Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  January 2010 saw the release of Scenes From Hell, which incorporated real orchestral instruments for the first time, including a heavy brass presence, with instruments such as trombone, tuba, trumpet, oboe, clarinet, and flute included alongside a string quartet. Interestingly it was actually Mikannibal’s saxophone playing that initially inspired Mirai to incorporate so much brass into the album, giving it a military atmosphere, which in turn inspired the lyrics.

  “These days I deal more with reality,” explains Mirai. “People are scared of the haunted house where the whole family was slaughtered. But we live in the city where a hundred thousand people were burnt to death in one night during World War II! I can’t even imagine how it was to see so many people dying around you.”

  Like its predecessor, Scenes of Hell contained songs that were far less episodic than earlier works, integrating the two main elements—in this case orchestral parts and metal—in a more cohesive manner. Nonetheless, the album demonstrated the same juxtaposition of moods, the triumphant and often jolly sounding brass riding across the more hellish metal parts, almost like the contrast of a military band and the suffering victims of an aerial assault. Such juxtaposition continued in 2012’s supercharged opus In Somniphobia, and it seems safe to say it is set to remain central to the group’s approach to composition.

  Indeed, juxtaposition is one of the factors that has always made Sigh so fascinating and effective; not only the manner in which they mix “inappropriate” moods to great effect, but the very fact that they introduce emotions such as cheer or whimsy into extreme metal in the first place. How much of this is the result of an intellectual decision and how much is down to the composer’s instincts is hard to say, even after numerous interviews with Mirai. For many Westerners, the appeal of Japanese bands is the fact that they interpret Western genres in a manner that throws up surprising results, and, as Mirai concedes, this may be one of several factors that give this great band their unique aura.

  “I took classical piano lessons for twenty years, so I have a huge classical music background and I am a pianist/keyboardist, not a guitarist,” he considers, “so the way of composition should be pretty much different from usual metal musicians. Also I’m a Japanese; I use [a] hundred percent different language and eat something different than Western bands, so it’s very natural that the music I create is different from the metal bands from U.S. or Europe, even if it’s not intentional. I believe the language has a big influence on music. The Japanese language is totally different from English—English is a very rhythmic language, but Japanese is much more melodic. We do not emphasize the accent at all, but instead tell the words by intonation, so obviously my perception on rhythm and melodies should be different from English speakers. Thus, it’s inevitable that the Japanese bands sound different. But, I often see Japanese bands that sound exactly like Western bands! I truly admire them,” he smiles. “They should have made a huge effort to be so unoriginal.”

  45

  DØDHEIMSGARD

  “I really like Dødheimsgard, both because of the obvious issues of the people in the band (and I think particularly Carl-Michael and Yusaf inspired each other a lot) and the sheer genius of the music. In fact, I think ‘Shiva-Interfere’ from 666 International is actually the coolest song that ever came out of the entire scene …”

  —Simen Hestnæs, (Arcturus, Borknagar, Dimmu Borgir)

  THE LAST TWO DECADES have been quite a journey for the evolving beast that is Dødheimsgard, who have made a dramatic transition from a conventional—even vaguely nostalgic—Norwegian black metal band to one of the major players in the industrial black metal scene. With a name that translates as “kingdom of death” or “death’s realm/home” (they would later come to be known as simply DHG), the outfit formed in 1994 as a side project for Vicotnik—a.k.a. Yusaf Parvez of Ved Buens Ende—and Aldrahn/Bjørn Dencker Gjerde, then playing in Haerfaerd and later a contributor to myriad Norwegian acts including Thorns, Old Man’s Child, and even (along with Vicotnik) Dimmu Borgir and Isengard.

  “We were both pretty defiant creatures in very different ways and found each other to be quite funny individuals,” recalls Vicotnik. “As common in those days, there was a lot of male bonding over fluids with high alcohol content, and this, more often than not, resulted in new bands forming. At the same time, Fenriz and myself were having pool competitions every time we went out to wet our palates—which was more or less two times a day—and Fenriz was kicking my ass so badly that the competition would potentially drag on forever if I was to ever regain any advantage. So we needed something else to occupy our evenings with, and Fenriz suggested making some music together. In the back of my head I thought that this would work well with what Aldrahn and I was doing, so I suggested it. Fenriz was very hesitant, but after twisting his arm a bit, he agreed to have a rehearsal with us. The rehearsal killed, [but] Fenriz was quick to point out that he was not joining. Aldrahn and I said, ‘Okay, no big deal’—we were happy just to have had a rehearsal with the guy, somebody we admired as a musician and individual.”

  In another time or setting, that could easily have been the end of the story, but thanks to the fertile ground of the nineties Norwegian scene, the project had already managed to put down the roots necessary for its survival.

  “As time went on, Fenriz pointed out now and again that he was not joining the band, always out of the blue,” Vicotnik explains. “I guess Fenriz just wanted us to nag him and really want him to join, and of course we did, we just respected his choice and left the question. One day Aldrahn and I were having a beer or twenty at Elm Street bar and suddenly Fenriz stormed in with really heavy, determined footsteps, his suitcase flapping around the whole room (he always walked around with business suitcase in those days) and went up to me, pulled out his arm in a handshake and asked, ‘So, am I in?’ That was it, DHG was a trio. We had already a bunch of songs ready, so all we had to do was start practicing.”

  Despite their later avant-garde direction, Dødheimsgard were originally a very traditional Norwegian black metal band in sound and appearance.

  The first fruits of the trio’s labor was a three-song demo released the same year, quickly followed by full-length debut Kronet Til Konge, released in January 1995 on Malicious Records. With an apparent thrash influence and less-than-obvious melodies, it nonetheless proved a relatively familiar slice of Norwegian black metal, especially in the context of the band’s later works. Featuring Vicotnik on drums, Aldrahn on guitars and lead vocals, and Fenriz on bass (unusually audible by the standards of the day), its sound is both mid-paced and considered, but also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a pretty stripped-down and raw affair.

  “The aim musically speaking was to start off with the most primal form of black metal art and develop from there,” explains Vicotnik. “To start with what was our generation’s beginnings, and let things develop naturally. The material we wanted for KTK was very specific, and since it was very primal it did not take a very long time. We also wanted it to be a little flawed, so we did not spend years rehearsing it—when something was written, we stuck with it, there were no discussions about this or that riff, we made a song and moved on. We got instant interest from a label, which was kind of expected since we had Ferico [Fenriz] in our midst and the [general] reception to Kronet Til Konge was okay.”

  Remaining on Malicious, Dødheimsgard’s next effort, 1996’s much-hailed Monumental Possession, saw a lineup shift with the addition of guitarist Ole Jørgen Moe a.k.a. Apollyon of Aura Noir, Cadaver Inc., and Lamented Souls, and the departure of Fenriz. A second new member also entered the fold at this time, namely future Emperor bassist Jonas Alver.

  “I always wanted Apollyon to join,” explains Vicotnik. “I had played around with him on a few occasions before, and really liked the guy and felt a musical kinship to him. He is a very pleasant person to be around—of course he has an ego as well, but he does not wear it on his sleeves. We really wanted a second guitarist to fill out the sound a little and al
so to add more impulses to the outfit and let it develop. I guess we decided that he was the obvious choice for us, especially as our material progressed in a slightly more thrashy manner. My time as a drummer was drawing to an end as well. Since we knew that the era after Monumental Possession would become a lot faster and Apollyon was a little more accomplished as a drummer and I was slightly better than him on guitars, we saw that we could also do the good old switch as the material grew faster and more technical. With Alver, it was an obvious choice; our paths were crossing more and more as time went along, and simultaneously Fenriz was not sure if he was joining for the second album—the tedious part of this breakup was that Fenriz went forth and back on whether he was going to stay or not. I think maybe Fenriz was just sick of it all back then and wanted to unwind and do other things than metal for a while, and in retrospective I truly understand that.”

  1995: A Malicious Records flyer featuring Fenriz advertises the Kronet Til Konge album.

  The second album bears a notably more aggressive and straightforward vibe, thanks to a punchy production and caustic vocals, which were split between all the members except for Alver. Despite Fenriz’s departure there is an undeniably Darkthrone-esque, eighties-inspired atmosphere to the thrashy, catchy numbers, and the fact that Apollyon’s Aura Noir were working on the similarly minded debut album Black Thrash Attack around this time seems to have left its mark on Monumental Possession.

  “We wanted to dig a little further down into our roots,” explains Vicotnik. “All the guys in this era were really into thrash metal, so we wanted to mix this with a straightforward style of black metal. I also started opening my mind a little and began reading a lot of psychology, philosophy, religion and classic literature. I think this is more evident in Ved Buens Ende’s music, but for example the outro on Monumental Possession shows that we are moving in on uncharted territory, a style of music that contains a blend of layers that was unfamiliar to us. Nevertheless, our main aim was to make a musical blend that had meant the world to us for years, to have a really warm and analog sound—we recorded two of the guitars through a bass amp—and tons of primal aggression. I am very happy with Monumental Possession, it is very straight to the point. [And] the drumming is more than half decent—I knew that this was the last one for me, so I wanted it to be solid.”

  Despite the efficiency of its actual creation, Vicotnik compares the atmosphere within the band following its completion to that of an abandoned ship, with the finished album gathering dust while the artwork and layout remained uncompleted. The experience appears to have been pivotal for Vicotnik, and from this point forward he would become the central figure within the group, the shift coinciding closely with a move into more avant-garde territories. “Even if the composing and the rehearsing went flawlessly, there were other issues that were just put to the side and expected to resolve themselves,” he recalls. “This grew more and more frustrating to me as the months went on and on, and I took it upon myself to just finish it by myself.”

  The first evidence of the band’s new direction was 1998’s Satanic Art—released on Satyr’s Moonfog Records after Malicious Records’ collapse—an EP whose sound was several worlds away from the previous recordings. With a running time of sixteen minutes, the release served as a gentle introduction to the band’s new incarnation (now a six-piece featuring the addition of Cerberus on bass, Galder of Old Man’s Child on guitars, and Zweiss/Svein Egil Hatlevik of Fleurety on keyboards and piano), though there were also other motivations behind the record.

  “This was what it all was building up to,” explains Vicotnik. “I could not wait, I had had this style of track since ’94–’95 and did not want to wait rehearsing and preparing a whole new album, so to speed things ahead a mini-album seemed like the clever thing to do. The contact with the label was also dwindling, so doing a mini felt a lot more secure, in case you got stuck with the costs.”

  Reflecting the taste for experimentation and sophistication prevalent at the time, the quarter-hour effort stands today as something of a stepping stone toward the more experimental and often mechanized style of the band’s later works. Though more organic than later efforts, the material nonetheless blends clear industrial leanings with a cold and concentrated black metal assault, as well as including a good dose of diabolically tinged piano and violin work. Lyrically too, it served to challenge, flipping the ubiquitous ego-oriented lyrics of black metal on their head.

  “Musically speaking it is a stepping stone most definitely,” agrees Vicotnik. “But inside the band we had seen this period coming for a long time. I had songs like ‘The Paramount Empire’ and ‘The Black Treasure’ ready since before Kronet Til Konge was released, but it did not make sense to play at bpm levels I was not comfortable with as a drummer and we needed to kind of stick to the plan; to start off with the basic forms of extreme metal and step by step take it beyond. This is kind of what I had been gunning for all along: speed, aggression, originality, insanity. To make music that challenged the mind. I planned it all out in detail; the design, the way to record, how to mix other more organic stuff in the contents rather than the black-and-white, ‘I am so powerful’ lyrics or the ‘I am a really evil guy in a really dark forest’ concepts. Catering to more frail parts of the human mind and body like disease, mental illness, and mix it up with stuff like parapsychology, metaphysics, surrealism and spice it up a bit with duality thinking. From the weakest to the strongest animal, from wheel-chairs to flying capes, god and the devil, order and chaos etc. I wanted the music to almost feel like you were looking at it, as much as hearing it.”

  1999’s challenging 666 International.

  “That’s probably the best we did,” considers Apollyon, who had moved from guitar to playing drums within the band. “It’s maybe more Thorns-inspired. I think the last song is from an earlier recording session because the drums are sped up on the song, we recorded it slow and sped it up to the tempo we wanted it ultimately. You can hear that on a lot of releases [by bands] of that time, because of the drum pitch. Satanic Art was very much Vicotnik, very much his band … from Satanic Art on he was starting to take over [the writing].”

  In 1999 the monumental 666 International was unleashed. Continuing directly from where Satanic Art had left off—to the extent that the album began with exactly the same piece of music the mini-album ended with—the record took the experimental attitude of its predecessor and ran with it. As part of another lineup shift, which saw Galder and Cerberus depart, 666 International included a significant addition in the form of Vicotnik’s close friend Carl-Michael Eide (Czral), who performed drums on the album as well as some guitar parts. No stranger to the musicians within DHG, he had, like Apollyon, already contributed to both Aura Noir and Cadaver Inc. and also played with Vicotnik in Ved Buens Ende, as well as in notable acts such as Ulver, Dimmu Borgir, and Satyricon. Thus the album would mark a period dominated by the Vicotnik/Czral partnership.

  “I knew what I wanted,” Vicotnik explains. “I gathered up every guitar riff I had, every piece of music I had written but not used. I took a portable bed and moved into the studio. I had riffs in bundles and together with Czral, we made drum patterns for every part we had. We added more and more layers on the parts and in the end we assembled the parts into songs. This way of working was totally new to me, but nevertheless, very interesting. The product almost had its own life and evolved all the time, it was almost like designing music. I am also glad it was done in the final era of hundred-percent analog production. We did not do this watching a computer screen, the whole thing was done working with the ears and with sounds. Almost three months later I moved out of the studio with an album I always wanted to make.”

  Though synth player Svein Egil Hatlevi wrote most of his parts in relative isolation, he is quick to admit that he didn’t play an “essential role” in the album’s creation, and his recollections of the period give some idea as to the unusual dynamics within DHG during this period.

  “It was
a much more chaotic band [than Fleurety]—there were more people involved, all wanting to do different things,” he ponders. “But it was a good thing for the music. There was some discussions going on, but basically it was fragmented, everyone had a responsibility for their own instrument even though Vicotnik was … well, there was never a doubt that he was the owner of the band. I would make my intros and keyboard lines and see if he liked it, if he didn’t I would do something else, I was very independent in terms of what I did with my own music. That felt natural, there were a lot of big egos in the band, so there wasn’t much room for discussion as discussions could easily turn into arguments.”

  The record would be Svein’s last appearance with the band, as upon attending rehearsals for the follow-up he found that there wasn’t much space in the songs for his piano skills, not to mention that the three-day-a-week rehearsals required by Vicotnik were incompatible with his lifestyle at the time. 666 would also mark the last contribution to DHG from Apollyon, who was now playing bass, his third role within the band in as many recordings.

  “666 International was really not my style,” Apollyon admits today. “Carl-Michael was in the band too, so I only play bass on about sixty percent of the album or something. They recorded riff by riff, then in mastering put it all together, and they would call me up and say, ‘Do you want to come down and record one riff?’ and I would say, ‘No, do it yourself,’ so I play on about half of that album. I didn’t like the album, I felt it was too chaotic. We had rehearsed some of the songs a couple of years before with me on drums and it was interesting, but then they decided to do this one-riff-at-a-time thing and process the drums. There are always good riffs and interesting parts, but I think it was also a drug problem back then on that album, some of the guys were really out on stuff. I never wanted it to be very experimental, [when I joined] I was probably looking to do Darkthrone-ish stuff, that kind of punkish black metal. I always liked simple stuff, 4/4. The later stuff was getting into 16/38 or something, fucking hell—crazy!”