of Burzum) that although he was aware that Venom and Bathory were not practicing Satanists, he “chose to believe otherwise.”

  Today the term “black metal” is frequently used to describe extreme metal with certain musical characteristics: high-paced percussion, high-pitched “screamed” vocals, fast tremolo picking on the guitars, an emphasis on atm
osphere and feeling, and an unholy aesthetic. Indeed, this is the definition many black metal musicians seem most comfortable with and it’s one used (if only for the sake of clarity) at times in this book. Likewise, “death metal” is now generally used to describe bands that emphasize brutality or technicality above atmosphere and use deeper “growling” vocals and frequent riff changes.

  For Euronymous however, “black metal” described bands celebrating “real” Satanism (and by this he meant a genuine theistic approach, literal devil worship, as opposed to the approach of organizations such as the Church of Satan), while death metal meant “real” death worship, the actual musical characteristics of the metal played by either party being wholly irrelevant.

  “There exist no death metal bands today,” he claimed in Orcustus magazine. “There are only a handful of (mostly great) bands (in case someone hasn’t got it right—black metal has nothing to do with the music itself, both Blasphemy and Mercyful Fate are black metal, it’s the LYRICS, and they must be SATANIC. If not, it is NOT black metal) and what we choose to call LIFE METAL bands. Take a band like Therion. Their music is quite OK, it’s actually one of the best Swedish bands (even though that doesn’t say much), but their lyrics STINK. They are about society and pollution, what the fuck has that got to do with DEATH? If a band cultivates and worships death, then it’s death metal, no matter what KIND of metal it is. If a band cultivates and worships Satan, it’s black metal. And by saying ‘cultivating death,’ I don’t think about thinking it’s funny, or being into gore. I’m thinking about being able to KILL just because they HATE LIFE. It’s people who enjoy to see wars because a lot of people get killed. How many bands think that way?”

  Contrary to popular opinion, Euronymous was not against death metal per se—indeed he praised certain bands such as Carcass in interviews—but was opposed to what he considered to be “false death metal” or “life metal,” which he characterized as the increasingly acceptable face of the genre. All the same, despite his own definitions it cannot be coincidence that the impressive collective of bands appearing in Norway at this time (including such well-regarded names as Burzum, Immortal, Darkthrone, Emperor, Enslaved, Hades, Gorgoroth, Satyricon, Arcturus, Carpathian Forest, and Mysticum) all utilized certain musical traits now associated with black metal.

  Furthermore, many of these bands had converted to the black metal cause after previously playing in death metal acts, albeit often ones with an atmospheric edge. Immortal and Hades, for example, had formed from the ashes of the bands Old Funeral and Amputation, Burzum also sprang from Old Funeral, Enslaved from Phobia, Emperor from Embrionic and Thou Shalt Suffer, while Mortem contained future members of Mayhem, Arcturus, and Stigma Diabolicum/Thorns. Perhaps most notably, Darkthrone underwent a dramatic transformation from a successful technical death metal band to a full-blown black metal outfit. As it turned out, Euronymous didn’t consider many of the bands that surrounded him to be black metal at all, even some bands that today are seen to epitomize the genre, such as Immortal. Again Euronymous emphasized lyrics and intent over musical characteristics and appearance.

  “Firstly Immortal is NOT a black metal band, as they are not Satanists,” he told Orcustus zine. “And this is something they say themselves. They are into the atmospheres and moods concerning Satanism. Their new look is just a way for them to go deeper into what they have always been into… And further, those who have cared to read the lyrics of Darkthrone’s Soulside Journey will know that they are the same Satanic lyrics, which means that Soulside Journey IS a black metal album.”

  Mayhem’s lyrics of the time were certainly Satanic in nature, though Necrobutcher casts some doubt as to whether this was reflected in the member’s lifestyles.

  “That was to provoke,” he states. “People misunderstood, they looked into our thing and made their own assumptions that we are Satanists and in that period of time when people asked us about that we said, ‘Sure.’ We just said yes to everything just because people are stupid enough to ask this sort of thing and we were just laughing. No, I don’t think [Euronymous] ‘believed.’ I think he loved to talk about it but since he was not a religious person I don’t think—or I know—that he was not. It was more like that was a bad thing, an evil thing in many people’s eyes, and he was a supporter of bad things.”

  While Euronymous often presented black metal as merely a medium to manipulate, commenting that young musicians should become Satanic terrorists rather than form yet more new bands, there’s no doubt that music was in fact his first love. Indeed, though he stated that Enslaved and Immortal should not be considered black metal because they veered away from Satanic subject matter, he nonetheless provided both with advice and support. After all, he was still a great fan of artists as diverse as Kraftwerk and Kiss and even admitted in Slayer zine, “I love Satanic bands, but I don’t care if they sing about eating carrots, if the music is great,” going on to state that he would even sign bands who wore “light clothes and jogging suits” if he admired their music.

  “I never felt like there was pressure to conform,” recalls Mortiis (Håvard Ellefsen), then bassist of Emperor. “Euro didn’t dictate the sound, he was definitely a music fan at heart and could appreciate a lot of music for what it was, black metal or not. He released Merciless, they weren’t black metal, and was planning releases with Masacre from Colombia, which was death metal.”

  Through such leadership, Euronymous quickly built a sense of unity, one that increased in mid-’91, when (with the help of a number of others, most prominently Stian “Occultus” Johansen of early Norwegian black metal acts Perdition Hearse and Abhorrent/Thyabhorrent) he opened a record store in Oslo. Named Helvete, the Norwegian word for hell, its primary role in many ways was as a focal point for the scene, providing a place to sleep for various young participants (including Vikernes) as well as a setting for the somewhat unhinged parties of the period.

  Front and back covers of a catalogue/newsletter for the Helvete store and the Deathlike Silence label, dated November 1992. On the cover is Morgan “Evil” Håkansson of Swedish acts Marduk and Abruptum, also interviewed within.

  “They were black metal parties, you know,” recalls Mortiis. “The mood was okay, some people would be ass-drunk, others would sort of sulk in corners, everyone wanted to live up to something I suppose. I remember I drove a map needle into my arm until the bone stopped it and I heard Euro once drove a spike into his forehead. I also remember that I broke a beer bottle over my own head during one of those parties. A guy once came in waving a gun—he might have been a member of Abhorrent/Thyabhorrent—all kinds of shit could happen.”

  “Obviously we had some crazy ideas about this and that… some stupid or weird ideas about humanity,” says Enslaved’s Grutle Kjellson. “But generally we had beers and we laughed… we didn’t sit there like this,” he frowns and crosses his arms, “all the time.”

  “For a little while I moved into the basement together with Varg [of Burzum],” recalls Tomas “Samoth” Haugen of Emperor. “It was a shithole of a basement and I can’t believe we chose to take residence there looking back at it. We hardly stayed there though. It was very dark and gloomy… and moldy. I really dived deep into the darkness during that time of my life. There were a lot of parties in the shop with a lot of crazy shit going on. The shop wasn’t very organized looking back at it. Sometimes it was total chaos. It was more run by idealism rather than good business sense. But it became a good meeting ground for people who shared interest in this music and the lifestyle that came with it back then. And it had an atmosphere. It was very different compared to how things are today. There were no ‘black metal catalogue fans’ back then. It was total underground and there was a more genuine feeling amongst the bands and people involved.”

  “The shop was a meeting ground for people socially and a place to pick up albums and get insights,” concurs Kristoffer “Garm” Rygg of Ulver. “You can’t really underestimate the influence of Helvete and Euronymous in the formati
ve days of black metal in Norway.”

  “It was also fairly cheap,” recalls Silenoz of Dimmu Borgir. “He didn’t overprice the CDs and I doubt that he made any money from it really. He was all about getting this extreme underground stuff to the kids.”

  It’s often imagined that the store was mainly selling black metal records, but at the time there simply weren’t enough of such items in existence to keep a store afloat, and Helvete stocked a great deal of material by bands that Euronymous himself had voiced a distaste for, such as Deicide and Napalm Death. While these helped pay the rent, the store nonetheless was geared toward attracting and nurturing underground metal fans, and was suitably decorated, the black walls adorned with inverted crucifixes, weapons, and records, though in some cases the latter had to be provided—and sold—by the regular customers themselves.

  “In Norway in the eighties it was dead scene-wise, and suddenly there was a shop fifteen minutes away from my work,” reveals Darkthrone’s Fenriz, a regular at the store. “Finally I could see and meet fellow maniacs. I was also one of the guys who donated vinyl so the shelves would look filled… I donated sixty vinyl and that would be mainly boring thrash metal stuff.”

  “Whoever was there worked behind the counter at some point,” explains Enslaved’s Grutle of the shop’s communal atmosphere. “I mean I sold records myself.”