An ‘album of the month’ review in UK magazine Terrorizer in 2001 illustrated that Snorre had lost none of his power to impress.
As should be clear, Snorre has remained closely in touch with his musical roots, and in 2007 he gave permission for his early demo and rehearsal recordings with Stigma Diabolicum and Thorns to be released by Kyrck Productions, a Greek label specializing in special editions of early Nordic recordings. He has also kept close ties with Satyr over the years, providing guitars and songwriting to Satyricon on 1999’s Rebel Extravaganza and again on The Age of Nero in 2008. Nonetheless, he has kept a certain distance from the rest of the scene and continues to work very much on his own schedule and on his own terms.
“It’s not my major interest,” he concludes when asked about the black metal scene today. “I’ve rather been following different things, I always thought a lot of the music made is … well, unnecessary maybe.” He laughs as his wife, also present in the room, begins to laugh at this comment. “My wife is laughing at me—she thinks I’m cocky. I want to continue making new music but always I was feeling a little not in the center of the black metal scene and I did not want to be either. I wanted to have my own expression and make something that had not been made before maybe, to challenge the listener a little.”
21
DARKTHRONE
“It started with Darkthrone, especially the A Blaze in the Northern Sky album. I mean they were considered pretty dark and different to everyone else before that, but that’s when I realized that black metal was more than just music. In the eighties you had bands like Sarcófago and Possessed which are now considered black metal, but then it wasn’t, so Darkthrone really set the spark.”
—Silenoz (Dimmu Borgir)
“Darkthrone is one of the most important bands for me. I was a big fan of their death metal-sounding output—Soulside Journey is still a favorite for that genre—but A Blaze in the Northern Sky is still the album that really struck me. They displayed a musical and aesthetic insight that ran infinite circles around the clumsy tough-guy acts that has led to the demise of black metal we are seeing these days. I’ll never get into punk, but I admire them for the statement they’ve made with their development—they saw the ship sink long before many others. Ugh!”
—Ivar (Enslaved)
“They have got a good relationship to their music, they are not too serious or stiff, they can do different stuff and have a glint in the eye which is very good. Maybe this is a little Norwegian thing, this little irony where you are overdoing your badassness just for fun almost, and people misunderstand a little …”
—Snorre (Stigma Diabolicum/Thorns)
HIGHLY PROLIFIC, frequently controversial, intensely focused on the past yet forever pushing forward in their own musical evolution, Darkthrone long ago established themselves as a black metal institution. Consistently imitated but never replicated, they have played a massive hand in creating the blueprint for raw Norse black metal, their influence still audible in new bands around the globe today. In fact, excluding the “first wave” pioneers, the group are probably rivaled only by Burzum in terms of the sheer number of acts who have taken direct musical inspiration from their work. Yet despite all this, the band have refused to merely rest on their laurels and exploit their rich legacy. Instead they have carefully deconstructed a mythology that many bands would sell their souls for, and reinvented themselves with a sound and image that has challenged as many fans as it has enthralled.
Darkthrone in their early death metal days. Ted Skjellum (later Nocturno Culto), Gylve Nagell (then Hank Amarillo, later Fenriz), Ivar Enger (later Zephyrous) and Dag Nilsen (later a session member).
For much of their existence—since 1993 in fact—the band has revolved around a partnership between guitarist, bassist, and vocalist Ted Skjellum, better known to the world as Nocturno Culto, and drummer and lyricist Gylve Nagell, otherwise known as Fenriz. Despite a much-voiced opposition to the mainstream and a general sense of misanthropy, the latter has become one of black metal’s more recognizable faces, as famous for his unusual sense of humor, near-encyclopedic knowledge of metal, and eccentric manner as he is for his drumming.
Given the significant influence that Hellhammer and Celtic Frost have had upon him, it’s interesting to note that Fenriz’s route into music is not entirely dissimilar to Tom G. Warrior’s. While thankfully he did not suffer the same trauma in his youth, like Tom he seems to have discovered his path in life at a very early stage, thanks to a combination of heavy exposure to music and isolation, in this case geographical in nature.
“It was very geographical!” he confirms, his voice characteristically expressive in tone. “We lived in the biggest crossroads in Norway and there were not any other kids living there, we were the only villa in a hill where there were only huts. This is a typical thing in Norway, everyone has a ‘summer house,’ and we were in a hill of summer houses, and we were the only villa. You can imagine, there were not so many children to play with, just the occasional visit from cousins. They also tried to put me in kindergarten, but I refused to go as the girls there wore pants!” He laughs, “I don’t know where I got those ideas, I was probably intimidated ’cos there were so many children.
“I started [musically] with stuff like Waiting for the Sun by The Doors in ’73. I was really young [he was born November 1971] but my uncle already understood that I wasn’t cut out to listen to normal children’s music at the age of two when he once played me some Pink Floyd, and so he started pushing other stuff on me, like Uriah Heep. We moved in ’77 and so I didn’t get any more help from him, and I kind of started from scratch with AC/DC and Kiss. That was a normal route, it was inevitable to get into Kiss and the Kiss trading cards ’cos they came in candy bags and everyone wanted those.”
Strange as it may seem, these trading cards may be part of the reason so many of the central protagonists of nineties Norwegian black metal started creating music at such a young age. A huge number of Norwegian musicians interviewed for this book pinpointed Kiss, and specifically these Kiss cards, as their introduction to metal.
“It actually started with punk/new wave trading cards with English bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Jam, bands like that—and also Kiss,” Fenriz elaborates. “Then after a while they started coming only with Kiss, who were huge. But Kiss weren’t any heavier than what I had listened to in Uriah Heep, so I was searching for that heaviness in the seventies, but I didn’t have anyone showing me Black Sabbath. The first time I heard them was in ’81, then it was like, ‘Eureka!’”
Fast-forward five years from this pivotal moment, and in 1986 the young drummer formed a band of his own called Black Death, alongside local guitarist Anders Risberget. A five-track demo entitled Trash Core ’87 was issued the following year, before the band were joined by a second guitarist, Ivar Enger, and a second demo, Black is Beautiful, was released the same year. Featuring songs like “Nasty Sausage” and “Pizza Breath,” it was a far cry from the band they would eventually become.
“At that time we had discovered punk, which was one of the reasons for do-it-yourself. Bands that were really shabby in playing style, like Cryptic Slaughter, could put out albums, so we felt we could at least start to have a band. I guess I was inspired by stuff like early Slayer, Cryptic Slaughter, and Celtic Frost. The cool thing about Tom G. Warrior was that the way he put the notes together was not like other riff-makers would make, but still he would make it very easy to play, that was the magic. And there was a lot of punk in early Celtic Frost too, there’s no arguing about that. So we started up and called it ‘trash core’—not like thrash, but trash, ’cos it was so bad—and there was punk with the metal from day one in the band.”
“After two demos I understood instinctively that I would want to continue doing music more seriously than in Black Death, so in late ’87 I changed the name to Darkthrone and we started writing a little bit more epic stuff. [The name was] inspired by the name of the Danish mag Blackthorn. From the get-
go it was spelled in one word for me, later I would explain it more humorously by saying, ‘Like Whitesnake.’ The logo was in one word too, but when the new logo came [with help from Tomas Lindberg of Grotesque, and later refined by one Tassilo Förg]—the one everyone knows—there was confusion.”
Fenriz now decided to, in his own words, “up the ante” and recruited a bass player called Dag Nilsen, brought in via guitarist Ivar. A debut demo entitled Land of Frost was issued in 1988, before the introduction of a new guitarist Ted Skjellum, who replaced Anders. Ted had grown up close to the other members, but only met with them after witnessing the band’s first performance (which included the one-off sight of Fenriz performing drums and vocals simultaneously) at Follorocken, the same annual “battle of the bands” Mayhem had participated in two years previously.
The band’s original intended logo, drawn by Fenriz himself. Interestingly, the ‘E’ is based on that of the English Dogs logo and indeed, the original drawing resides in the sleeve of the drummer’s copy of their Where Legend Began album today.
“We set up a meeting and decided that we would play our first gig in the spring of ’88, and Ted was going to turn up and watch our live experience. Mind you, none of us had actually seen a gig except on TV—that was kind of a cool footnote; the first gig we went to was actually Darkthrone. So after the show Ted said, ‘Yeah, it’s hunky dory, I wanna join,’ and the rest is history.”
Hitting sixteen shortly afterward, Fenriz quit school and joined the post office, where he still works today, to help fund both his fervent music-collecting and Darkthrone itself. Doubling their efforts, the band rehearsed furiously in their cold-war bomb shelter rehearsal room (another interesting Hellhammer parallel) and released a promo tape in late 1988 entitled A New Dimension, featuring a song called “Snowfall” along with an introduction track.
“Most bands—people that are self-taught—they need to rehearse for at least two years before they can make a recording that can portray them in a way that is any good,” says Fenriz. “So we didn’t really have anything to show until late ’88 with the ‘Snowfall’ track, which showed we could at least play a little bit and do a long and epic song. The title A New Dimension explains how much we rehearsed and that we took a tiny quantum leap from our first shitty demo.”
Though Fenriz was personally keen to further explore the epic side of metal, the band found themselves instead evolving into a more aggressive death/thrash direction, quickly crafting another demo called Thulcandra, issued in early 1989. Following the tape, Nocturno would take over vocal duties within the band, due to Fenriz being unhappy with his own efforts. During 1989 the band played a number of shows, one of which was shown on TV and also became the fourth tape, Cromlech. This was then sent to a number of labels including UK label Peaceville, with whom the band were especially happy to get a contract, firstly because it was an English label, and secondly because it featured both Autopsy and Paradise Lost on its roster.
Photograph from the shoot for 1993’s Under A Funeral Moon album, featuring Nocturno Culto.
The first result of the deal with Peaceville was the debut album Soulside Journey, recorded in Stockholm’s Sunlight studios in 1990 with owner and producer Tomas Skogsberg. During the recording the band stayed with Swedish death metallers Entombed, who were able to offer advice as they had recently recorded their debut album Left Hand Path at Sunlight (guitarist Uffe Cederlund was ultimately credited with co-producing the guitars on Soulside). Released in January 1991, the result was an effective death metal album that bore both a technical edge and a somewhat otherworldly atmosphere thanks to choice use of synth and an epic, slightly creepy approach to songwriting.
“We were influenced by American bands, but the key to our sound was that every riff on that album—except one, that’s like a Celtic Frost riff—you could take and play on a synthesizer, and it would be horror movie music,” explains Fenriz. “When people make horror movie music they don’t use the blues scale, they use a certain scale and we made our riffs on this ‘horror scale.’ So we would call our music ‘technical horror death metal,’ inspired by maybe Necrophagia, Nocturnus, early Massacre and Death. I didn’t actually watch almost any horror movies at all but that was the philosophy behind the riffs, to make it sound eerie, and we had some science fiction creep in there too. So if it’s original that’s the reason.
“We wanted to record the album where we did the [Cromlech demo] so we could use their board,” he continues, “but it wasn’t possible as we only had a thousand pounds to record the album with. He even didn’t want me to bring any drums, he wanted me to play the stupid computer drums. I mean we were only seventeen, eighteen years old, we didn’t have much money, so that’s why it sounds like it does, and that’s why we never recorded with modern sound again and have been fighting modern sound since then. It should have had an Autopsy or Black Sabbath sound, that would be better.”
Zephyrous on the cover of 1992’s A Blaze In The Northern Sky.
Fenriz finally makes the cover on 1994’s Transilvanian Hunger. Darkthrone originally intended these monochromatic portrait covers to be their visual trademark, but the approach quickly spread throughout the black metal scene.
Notably, it was to be the last time that the group would compromise their artistic vision, and while Soulside Journey was an effective and well-received album, its musical approach would soon be confined to the past as the group underwent a radical transformation in 1991. Though the band had already found success with death metal, three quarters of the lineup had come to the conclusion that it was time to add their voice to the Norwegian black metal movement—despite the fact that it barely existed at that point—due to a disillusionment with the genre they were playing. Thus, Darkthrone ceased work on the death metal follow-up album Goatlord, instead preparing A Blaze In The Northern Sky, an opus that would become known as the very first Norwegian black metal album.
“Definitely one major, major point was looking at my collection and [realizing] I had bought maybe five death metal releases from 1990,” explains Fenriz of the stylistic shift. “I was so sick and tired of it, even though it was what we’d trained to play. I mean it was okay to play, but not to listen to other bands. And many other death metal bands came out with disappointing stuff after their promising demos … it became apparent that what we got a kick out of was, to put it simply, Celtic Frost, Motörhead, and Bathory. Throughout 1990 it was more and more of this but the songs we made were still death metal—we had 13/16 beats and shit like that, it was almost jazz—and I was thinking in my head, ‘This professionalism has to go, I want to de-learn playing drums, I want to play primitive and simple, I don’t want to play like a drum solo all the time and make these complicated riffs.
“Ted and Ivar had also talked between them and said the same damn thing. Then one time they took the car and drove to my place, which was also the rehearsal place, without Dag ’cos he was really into the technical stuff, and said to me, ‘What if we just skip playing all the intricate stuff and just play what we really care about, what we’re listening to, what fires us up?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, let’s go guys,’ so we quickly stopped rehearsing the Goatlord material. But we had to use some of the material for the A Blaze album, ’cos we didn’t want to make an EP with just three new total black metal songs. So we made three new black metal songs—‘Kathaarian Life Code,’ ‘In the Shadow of the Horns,’ and ‘Where Cold Winds Blow,’ and the rest would be Goatlord-ish material that was ‘blackened’ because of the studio sound we chose.”
Even if some of the material on the album doesn’t reflect it (at least to Fenriz’s well-trained ear) the band’s conversion to black metal felt like a total one. The group took a hefty dose of inspiration from the early pioneers, most notably Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, whose influence was evident in the key riffs of sublime songs such as “In the Shadow of the Horns.” The band also completely reworked their aesthetic, adopting pseudonyms (Ted became Nocturno Culto, Gylve became Fenriz,
and Ivar became Zephyrous) and wearing corpsepaint, becoming one of the most visible bands to do so thanks to the iconic sleeves of their next three albums, which each featured a band member in a stark, high-contrast, black-and-white photograph—intended at the time to be something of a visual trademark. Now so common in black metal sleeves that it sometimes seems obligatory, at the time it was a pretty revolutionary move.
“We saw early photos of Hellhammer, Sarcófago, and Dead from Mayhem and decided this was something that made sense for us. The first time I did it we were doing some sort of video shoot in early ’90 for one of the death metal songs. I took a pencil and a pencil sharpener and on the side there’s a thing [where] you can rub the pencil and get fragments and I rubbed this under my eyes” He laughs, “It’s like lead, so I was pretty desperate. I mean that’s a sign you’re hungry, that you wanna rock, using lead from a pencil!”
Both Dead and Mayhem were already well known to the band, in Fenriz’s case since 1987, when he had begun attending Mayhem rehearsals. Fenriz was some three years younger than both Euronymous and Necrobutcher, no small amount of time at that age, but not an unbridgeable gap, as it turned out. “They would just pick me up in the car,” he explains. “I was already in Black Death then and they—like any sane person would do—hated the band, but they understood that I was a hungry kid that wanted to learn.”
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 26