Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  Whatever his state at the time, there’s no doubt that Attila was as beneficial to the band as they were to him, and ultimately his joining brought a major boost in attention for the band. The ex-Tormentor and Mayhem vocalist initially appeared on Kali Yuga Bizarre as a guest—filling in for Yorga—only becoming the sole vocalist on the follow-up, 2001’s Fire Walk With Us. Indeed writer Nathan T. Birk’s Terrorizer review for the latter focused heavily on the Hungarian’s presence, opening with the words: “Attila. Not the Hun, mind you, but the vocalist … man behind The Voice. The Voice that laid down the most haunting, tortured, just plain disturbing larynx contortions known to a piece of plastic with Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. The man who commandeered the sporadic Tormentor (Hungary) from cult icons to carnival bizarre.”

  Of course, with “album of the month” status and a 10/10 mark in said review, the record clearly had more to offer than just great vocals, Birk concluding his write-up by stating, “Most black-heads will hate it, others will be curiously offended by it, and a fearless few will call it their own and use it as their very lifeblood,” before ending with the bold words, “Thorns step aside.”

  Now featuring guitarist Nysrok Infernalien Sathanas (who had joined the band during the Kali Yuga sessions), Fire … was a far darker and more punishing effort than its predecessor. Moving away from the clean vocals and grandeur of old, it instead explored more extreme “industrial black metal” territories, the colder, more mechanized qualities being particularly noticeable on the cover of Burzum’s “Det Som Engang Var,” a track Attila apparently chose not to contribute to due to his friendship with Euronymous.

  “I have vague, ethereal memories around [the whole recording],” ponders Fàbban of the band’s harshest album. “It was a tough period. We weren’t doing so well and that album explains a dark moment that pretty much everyone in the band has been through. Probably it’s the most obscure album by Aborym. Listening to it nowadays, after so many years, makes me feel really proud of it. I think it’s an amazing album.”

  It was an opinion shared by many fans and critics, and the band’s next album, 2003’s With No Human Intervention, met with a similarly overwhelming response, making Terrorizer “album of the month” status for the second time in a row and earning a swath of positive reviews. As with its predecessor, the album was built around a decidedly metal infrastructure, the electronic beats and samples adding a cold ruthlessness to the atmosphere without significantly altering the core sound. Increasingly, Aborym were integrating elements of goth, industrial, and EBM culture (reflected in the band’s UV “corpsepaint” and club gear aesthetic, as well as in their choice of intoxicants), but without softening the ferocity of the assault, arguably the reason the band still appealed to many longtime black metal fans. The “club” overtones did not sit easily with everyone however, and live shows—such as their memorable London performance the same year—provoked plenty of horrified faces, specifically during the techno break within the set.

  “During the years we’ve always shocked, we’ve always caused confusion and contradictions,” comments Fàbban. “We have ‘played’ with our listeners, generating chaos, both in sound and in a conceptual way. And, well, this has always been really entertaining … I don’t play a music genre like pop or rock, I don’t play a genre which represents for me a sort of job or economical reliance, so I feel free to play whatever I like, without facing any kind of paranoia or issues. If someone turns his nose, my life doesn’t change at all. If Fire Walk with Us is the darkest album by Aborym, With No Human Intervention is—without any doubts—the most psychopathic and experimental album of our whole discography. This LP is strongly related to chemical drugs and to a very long period of chaos, disorder, and intemperance.”

  Both the London show and the band’s appearance in Oslo’s Inferno festival the following year were notable for featuring a brief guest appearance by ex-Emperor drummer Bård G. “Faust” Eithun, his first live performances since leaving prison. Faust also contributed lyrics, spoken word, and even the album title for With No Human Intervention, and was one of a number of guests on the album, joining Nattefrost (Carpathian Forest), Mick “Irrumator” Kenney (Anaal Nathrakh), and Matt Jerman of UK band Void. Faust would soon become a full-time member of Aborym, the band’s first human drummer since their reformation in 1997.

  “I called [Faust] on the phone as I wanted to ask him if he would be joining Dissection again, at that time they were planning their return to the scene,” recalls Fàbban. “He made me understand that ideologically speaking he didn’t have anything to share with Dissection anymore and that he wouldn’t [be] back with them. So I asked him to join Aborym. The answer was immediate. I wanted to give Aborym a more rock imprint … more ‘metal’ let’s say, more acoustic, so that the acoustic and electronic could melt together, generating something completely new but classic at the same time.”

  Fàbban, Prime Evil, Nysrok, Faust: The short-lived Generator lineup which saw the band featuring as many Norwegian members within Aborym’s ranks as Italian.

  Further lineup shifts would occur in 2005, with Set exiting the band in somewhat acrimonious circumstances, the talented guitarist coincidentally joining the aforementioned Dissection (and later Watain) in Sweden. Also departing (though on better terms) was Attila, who had been invited to rejoin Mayhem. His role in Aborym was soon filled by a member of industrial black legends Mysticum, namely vocalist “Prime Evil.”

  “I was incredibly honored to be asked,” the vocalist recalls, “I was also very nervous—to be the one to take over for this great singer was a bit scary at that time, but I practiced the lyrics and went to Rome to meet the band. My main influence for the vocals during the recording for Aborym was actually the Ilsa movies.”

  “He was the first person I called after Attila was back with Mayhem,” says Fàbban. “I’ve always been a huge fan of Mysticum and having one of them in Aborym was a sort of a dream for me. And so it happened. We became great friends. In the past, Mysticum had been very important for our personal growth, but Aborym reached a point far beyond them. It was and it will always be a goal for us: to go over every single thing that has already been conceived. Overtake ourselves as we always did, without any rules but the ones we state.”

  The product of this new lineup was 2006’s Generator, released by Season of Mist, the biggest label the band had worked with, highlighting the good standing the previous two albums had given them. The addition of a live drummer reverberates through the recording, the album adopting a more traditional second-wave black metal sound and putting less focus on the band’s industrial influences, the presence of electronics predominantly surfacing in the synth work, providing an epic and symphonic (rather than aggressively techno) backdrop.

  Sadly, Prime Evil would soon leave the band (and temporarily the scene) without recording any more vocals. Generator was also the last album to feature the band’s longtime guitarist Nysrok, who Fàbban considered to have gone from an enthusiastic and vital member to a somewhat burnt-out individual with an overbearing reliance on intoxicants. In fact, Nysrok continues to create music in the successful electro/industrial band Alien Vampires, a group whose very raison d’etre appears to be such indulgences.

  Now a trio, Fàbban and Faust are joined by guitarist, keyboard player and backing vocalist Paolo “Hell:I0:Kabbalus” Pieri.

  As with many key industrial black metal bands, intoxication, specifically hard drugs, was one of the many trappings of industrial and club culture Aborym had embraced over the years, something that became public knowledge following Attila’s arrest for possession of a large quantity of pills in 2002. Today however, Fàbban has largely moved away from drugs, and though his works in Aborym (such as 2010’s Psychogrotesque, a concept album based around a nightmarish scenario in a mental institution and 2013’s double album Dirty) suggest that his tastes remain as dark as ever, it seems he is intent on embracing a rather cleaner lifestyle.

  “I quit with that shit,�
�� he states simply. “In fairness, I had fun at that time. Now I am in my mid-thirties and I’m not really interested anymore in those kind of things. I don’t want to appear as a redeemed moralist—everyone is free to do whatever he wants—but I am a fanatic of nature, open air, mountains, and I really care about my life and health. I don’t go to clubs and my circle of friends is really small as I care a lot about my privacy…. Whenever it’s possible I like to trek and hike up the Alps together with some close buddies. Reaching peaks at three or four thousand meters high is much more extreme than any club full of psychos and drugs, you can bet on it!”

  48

  BLACKLODGE

  INDUSTRIAL BLACK METAL PART III

  DESPITE HAILING FROM the rather warmer climates of southern France, Blacklodge are in many ways obvious spiritual successors to Norway’s Mysticum, thanks to their combination of black metal, industrial, hard drugs, and Satanism. Formed in 1998 as a solo act by one Saint Vincent, the project not only immediately embraced the musical possibilities that electronics offered, but also set out to explore the possible relationship between advancing technology and the realms of spirituality and the occult in its lyrics.

  “The ‘black’ stands for the dark side of magic and the ‘lodge’ stands for esoteric secrets and initiation,” begins founder and songwriter Vincent, who also took inspiration from the extra-dimensional “Black Lodge” on the Twin Peaks TV show. “The strong core of the band is to link our material, technical, and industrial world with religious feeling, mystical revelations, and magic, two topics that are usually considered paradoxical. The band sees religious experience through the infernal influence of the machine. Technology is widely thought of as a move away from spirituality, but I say something different. This is a move away from human equilibrium and harmonious consciousness, but it’s not about leaving spirituality, but rather about imposing a massive black ‘evil’ spirituality. Difficult to explain in English maybe, but there is a spirit in the machine. There is a spirit in iron. And this spirit is acting, fighting against the harmony of humanity.”

  Unusually for a practitioner of industrial black metal, Vincent embraced electronic music prior to metal, as opposed to the other way around, though he explains that the music he was originally exposed to was predominantly “those electronic songs supported by the media, the beginning of techno, house music and so.” While Vincent attributes his acceptance of electronic music to this early exposure, he was eventually moved to leave the electronic scene behind upon the rediscovery of an Iron Maiden record, a trophy from his childhood years.

  Blacklodge circa 2010: Acid Jess, Saint Vincent and Narcotic. Photo courtesy of Saint Vincent.

  “When I was a kid, I was hanging out in the forest with two other guys,” he recalls. “We were young boy scouts having an adventurous trip in the unknown with small axes, wandering around the camp. It was very exciting and we were telling frightening stories while getting deeper and deeper into the forest. The day was fading and the dusk was turning the silent forest to a scary and weird place. Just before we set off to walk back, we noticed a small wooden house in the middle of a clearing. We were very young, but I was the oldest, and I challenged them to come with me inside the cabin. They were too scared, and me too, but I managed to push the door. I remember very well the fainting sun, getting weaker and weaker. We had to go back, but something inside of me, despite the fear, told me to bring something back from this house, like a symbol of the adventure I was living. There was lots of chaos everywhere there, and my eyes couldn’t really see what was in there. My heart was beating hard, so I decided to take one of the first things I could find in the first box close to me on the ground…. It was Iron Maiden’s Killers. I got fucking scared and then I screamed and started to run. The other kids did the same, screaming, like we found the house of the devil in the middle of the forest. We were cursed. I ran to the camp and kept preciously this vinyl, as a black magic book. Then I put it aside for years.

  “When I became a teen, I found it again and listened to it. Then I understood what the curse was that hit me in this cabin, it was the curse of metal. I started to be totally addicted to Iron Maiden, then thrash and death metal progressively, and I was following this aside my interests in black magic. I was not satisfied with the lack of darkness and Satanism in metal music. And one day my best friend came with the album In The Nightside Eclipse, and my life took a new turn again and I got totally into black metal.”

  In 1994 Vincent formed his first band, Faust, a melodic black metal act in the vein of Swedish acts Dissection and Sacramentum. The band lasted for four years but achieved very little due to its various members’ other preoccupations: namely alcohol, drugs, and women. In 1998, frustrated at the lack of opportunity to create what he describes as “serious and deep art,” Vincent formed Blacklodge, an act that would allow him to rely solely on his own abilities. The following year saw the first Blacklodge recordings in the shape of the eight-song, album-length demo InnerCells, and a three-track CD EP entitled Prince of Dark Cellars, which also included multimedia material relating to the band. Something of a chaotic and noisy listen, the songs at this time were anything but refined, yet already bore the fast and mechanical percussion that would become the group’s hallmark.

  “I began to be obsessed by one thing: control,” Vincent explains. “And at the same time I had my first PC, so I naturally started to write music on it. And I discovered a very satisfying thing—the control I was searching for. I started to write songs with an electronic basis and the first demo of Blacklodge appeared. I was alone at the beginning, and controlling all—the writing, the recording, the visuals, and so on, all the humans were replaced by the machine. And I liked the different sound of the result. InnerCells was recorded on a cheap computer with one gigabyte of hard drive and we quickly stopped using the keyboards, but it shows the will we had to use electronics. Some musicians joined me later on to create a real band and play live, but the spiritual basis of the band comes from here: the Machine controls the human. And we are still slaves of the beat when playing live.”

  The following year saw the release of the Login:SataN Demo 2000, which featured new material, a remix, an Impaled Nazarene cover, and a strange video clip featuring, among other things, a naked Saint Vincent. A two-year hiatus followed, during which the future of the band looked increasingly in doubt, largely as a result of the scorn they were receiving at the time from more conservative elements of the black metal scene.

  “I didn’t want to write more material,” Vincent admits. “Many years had passed without a deal, and with very few live opportunities. We were very unpopular, except for a very few dedicated fans. The demos had been poorly distributed, as many people didn’t understand why we were not playing typical black metal, and got quite lost with our sound and approach. Labels and people we were in touch with were very pessimistic about the band’s future. People were telling us ‘Hey, [you have] some nice tunes but you need to find a drummer.’ I would tell them, ‘We don’t want a drummer, that’s the spirit of the band, to mix human with machines through black metal,’ and then they were kinda like, ‘What the fuck?’ The most silly reaction I heard was like, ‘black metal is about nature and forests, not about cities and machines.’ Well, then I knew that I was going to be lonely on this path. That created the spirit of the band, to continue our own way whatever the fuck people can say about us.”

  Login:SataN was the first release for Netherlands-based Blazing Productions and is, in hindsight, a pretty curious one given that the label is now known for its interest in paganism, “the preservation and celebration of our Indo-European Spirituality and Culture,” and its focus on nationalist-related music releases. Far from promoting any sense of virtue, strength, or supremacy, Blacklodge’s debut full-length exhibited extremely self-destructive tendencies and a passion for hedonism and debauchery, immediately noticeable thanks to a sponsorship statement from hardcore fetish website Redway.org and even a song named after the site.


  More significantly, the album was littered with explicit drug references, songs such as “Need A Needle to Tap the Vein” and “Whiten Your Nose For Satan,” dealing with the group’s “extreme tragic experiences with hard drugs.” The narcotic, industrial, and technological themes were aptly reflected in the cover art, which featured a male shooting up alongside circuit boards and concrete towers, not to mention a new syringe-decorated band logo. The sleeve art also featured a full-page photograph of Vincent wired up in a Los Angeles hospital bed following a heroin overdose.

  “During the mid-nineties, while getting high on morbid trips with the black metal new wave, I got naturally interested in more ‘dangerous’ substances than the usual pot and alcohol. Cemeteries, knives, and extreme art started to get slightly boring. Then we were introduced to various kinds of drugs by a couple of friends, and started a kind of race to experience everything we could. This was a poor period for music, because we were too wasted to have a proper working band, but a fucking great trip where all seemed possible. After years being attracted by Satanism and occult stuff, I had finally the real possibility to do black magic and feel the presence of demons through psychoactive chemistry. The black metal concepts dealing with paganism, or nature, or old Middle Age powers then sounded terribly wrong to me. Satan was not there, he was breathing upon his throne during those evenings of decay and excess. I took some distance then from the typical black metal ideology, and took interest in more modern, contemporary concepts, that led me obviously to electronic music and industrial imagery. Mysticum was by then far more exciting than Emperor, even if I was a huge fan of In the Nightside Eclipse. My drug race crashed in summer 1999 where I did a heroin overdose in Los Angeles, after a ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ trip where I was banned from most of the casinos after attacking a sheriff while being very drunk. This traumatizing event clearly then founded the real basis of Blacklodge and led to the second demo and first album Login:SataN.”