Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “The worst thing with that was getting a letter from him in my mailbox the next day,” sighs Deathcrush vocalist and longtime contact Maniac. “He sounded very determined about his future; unfortunately for him the future was terminated.”

  The record’s release was ultimately postponed, as the parents of the guitarist had requested that Varg’s bass lines be removed, a point that Hellhammer initially agreed to but ultimately decided against. To this day they remain, simply lowered in the mix and without credit to Vikernes. The distinctive cover art for the record was also kept as Euronymous intended: featuring Trondheim’s massive Nidaros Cathedral bathed in an eerie blue, it is a perplexing image for a Satanically themed album but makes more sense when one learns that it was apparently Euronymous’ plan—and one Deathcrush drummer Manheim suggests he would have attempted—to blow up the cathedral, reportedly with assistance from Varg, who was found to be in possession of a large amount of explosives at the time of his arrest.

  Indeed, many facets of the finished album mirror the increased level of seriousness Euronymous had been injecting into the black metal scene, the whole presentation contrasting strongly with previous release Deathcrush. The album is generally considered one of the archetypal Satanic metal albums, though Necrobutcher—who was present for the writing of the lion’s share of the material—is adamant that this isn’t as clear-cut as it might seem.

  “We were not practicing any religion, we made music,” he explains simply. “The fact that the album is called De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas makes people think we are [a] Satanic band, but it’s based on a book called that, which is about Satanism but is not about worshipping it. It was a book that inspired Dead to write the lyrics, but he is not around to answer that question and I never saw the book myself. If other people feel this is Satanic music, maybe it is. This is the great thing about art, you make it but other people can find other things in your art that you don’t see yourself or that you don’t think about yourself when you make it or perform it.”

  Finally issued in the middle of 1994, the album would be the final release on Euronymous’ Deathlike Silence Productions. While the group’s stellar reputation and macabre backstory would have been enough to guarantee attention, even objectively speaking it was a milestone in the black metal scene and hailed as a classic upon release. The long-delayed Live in Leipzig the previous year meant that four of the eight songs were already familiar to fans, not least “Freezing Moon,” which arguably remains the most iconic song in Mayhem’s back catalogue, its aura of despair still unparalleled in the band’s catalogue or indeed anyone else’s. Elsewhere Euronymous’ own composition techniques were married to the snaking discordance of Snorre’s writing style on newer songs such as “Cursed in Eternity” and “From the Dark Past.” Masterminded by Euronymous, but with the close link to the Dead/Necrobutcher/Hellhammer lineup, the record is aggressive, cold, detailed and single-minded, and testament to both a new era of brilliance for the group but also the delayed realization of its previous lineup’s work.

  Several freezing moons later: De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is finally released in 1994.

  It was also the end of another incarnation of the band, and with half its participants either dead or incarcerated, the group once again ceased activity, destroying any plans Attila had to join the band permanently, at least for a time. In fact the singer would only learn of the band’s fate some months later, and soon entered into a lengthy period of inactivity and depression.

  “I read it in the papers,” he sighs. “I only had the phone numbers for Varg and Euronymous and both the numbers didn’t work, so I thought the guys were on holiday. Then I read [the news] in a Hungarian version of Metal Hammer and I thought, ‘What the fuck is this?’ I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

  28

  THE BEAST REAWAKENS

  MAYHEM PART IV

  EVEN AS EURONYMOUS was being laid to rest, the beast of Mayhem was once again stirring back into life. Meeting at the funeral of the guitarist, Necrobutcher and Hellhammer discussed the subject and agreed that they should rebuild the band, but recognized that this would be no easy task. With Dead and Euronymous gone, Occultus and Varg out of the picture, and Attila unreachable, the band looked to another ex-member, Deathcrush vocalist Sven-Erik “Maniac” Kristiansen, with whom Necrobutcher was still in close contact. No longer living in the mountains of Telemark, he had moved to the country’s capital and was working on several musical projects, including one called Status Fatal, which he describes as “in the vein of a helpless Joy Division.”

  “I was in another band with Maniac called Fleshwounds,” explains Necrobutcher. “It was a trio and a drum machine. He was in some kind of art school where you pay a fee and then you live there—they had a ‘How to Be a Sound Engineer’ course and Maniac had moved there from the mountain village where he lived. So when I talked to Hellhammer at the funeral I told him I was already in contact with Maniac and that he had improved his way of singing and was willing to step in.”

  The following year the lineup was completed thanks to teenage guitarist Rune “Blasphemer” Eriksen, who lived outside of Oslo and only had a marginal connection to the black metal scene. Originally discovering heavy metal via his older sister and her metal-loving boyfriends, he had developed a passion for the technical late-eighties thrash of outfits such as Slayer, Holy Moses, and Coroner. He was also a fan of death metal and had even started a band playing Obituary covers, releasing a demo in 1991 and playing a handful of shows the same year, including one with Kreator. Though not a particular fan of black metal (he explains that Rotting Christ’s Thy Mighty Contract was one of the few examples he favored) he had gravitated to the Oslo scene out of a hunger for greater extremity. He eventually crossed paths with Hellhammer, who invited him to participate in another of his musical projects, a post-Mortem act called Descended, from which guitarist Steinar “Sverd” Johnsen had just been kicked out.

  Maniac, Hellhammer, Necrobutcher and Blasphemer—the face of Mayhem from 1994 to 2004.

  “I went to the same school as Hellhammer’s girlfriend,” recalls Blasphemer, “and he had heard some rumor that I was a very good guitar player. I bumped into him in Oslo and he had this side project thing with the guy from Arcturus and he asked if I would take part. That suited me very well as I was hanging around Oslo and wanted to do something in that scene. So I met up in the Mayhem rehearsal room. I think it was Mortem, we did a couple of tracks, but then a disaster happened so I kind of fled the city. It was me and the vocalist, we were drunk and somehow managed to trash the rehearsal room. I think someone had broken into his equipment box and we went totally nuts and started trashing stuff and that led to my departure from the scene for a few years. There was a lot of bad blood of course, and people were… not threatening but, like, Hellhammer said I managed to ruin his bicycle and was very pissed off. It’s kind of funny and absurd now.”

  Fast forward to late 1994, and the talented guitarist would be offered the opportunity of a lifetime despite his earlier faux pas. “I kind of isolated myself and tried to start a black metal band with some childhood friends from school,” he continues. “I was playing drums and we did that for a year and a half and were about to record a demo, but before we managed to do that Hellhammer got in touch with me again and said, ‘Hey, long time no see, would you like to join Mayhem?’ I thought, ‘What the fuck is this?’ but my heart was already there, I wanted to get more into this extreme stuff and really go for it. And at eighteen, you don’t give a fuck about anything, you just go for it. So that’s what I did.”

  “Hellhammer knew him, but since this episode that they vandalized our rehearsal space he was not the first on the list,” explains Necrobutcher dryly. “But after a while we thought we would check him out. For one year we had been looking at different options… we were thinking to maybe wait until Snorre got out of jail, but that was still seven years ahead.”

  The move to resurrect the band initially proved universally unpopular, and fan
zines bemoaned the decision to bring back the band in the absence of Dead and Euronymous, a point that Maniac admits made him hesitate. “I was very reluctant, but when I heard Blasphemer play all doubt was surgically removed. That’s how I embarked on a roller coaster of cutting flesh, bloody pig heads, alcohol, misanthropy, and the guitar riffs of a genius. I think most people wanted Mayhem to remain buried. But Mayhem is still there. I am sure a lot of these people are not.”

  “There was a lot of crap actually,” recalls Blasphemer. “I think Hellhammer got more shit than me. I mean, it was not like I forced my way into the band—I was asked and I accepted. I remember a couple of times when we were out he would end up in discussions, kind of defending why he did this. People were not that convinced and were certain that we would do this to go out and earn as much cash as possible. But with time it sort of bounced off because we did nothing. I mean, I joined in October ’94 and we did not play until ’97, we were just rehearsing all the time.”

  “We got no support at all basically,” confirms Necrobutcher. “Nobody was excited. People asked how we could go on in Mayhem without Euronymous. A lot of people said that in the beginning. We felt that the only way to shut their face was to release good shit… That’s why we rehearsed for four years.”

  “I think it was this common feeling that we should have material,” Blasphemer confirms. “I was starting to compose, I had written ‘Ancient Skin’ and ‘I Am Thy Labyrinth,’ those two songs we were already starting to play at the end of ’95 and every so often people would come by and like it and people started to get more belief. I’m not sure why it took so long, we were only doing weekend rehearsals and I was still living where I was raised, I was still at school so I was living partly at the rehearsal room and going back home sixty kilometers from Oslo. And weekend rehearsals meant beer of course…”

  Just as De Mysteriis had endured an epic gestation period, so too did any evidence of the new lineup’s existence. The first preview, rather appropriately, came via 1995’s Nordic Metal: A Tribute to Euronymous, which featured a rerecording of the De Mysteriis track “Pagan Fears.” It was not until the summer of 1997, however, that the band made their official return, thanks to a live show in Bischofswerda, Germany. Though hardly their finest performance, it marked their first appearance abroad since their eventful 1990 tour of East Germany and Turkey, during which they had not only recorded Live in Leipzig but played the first black metal show in Asia, in the Turkish city of Izmir, despite police interruption.

  The first new Mayhem release was also issued in 1997, a two-track single making its way into the hands of attendees of the comeback show, as well as some of those at the London show later that year. Featuring a cover photo from 1987 that Euronymous and Necrobutcher had originally intended for the cover of Deathcrush, it was limited to five hundred copies and consisted of a rerecording of “Necrolust” and an exclusive version of the aforementioned new song “Ancient Skin.” Now signed to UK’s Misanthropy Records—a decision that raised eyebrows, since the label was most famous for having Burzum on their roster—Mayhem followed this a few months later with the EP Wolf’s Lair Abyss.

  A memorable Terrorizer cover captures the band’s official return with Wolf’s Lair Abyss, 1997.

  Featuring four songs—“I Am Thy Labyrinth,” “Fall of Seraphs,” “Ancient Skin,” and “Symbols of Bloodswords”—along with an electronic intro track, the opus remains one of the band’s most intense recordings. Frequently high-paced, it is a mass of distorted bass, searing guitars, and blisteringly fast but detailed percussion, all topped off by the inhuman screams of Maniac. Retaining the single-minded and often linear fury of De Mysteriis, the EP is nonetheless more technical and calculated, with unusually complicated drum patterns and guitar work breaking up the furious assaults.

  “When you rehearse old songs as often as we did in those early years you begin to understand the patterns,” reflects Blasphemer, “and I think subconsciously I wanted to have some of the similarities from [De Mysteriis]. But at the same time it has this weirdness, the weird timings, ’cos I was always into that technical side. It was a combination of what I did and the older Mayhem stuff.”

  “It was clearly aggressive people playing aggressive music,” comments Necrobutcher. “Negativity, drinking a lot… a bunch of pissed-off guys you know? Hellhammer was the only one who had a job—he was working as night guard so it didn’t collide with the rehearsals—so we were poor, piss-poor ’cos we didn’t do anything else but the band.”

  Mixed by the band along with Knut and Garm of Arcturus, the Wolf’s Lair Abyss tracks were consistent in style if not in sound. That’s hardly surprising, as the recordings were carried out in two sessions after some of the initial results sounded too extreme, even for Mayhem’s tastes.

  “We actually recorded in a really good studio with a producer who was a member of TNT,” laughs Necrobutcher. “We listened to it afterwards and realized we’d recorded it too fast, it was too aggressive, so we had to go back to Farout Studios in Oslo and record several of the songs again.”

  Despite these hiccups, the band did well to re-establish themselves within a scene that had been skeptical, earning magazine covers and healthy sales in the process. For most fans the tour that followed the release was also the first opportunity to see the group live and the band made sure to capitalize on their touring opportunities, decorating their stages with the pig’s heads and animal skulls that had become their trademark. Maniac too proved a compelling and dramatic frontman, balancing a keen sense of showmanship with the same self-destructive streak that had characterized Dead’s performances, this manifesting most obviously in his onstage self-mutilation.

  “My approach was to enter another mindset and to get out of there alive,” explains the vocalist. “During my best performances I think I managed to be in another world. I was not in the presence of an audience but a black vibrant light. My worst performances are best forgotten but unfortunately they are very vivid. Drunk beyond humanity. The cutting was directly inspired by Dead, especially after patching him up after the gig Mayhem played in Jessheim [Norway]. I realized back then that he actually went to other worlds, and years later I wanted to go there myself. But I think my worlds were different from his. An ecstasy hidden in a religious veil. And in general I hated religion. I still can’t believe how I got there. I hated religion so much yet every time was like a revelation. Today I know how to get there perhaps because I might have achieved a spirituality lost to me in the past. Mainly thanks to Dissection and Watain. But anyway the cutting turned into a freak show where the audience wanted to see it more than they wanted to listen to the vocals or the lyrics. I don’t think any of them understood anything, except maybe one percent of them.”

  The band would demonstrate their onstage proficiency on their next official album, a live opus recorded in Italy in late 1998 and released in 1999 under the title Mediolanum Capta Est, intended to mean “Milan is captured.” Though it was never going to topple the raw brilliance of Live in Leipzig, the record nonetheless remains an intense and rewarding experience, particularly notable for its guest appearance by Attila.

  Far more significant was the band’s second full-length, which arrived midway during the following year. Titled Grand Declaration of War, it was divided into Parts II and III, and presented as the second and third chapters of a bigger work that had begun with Wolf’s Lair Abyss, the opening track even beginning with the same riff that closed that EP. But it was there that any similarities ended, the music and lyrics taking a bold step away from conventional black metal. A complex concept album with a somewhat futuristic aesthetic, Grand Declaration saw the band taking the unusual step of entrusting all songwriting duties to their newest member, who went on to oversee every facet of the record’s creation.

  “Blasphemer basically had free hands writing all the music in Mayhem, we just tried to arrange our instruments,” Necrobutcher explains. “Some parts I contributed a little bit, not much, Hellhammer contr
ibuted a lot of course—Blasphemer just told him when he didn’t like it rather than telling him exactly what to play. We spent one year finding the right guy, then you have to build him up, psychologically and everything,” he continues. “It was big shoes for him to fill and all these negative comments that we should quit and stuff like this all the time didn’t help much, so we tried to build his confidence to release his potential—and then it did.”

  “Wolf’s Lair Abyss was a bit more free,” considers the guitarist. “I was pumping out the riffs that I had and people just hooked onto it and played along. After that I became more fussy with the drum patterns and had a lot of ideas that I would tell to Hellhammer. The other guys were very happy about it and who wouldn’t be—one guy to sit at home and do all the work?” he laughs, before clarifying “I think they just realized I had a fucked up thing going. I didn’t get any complaints so I just continued almost without any interference. That’s how I write music—I am probably a demanding musician to work [with] and I guess will always be, ’cos I have very strong opinions: it’s not just a riff, it’s so much more, it’s a very spiritual thing. That was a very mental album though… much more about thoughts than emotion.”