Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “It was Kris from Ulver’s idea, he was really the one who wanted this song to be rerecorded since he liked it so much,” explains Mean, who remains somewhat unsatisfied with the recording. “I can’t really remember where we did the recording for this song, I think it was on the same studio as the album was recorded [Bondi Lydstudio]. I don’t understand why we removed the cymbal/hi-hat sound with a lot of reverb on it—earlier fans said they missed that, and I could not agree more. It’s also recorded with a pitch[shift] to the voice and the switch is really bad, you can hear it turned on and off.”

  The group would return to Bondi in February of the following year to record two new tracks for the compilation Nordic Metal: A Tribute to Euronymous, namely “In Your Grave” and “Kingdom Comes.” Featuring a searing and icy production, the songs were nothing less than a revelation, even on a compilation of unparalleled high standards. The songwriting was now on another level, the highly memorable and relatively simple melodies combined with various bridges and twists, perhaps most memorably the eerie organ break in “Kingdom Comes” that creepily builds the tension before breaking into a truly epic and haunting pay-off. Synths and electronics now played a far greater role generally, the drum machine playing to its strengths by utilizing the sort of ultra-fast hi-hats and thumping bass hits simply not possible from a human drummer. Just as memorable were the sublime vocal performances of Prime Evil and Cerastes, which combined to hypnotic effect.

  The compilation was released on American label Necropolis Records, and coincidentally Mysticum now looked to the U.S. for a record deal due to intense dissatisfaction with Deathlike Silence. In Euronymous’ absence, the label had been taken over by the more mainstream Voices of Wonder, who had previously handled distribution for Deathlike. Like labelmates Enslaved, Mysticum wanted off the label and in April 1995 they broke contract and signed to Full Moon Productions, a Florida label run by Jon “Thorns” Jamshid, previously editor of Petrified and a longtime contact of Euronymous. A few months later, the group returned to Bondi to record their debut full-length.

  “This was the most disruptive time in my life, total chaos,” recalls Prime Evil, “so it’s very hard to remember. The recording of In the Streams of Inferno album was done in couple of weeks; since we programmed our drum machine [beforehand, we were] only working with the sounds of it. I guess it was pretty normal studio work—with a lot of red wine for the vocals. One thing I remember well is different people showing up in the studio, and one of them was ‘Saiithem’ [Mathias Løken, who would later become the band’s manager, a role he holds today] who [arrived] with another close friend of ours. We didn’t really know him at that time, but he started to interfere when recording and mastering. He complained about our guitar sound, telling us it was too unclear etc. This started to piss us off,” he laughs, “we just ignored him totally, which we shouldn’t have done!”

  Indeed, as Prime Evil suggests, the album would feature a far more compressed and less dynamic sound than the Nordic Metal tracks, particularly noticeable since the record features rerecorded versions of the two numbers originally on the compilation. A number of other old songs were also rerecorded—this time improving the sound including updated versions of “The Rest” and “Wintermass” from the first demo and a reworked version of “Crypt of Fear” from Medusa’s Tears. The latter would prove to be one of the most impressive recordings on the album, its near two-minute synth buildup breaking into one of the band’s most furious and possessed performances to date. Two ambient/industrial instrumentals bookended the album while at its center lay a song with the familiar title “Where The Raven Flies.”

  Though the sound certainly leaves room for improvement (though this was improved considerably for the 2013 re-release), the album’s visceral power remains undeniable, harnessing a unique combination of chaos and focus, the linear but multilayered compositions encapsulating a demonic and otherworldly mass of guitar, bass, eerie keyboards, and utterly incomparable vocals, kept in line and driven ever forward by the industrial pummeling. Aptly, given that the members’ main influences were apparently Satanism and hard drugs, the result is an intense assault on the senses that is as utterly dark, furious, and unbalanced as it is euphoric and transcendental. Unfortunately fans would have to wait over a year to actually hear it, the group sitting on the recordings until autumn 1996, instead releasing a promo tape entitled Piss Off!!! featuring a number of rough unmixed versions.

  “Why we were so delayed sending the masters has no other reason than we had a little too much left from our celebration after finishing the recording,” laughs Prime Evil. “It takes time to make all those smoke signals visible all the way over to Florida …”

  The band would follow the release with a tour of Europe with Marduk and Gehenna that saw them playing twenty-four shows in twenty-five days, posters famously declaring the band to be “cumming all over Europe.”

  “That was a very fun experience—Gehenna were just sleep, sleep, sleep but Marduk became our best friends that time,” recalls Mean, whose highlight was being given a huge box of marijuana in Switzerland. “Yes, they gave us five hundred grams of weed. Then we were so drunk we ate all their plants—fresh. Not a good thing to do. But we lost everything before the day was over as the bus driver took it away!”

  “They were extreme,” recalls Peter Tägtgren, who was playing guitar in Marduk at the time, “just really fucking extreme guys in their way of living. We were sitting in the lounge in the bus listening to techno and taking acid every fucking day, it was madness … one of the most fucked-up tours I did so far.”

  In November the band headed out for what was supposed to be a three-week tour with Cannibal Corpse, Angelcorpse, and Immolation in the U.S. and Mexico, though due to “complications” the band would ultimately play only two dates. A few months later the group recorded a song for Full Moon’s Tribute to Hell compilation, namely “Eriaminell” (a play on the words “here I am in hell”), another stunning number defined by slow and memorable riffs, high-paced percussion, and an unforgettable bridge, this time featuring an otherworldly use of string effects.

  Despite the sleeve of the first album mentioning the band’s proposed second album Planet Satan, there followed a silence of four years broken only when the band headed into the studios to record a new number called “Black Magic Mushrooms.” Another intense and truly outstanding number, it saw the band integrating their dance and industrial influences to a far greater extent than ever before. So were rumors true that the band had also recorded much of the long-awaited Planet Satan album?

  “No, the only thing we recorded was ‘Black Magic Mushrooms,’” explains Mean, “And I think that was the best song we ever made. But we never met in the studio. I had forgotten the riffs which I had made and the studio guy had to teach me the song again,” he laughs. “What a fucked-up picture you are getting of me now!”

  The song would see release as a split with Norwegian thrashers Audiopain (whose guitarist had produced the track), and the following year would see manager Mathias Løken release a compilation on his label Planet Satan Revolution, featuring most of their non-Streams material, including the demos, the two splits, “Eriaminell,” and material from both Piss Off!!! and Nordic Metal. The CD’s title, Lost Masters of the Universe, turned out to be accurate as the masters for the recordings had indeed been lost (“My father had used the master to record a stupid movie or something,” explains Mean), meaning that everything had to be re-mastered from the tapes and EPs. If all this “activity” had raised any hopes of a resurgence of the group, they were dashed as the group remained dormant for another eight years. So what happened?

  “Children, time, money, too much party for some,” ponders Cerastes. “A few years after Euronymous’ death, the scene had become very commercial, suddenly everyone played in a fucking black metal band. Black metal stuff in newspapers, national music awards given to bands, it all seemed very ‘house-trained’ and weak, we think that black metal lost its magic, ori
ginality, and pride. This made us lose interest in staying in the scene. Also lots of drugs were used at this time, therefore Planet Satan was put on hold.”

  Prime Evil would resurface as a vocalist in Norwegian deathrashers Amok and Italian industrial metal outfit Aborym, before departing and taking a hiatus from the scene, while both Cerastes and Mean seemed to have lost interest in making music. It seemed a situation that was unlikely to resolve itself and Mean admits that the three can be willfully stubborn and slow when they want to be. Indeed, it’s worth mentioning that almost two years would pass between first speaking to Mean and the interviews appearing here finally taking place. It was all the more remarkable then when the guitarist one day mentioned in e-mail that there were chances of a forthcoming reunion. A year later and the band announced a new deal with Peaceville Records, and began working on the re-release of their two previous CDs, re-mastering both and adding to the contents. Jump forward again to summer 2013 and your author was finally able to finally hear work-in-progress versions of new material destined for the now almost mythical Planet Satan, thanks to a short but memorable visit to Asker. Against the odds Mysticum, one of black metal’s most lamented losses, had returned.

  Mean, Cerastes and Prime Evil seem to have returned to their urban exploring roots following their reunion in 2013.

  “Prime Evil had an enlightenment in summer 2011 and produced loads of riffs,” Mean recalls. “He contacted us and we felt that the time was right for all to get back together. That was that. Cerates was always in a different world, I had to work hard to get him into the playing. But one rule we had—if one stops playing, Mysticum stops. Brothers forever.”

  It would be unwise at this point to take anything for granted with regard to this inimitable trio, with uncertainty apparently the only certainty in the Mysticum story. Still it seems fair to predict that this seminal group will continue playing only by their own rules, testing the sanity of fans, press, labels, and (perhaps most of all) their manager in the process.

  47

  ABORYM

  INDUSTRIAL BLACK METAL PART II

  “I saw and heard Aborym for the first time at the Inferno Festival in Oslo the year they played and I was overwhelmed at how great they were. M: Fabban is a very accomplished musician and like a brother to me. I don’t know why they wanted me to be part of the band but it is truly an honor.”

  —Prime Evil (Mysticum)

  WITH AN EVER-EVOLVING SOUND and lineup, Italian veterans Aborym have both bewildered and rewarded listeners for over two decades, becoming one of the best-known bands to adopt the “industrial black metal” label in the process. Taking their moniker from a demon named Haborym Sadek Aym, discussed in the infamous book of demonology The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, the group would first find acclaim in the late nineties, though its original incarnation was in 1992 and was formed by the prolific musician known as Malfeitor Fàbban, who contributes bass, synth, and occasionally vocals to this day. “I originally got into metal after listening to Kill ’Em All by Metallica in 1989,” he explains. “Before that I used to listen to softer music, like Alice Cooper, Faster Pussycat, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Kiss, all bands that I listen to nowadays as well. The first time I ever listened to a death metal band was when a really weird lad at the bus stop asked me what kind of music I liked. He gave me then a demo of an unknown band … I think they were called Mortmain. After months of healthy tape-trading I fell in love with Beneath the Remains by Sepultura, then I discovered Carcass, Morbid Angel, and all the rest. At that time a friend of mine, Nicola Curri, who later on became the singer of Funeral Oration, was working on the artwork of the vinyl for Live in Leipzig, trying to emulate Dead’s writing through some of his letters. That’s how I discovered Mayhem and then a whole bunch of black metal bands.

  “Aborym itself formed in 1992–’93,” he continues. “At that time I used to live in the south, in a really tough city, where playing was basically impossible. There weren’t any kind of rehearsal rooms, so if you didn’t own a basement or a garage, you just couldn’t play at all. In my city there was just delinquency, criminality, and poverty, try to figure out how impossible it would have been finding rehearsal rooms. However, my wish was huge, so I spent all the summer looking for a basement to equip, and once I found it I started to look for people to play with. We started like a sort of cover band: we only had couple of songs written and a Rotting Christ cover (“The Old Coffin Spirit”) and Beneath the Remains by Sepultura.”

  Working as a trio—Fàbban appearing alongside guitarist Alex Noia and drummer D. Belvedere—the band’s early recordings were captured on two tapes; a rehearsal, Live in Studio (1993), and a debut demo entitled Worshipping Damned Souls (1994). With a dark and obscure sound based around an early black/thrash metal template, the tapes unsurprisingly reflect the bands covered in the group’s formative months, adding some solemn and minimalist organ passages into the bargain. Fàbban, however, would soon split the band up due to personnel issues, before working with other projects including the aforementioned Funeral Oration and (perhaps more significantly, giving Aborym’s future recordings) M.E.M.O.R.Y Lab, an outfit that combined industrial music with metal.

  In 1997 Fàbban reformed Aborym, this time determined to integrate electronics into a contemporary black metal formula. In 1998, having joined forces with guitarist Davide “Set Teitan” Totaro and a vocalist/guitarist/synth player known as Yorga SM, he recorded a five-song rehearsal demo entitled Antichristian Nuclear Sabbath, and the following year the band’s debut album Kali Yuga Bizarre was released, featuring four of the songs from the Antichristian demo alongside five new numbers.

  The result was a powerful, epic, and highly varied opus, one of the band’s finest albums and one that, in retrospect, also reflects the grandiose and determinedly avant-garde direction black metal was taking at the time, its dramatic synths and soaring, clean vocals providing a nod to progressive Norwegian acts such as Emperor and Arcturus. Certainly the drum & bass break on third track “Horrenda Peccata Christi” could well have come off the latter act’s La Masquerade Infernale album, while “Tantra Bizarre” saw the band move into even more experimental territory, blending traditional Eastern music with disorienting beats and bizarre vocals. The following track, “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” proves even stranger, blending a choir recording with a rather rabid vocal declaration by guest vocalist A.G. Volgar of Italian goth rock group Deviate Ladies.

  “The desire of creating something new and extremely violent at the same time, something that somehow could reflect the time we are living, the Kali Yuga,” explains Fàbban of the inspirations behind the band’s varied take on black metal. “I don’t believe in bullshits like ‘the true spirit of black metal,’ I don’t believe in ‘this is true, this is not.’ The essence of music is the expression of the essence and spirituality of the artist. All the rest is bullshit, stereotypes invented to diversify musical genres, trends, different ways of appearing. Experimentation—to my advice—is something inner in some men and artists: it’s like a sort of overcoming, or self-overcoming. Kali Yuga Bizarre is the first album we recorded and it has to be taken as it is. It’s a great album to my advice. I literally adore it. It’s terribly honest and spontaneous.”

  Aborym’s core lineup during their Kali Yuga Bizarre era: Nysrok, Yorga, Seth Teitan, Fàbban.

  The “Kali Yuga” that Fàbban refers to, according to Indian scriptures, is the final epoch of the world, the “end times” where strife and conflict are common, a period generally considered by believers to be the era that we live in today. These apocalyptic themes would become a defining theme in the years that followed, though on the debut album the lyrics were primarily in Italian, making the album’s concepts largely impenetrable for those who didn’t speak the language. This didn’t stop a degree of controversy arising, thanks in part to the speech on “Come Thou …” which, among other things, poured scorn on “collective mediocrity” and declared that if the Chil
ean dictator Pinochet was to be punished for his crimes, so too should Fidel Castro. More pressingly, although Yorga SM’s vocal abilities were undoubtedly magnificent, he was beginning to voice controversial opinions elsewhere that would tar the band’s reputation for some years to come. In any case, he would be kicked out of the band some way prior to the album’s completion, due to a conflict of personalities.

  “A couple of dickheads who were part of the group have declared things that weren’t on the same line as the philosophy of the band,” Fàbban explains dryly. “Yorga upon all; such a mommy’s boy. Since then, people started to point at us as a right-wing group, which we are not. Aborym are not a right-wing band, Aborym don’t do politics. In fairness, Aborym are against all of those dorks who want to make politics through music.”

  As a result of Yorga SM’s departure the group sought a new vocalist to complete the last few tracks of the album, soon finding a replacement in ex-Tormentor/Mayhem vocalist Attila Csihar, who by this point had returned to Budapest and was inactive within music, having entered a period of depression and self-destruction following Euronymous’ murder.

  “He was a man reduced to bits,” claims Fàbban. “I called him to have a chat and to ask him something about [his band] Plasma Pool. I sent him the prerecording of Kali Yuga Bizarre and he made me understand he was really interested in that kind of music. He wanted to be back in the game somehow and I gave him that chance through Aborym. Attila Csihar should be very grateful to Aborym. Without us he would have never been back to the scene and he would have never been out of the tunnel [he was in].”