Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  Many, however, already suspected Varg, due to the increasing hostility between the two men and his strange behavior in the days that followed. Varg had apparently set up an alibi—getting an associate to rent a video and use a particular bank card at a cash machine, to give the impression that Varg and Snorre were in Bergen that night—and also apparently taken gloves to the flat. However, he didn’t wear gloves during the murder, and his finger-prints were found in Euronymous’ blood on the stairwell. Not only that, but the Burzum contract with Deathlike Silence had been left signed and dated in the apartment, a smoking gun that was quickly traced back to Varg.

  “I had to take a ferry back home from my work,” recalls Grutle of Enslaved, a close friend. “On the bay I remember seeing my girlfriend, my parents, her parents, waiting for me and I thought, ‘Oh, something is wrong, something is badly wrong.’ Everyone gave me a hug and I said, ‘Alright, what’s up?’ and my ex, I remember she was crying and she said, ‘Øystein has been killed.’ And I knew it was him, right away I knew it ’cos there was a rivalry in the last few weeks.”

  A double-page spread in Kerrang! reports on Bård “Faust” Eithun’s imprisonment on murder charges as well as Varg’s impending sentence.

  “I got a call from him the day after he killed Euronymous,” explains Lee Barrett of Candlelight Records, a label that was considering signing Burzum for a time. “He phoned to tell me Euronymous was dead and by calling [me] he almost gave himself away. He definitely seemed eager to tell the news, he didn’t admit anything in the slightest, he was trying to fob it off as Finnish black metal people, but by the time he’d phoned me the only people who would know about his death were the police and someone living in Euronymous’ apartment block.”

  The resulting court case turned Varg into Norway’s most famous criminal and brought chaos to the remains of the Inner Circle. As the police rounded up anyone with a connection to the movement—both inner members and those tenuously linked—for long interviews, the truth eventually began to come out, about the murders, church burnings, and desecrations. Many of the protagonists, who were mainly teenagers, found themselves pressured by the police to make statements about their peers, the result being that some confessed in order to reduce what by that point seemed to be inevitable jail sentences.

  “After Euro was killed they bothered everybody,” confirms Mortiis. “I was tricked into telling on people like Faust, which didn’t make me very popular with him and a few others, which is understandable. When they pulled me in they told me they knew he’d killed that guy and they knew I knew and I was fucked if I didn’t just verify, some bullshit like that…”

  Prosecutions included Emperor’s Samoth and Hades’ Jørn Tunsberg, who would both be jailed for their parts in the church burnings. Bård “Faust” Eithun would be sentenced to fourteen years in prison for the Lillehammer murder, his part in the Holmenkollen arson, cemetery desecration, robbery (of material from churches) and possession of illegal weapons, videos, and explosives. Varg would receive a twenty-one-year sentence, the longest possible in Norway, for Øystein’s murder, the attacks on Holmenkollen, Skjold, and Åsane and the possession of a large amount of explosives and ammunition. It is believed that these were to be used in an attack on Oslo’s famous left-wing punk squat Blitz, though there was also a plan to blow up Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, the building featured on Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas album. Finally, Snorre Ruch was sentenced to eight years as an accomplice in Euronymous’ murder.

  Almost universally, those within the scene turned against Varg in support of Euronymous. A CD entitled Nordic Metal: A Tribute To Euronymous—incidentally perhaps the finest black metal compilation ever created—was later released featuring contributions from Norwegian acts Mayhem, Emperor, Mysticum, Enslaved, Mortiis (now working as a solo artist), Arcturus and—rather surprisingly—Thorns, as well as Swedes Abruptum, Marduk, and Dissection, three bands that strongly supported Euronymous in the feud. The booklet was full of quotes paying tribute to the deceased leader of the scene, and in some case even threatening Varg’s life.

  In contrast to Varg, Snorre seems to have escaped the scene’s wrath simply because he was well-liked, as Necrobutcher explains, saying, “We weren’t upset at Snorre at all ’cos everyone knew [him] and everyone that knew Snorre knew that he was a good guy. I don’t know Varg Vikernes myself and I didn’t know anybody he hung out with, he was a new kid on the block, nobody knew him.”

  “Maybe because I’m a decent guy?” Snorre laughs awkwardly when asked why he got such support from the Norwegian black metal community. “I think they understood that I didn’t have any wish to kill Øystein and maybe they didn’t like Øystein but they supported his views and thought that Varg had done a cowardly thing. Maybe they thought it was unfortunate I was there. I’m a very open person when I meet people, so I think people trust me. I think there grew a lot of hate against Varg—not everyone supported the church burnings, not many supported the killing, and not a lot of his verbal actions have been very popular either. I guess I have been very lucky and I have kept my head down during the case and not exposed myself in any way.”

  Other parties, such as Gorgoroth and Darkthrone—the latter having connections with both Varg and Euronymous—avoided becoming involved in the conflict altogether, choosing not to take sides.

  “During the next two years a lot of people were angry and talking pro and against Vikernes,” explains Infernus. “That’s rubbish, if people have a problem with Varg Vikernes they should go and tell him. I never met him and I don’t think we would necessarily get along, but to the degree that I would have a problem with him, I would tell him.”

  “Satanist revelations: 150 Kilo dynamite found at Count’s [home],” Verdens Gang newspaper, Norway, 1993.

  Regardless of the differing opinions on the matter, Euronymous’ passing and the trial that followed essentially marked the end of the Inner Circle and the peak of Satanic/anti-Christian activities within Norway, with the Kristiansand circle also disintegrating around this time.

  “There was not a specific situation but many during a short period of time,” explains Terje “Tchort” Vik Schei. “Attacking with knives some Christian preachers in the middle of the street, storming a church during a midnight mass and trying to slay the minister… when we attacked the Christians in the middle of the street people who knew us would recognize us and tell the police…some kids tried to make heroes of themselves by taking us down. I ended up almost killing one of them, and it was for this I served time. We were hiding for some weeks, living only a day or two in each place. At one point we had to go to my friend’s flat to collect clothes and money and the neighbors must have called the police because shortly after they busted the door and police with dogs busted our asses. They even came through the veranda windows in my mum’s flat and she lives on the third floor so the police used the neighbors’ apartments to lower themselves down, before bursting in through the windows looking for me.

  “It’s the same with the scene as it is with most of the other situations around the world,” he continues. “Take down the leaders and the followers will spread for all winds. My friend and me who were behind all this that happened in Kristiansand were hiding from the police for some weeks and during this period there were some followers who offered themselves to the media and sold ‘their’ stories for money. Most of what they said was total fiction but the media got their first interview and a face to put together with the headlines. It drew the attention away from us, but the local scene split because of this.

  “25 year-old found stabbed to death. Murder/manhunt. Satanic circle to be turned upside down” Dagbladet newspaper, Norway, 1993.

  “I reduced my own sentence by giving the police access to things I had stolen from graveyards and giving myself away on various cases they had open. Looking back I have no regrets for my actions but I am mostly glad that I didn’t turn anyone else in but myself. National police came to Kristiansand to interview us and we
pretended to not know anything and that we didn’t know the people they asked us about. They would show us photos of us entering Helvete, in talk with the people we just denied knowing—they knew everything already and just wanted us to confirm their knowledge. It was better for us just to shut up and say nothing.”

  “I felt the same way anyone would feel when your friends are convicted for murder and arson,” reflects Necrobutcher of the whole period, “you feel sick to your stomach. I was hoping every day that there would be some fucking badass murders to take away the attention we had every fucking day, hoping the papers would get something else to write about, to take away the focus. Vandalism, to destroy someone’s property, it doesn’t have any meaning to me… and the churches were just built up again on taxpayers’ money… All the people involved were under twenty and I think that speaks for itself.”

  While things appeared to have fallen apart within the Norwegian fraternity for a time, the explosion of criminal activity and media coverage had put black metal on the map, giving it a momentum that even today has yet to fade. While these sensational events inevitably overshadowed the amazing music coming from Norway, they also gave many of the bands involved a huge boost, bringing increased attention to both their works and those of the black metal scene as a whole.

  20

  THORNS

  “Snorre has a very unique style of playing. I love the use of weird eerie chords and disharmonies, as well as the often very strict and dominant way of executing the riffs. Back in the day we used to play the so-called Grymyrk rehearsal tape a lot… it became an inspiration for many bands in the scene.”

  —Samoth (Emperor)

  “I remember I got the Grymyrk tape when I was about fifteen from Frederik [Karlsson] of Funeral Dirge—before that had only heard “Ærie Descent” from Nordic Metal, a fucking brilliant compilation CD. Thorns always made a huge impact on me, for me it sounded like old, eerie fucking lullabies.”

  —Niklas Kvarforth (Shining)

  SUITABLY DARK and obscure, the curious tale of Thorns illustrates how even the most arcane creation can have untold impact if discovered by the right people—in this case, impact that would far overshadow its creators’ original intentions. Predating the Norwegian black metal revolution of the nineties, Thorns was the brainchild of guitarist Snorre Ruch, who formed the band while living in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. Musically he was primarily inspired by the thrash and first-generation black metal of the eighties, not that it would be particularly reflected in the highly distinctive playing style he developed between the years of fifteen and seventeen.

  “I always liked fine arts and music,” he explains today from his country home not far from Trondheim. “So it came naturally that when I was fifteen and was beginning to listen to metal, I bought a guitar to see what I could make out of it. I guess I was finishing with WASP, Twisted Sister, and Iron Maiden and going for the harder thrash stuff like Slayer and Metallica and then further to Venom and Bathory. It was in that spirit that I bought the guitar to try and make some hard music.”

  Like many metalheads in Norway at this time, he quickly made contact with national heroes Mayhem, who had recently released their Deathcrush mini-album. He would later visit the band in Oslo, becoming a close friend of several members.

  “I made good friends with the Mayhem guys,” Snorre confirms, “Euronymous, Necrobutcher, Hellhammer, and Dead, and spent some weeks in Oslo. I used to hang around in Øystein’s shop and met a lot of the new guys who were coming into the scene and knew the Darkthrone guys a bit, especially Fenriz, who was hanging out a lot in the shop. But I’m the kind of guy who keeps to himself a bit, not really that social and following what’s happening all the time, so I can get a little isolated from that aspect of the metal scene. There’s a big part of rock ‘n’ roll in it as well, people like to drink beer and go to concerts and party and all that, and I’m more like the Asperger kid who sits at home.”

  It was actually as an indirect result of Mayhem that Thorns—or rather “Stigma Diabolicum,” as the outfit was originally known—was formed in 1989, Snorre finding a like-minded comrade in the form of Marius Vold, an Oslo-based vocalist who was also active in the band Mortem, later to evolve into Arcturus.

  “I was in some smaller just-for-fun bands before that—and after as well—but that was my first personal musical project,” Snorre explains. “I first got in contact with Mayhem having heard of them on a radio show and we started mailing back and forth. After some time being in Oslo visiting them I met Marius and he seemed very interested in things I played for him, like riffs and stuff. He was more into doing the vocals and being supportive around the things I wrote, because I was not certain that people would…” he pauses, “sometimes people think what I make is cool, sometimes I make stuff that is just silly,” he finishes with a laugh. “Marius was also the main one writing the lyrics—or stealing them, or borrowing them from Shakespeare. I think the lyrics were secondary to the music… it was more important to have a cool song title than a lyric.”

  Working under the tasteful pseudonyms of Pedophagia (Snorre: guitar, bass, synth) and Coprophagia (Marius: vocals and drum programming), the pair crafted their first release, a three-track demo entitled Luna De Nocturnus that showcased an intense and challenging sound, the discordant guitars in particular communicating a heavy sense of creeping dread and often leading the music away from any sort of traditional song structure. Like most of their peers during this period, the darkness of the music was not yet totally mirrored by the band’s aesthetic, and a close look at the tape’s inlay reveals that the tongue-in-cheek pseudonyms are echoed by the credits list, which thank Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot… and Mayhem.

  By 1990 the group had picked up a third member in the form of drummer Fetophagia (real name Bård Guldvik Eithun, soon to be known as “Faust”), and during that year the trio would record a rehearsal tape (playing original material alongside Metallica and Slayer covers) and a live tape, recorded when the band played a metal event in Stjørdal, appearing instead of Marius’ other band Mortem, who were scheduled to play but had recently disbanded.

  “When Bård joined us I don’t know if he played in any metal band,” comments Snorre. “I think he just played in a marching band or something like that. But he had a drum set and was very, very eager to play metal. Very, very eager.”

  While the group seems to have been regarded by many as a death metal band at the time, their music was nonetheless a far cry from the brutality of the Swedish and American camps or even the more atmospheric efforts of Norwegian death metal bands such as Old Funeral or Thou Shalt Suffer. Nor did it have a great deal in common with anything from the world of eighties black metal. Instead, the songwriting bore a distinctly experimental approach, with creepy and discordant riffs disrupting the flow of the more aggressive passages in a seemingly intentional and almost confrontational manner.

  “I think it’s mainly because I tend to see things in different ways,” says Snorre with a nervous laugh. “I am a funny guy in some ways—I’m not your typical fellow, I’m afraid. I tend to twist things around a lot, it’s just a part of my personality that things turn out the way they do. I try to challenge some of the basics of what is supposed to be musically correct or accepted to listen to. A lot of my music is dark and twisted and aggressive, but people that know me don’t think I’m like that at all. It’s like an outlet for my more frustrated side I guess.”

  In the latter half of 1990 the band expanded once more, thanks to the addition of a fellow Trondheim resident, bassist Harald Eilertsen. This evolution would coincide with a change of name, the band making the transition from Stigma Diabolicum to Thorns in a concerted attempt to distance themselves from a steadily expanding crowd of new bands.

  “It was when a lot of bands started to call their bands Latin names, you remember that?” Snorre chuckles. “We decided we didn’t want to do that and get lost in the ‘Latin-name bunch’ so we wanted something simple and different. ‘Thor
ns’ was something pointy and sounded cool I guess; it hurts—it’s like that.”

  The following year would prove a significant one for the band, at least in retrospect. At the time, things were moving slowly due to the significant distances between the members—no small issue in the pre-Internet age. So it was that the most famous recording by the band was created with only half its members present, Snorre and Harald crafting a humble tape whose influence upon the Norwegian black metal scene would be nothing less than acute. Consisting of six numbers, it featured five tracks from the Stigma Diabolicum days (“Fall,” “Thule,” “Fairytales,” “You That Mingle May,” and “Into the Promised Land,” curiously renamed “Lovely Children”), as well as a new number called “Home,” a song that would later become known as “Ærie Descent,” probably the band’s most famous song to date. The recording was named the Grymyrk tape, “Grymyrk” being, as Snorre explained in a later webzine interview, “the grim world which all music and lyrics for the early material came from… a dead and silent world with its own strange logic. We even made a language for it… A thirty-word dictionary.”

  What’s perhaps most strange—especially considering its influence—is that the tape features only guitar and bass, with no percussion or vocals whatsoever. Indeed, the recording was only ever intended as a working document to send the two non-Trondheim-based members so that they could work out their respective parts, and was never intended for any form of release, only attaining its later fame due to tape trading among close friends of the group.