by Ian Christe
As De Mysteriis neared completion, the sessions pushed the artistic process to the point of epiphany. “I remember dedicating an entire day to recording ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas,’ a most difficult song,” says Csihar. “Euronymous explained to me how he wanted me to sing ‘A demon flies.’ They were great musicians. Euronymous and Blackthorn were playing their guitars very well, and Vikernes was a very young but good bass player, very professional as well. Hellhammer was incredible on drums. They were very nice people to me and my wife.” An orchestrated and unpredictable maze of interlocking mercurial riffs, the results were cryptic and dire, yet impressive. Euronymous felt that the savagery of the recordings measured up to expectations—yet the release was delayed for the mundane reason that his self-financed record label lacked the funds to proceed.
During the peak of the church fires in 1993, Emperor recorded its triumphant In the Nightside Eclipse at the Memorial Hall of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. The album opened with a dramatic rush of rolling drums and symphonic guitars underscored by choral and organ lines, as vocalist/guitarist Ihsahn cackled a moving invocation. “As the darkness creeps over the Northern mountains of Norway, and the silence reach the woods, I awake and I arise …” Decorated with stark photos of the wilds of Norway, Nightside was dirty, destructive music, yet oddly beautiful. Though still teenagers, the band members understood juxtaposition completely, sealing the album’s sinister and sensitive sides together in a lyrical net of moon worship, forest fantasy, and dark-star loneliness.
Meanwhile, the crimes escalated in senselessness, and rumors spread of an “inner circle” of a “black metal mafia.” Norwegian police remained baffled by the severity and seemingly random patterns of the attacks. As with a terrorist movement functioning through independent cells, there was little evidence of a real conspiracy between metal bands, yet arson and unsolved stabbings continued. “Most of the actions were more or less ‘let’s do it tonight’ kinds of things,” recalled Emperor’s Samoth in the book Lords of Chaos, “but that didn’t make them any less serious. It was not like ‘Knights around the Round Table.’ There was not a formal meeting before any act would take place, where people were told what to do and things like that. For a little while there was unity and some strong ideas, but it soon became too unserious. Way too many people knew what was going on.”
Stoking the fires of controversy, the Burzum album Aske— “Ashes"—recorded in August 1992, used a photo of the smoldering ruins of the Fantoft stave church on its cover. A limited edition was later packaged with a cigarette lighter. Though underworked and not altogether impressive, the music remained surprisingly melodic and featured a rare outside contribution by Emperor’s Samoth on bass. Unlike the sophisticated Emperor, Burzum was an intensely personal one-man band, at that point sounding like the low-fidelity product of raw angst and adolescence sinking under extraordinary pressures.
The unchecked violence in the scene hit home on the early morning of August 10, 1993, when Mayhem founder Euronymous was stabbed to death in his Oslo apartment. Seven days later police arrested a younger rival, named Varg Vikernes, aka Count Grishnackh—the bassist in Mayhem at the time, whose savage Burzum was also signed to Euronymous’s record label. The motive was unclear, and various rumors explained the killing as a dispute over money or rivalry over a girlfriend. There was certainly a taste of Oedipal victory in the slaying of his former mentor—Vikernes had begun openly proclaiming his view that Euronymous was a “fat, lazy communist” whose lifestyle failed to uphold his ultraevil persona.
Turning their attention to the black metal scene, authorities discovered another motivation—a twisted sense of one-upmanship on Vikernes’s part. As they began questioning the black metal community, they learned it was apparently widely known that Emperor’s drummer, Faust, had already committed the ultimate sin of murder, in August 1992 stabbing to death a middle-aged homosexual man who had trailed him from a pub into the Olympic Park in Lillehammer. (“I remember I thought, ‘This is it, now it is done,’” Faust told an interviewer.) For this crime and his role in subsequently uncovered arsons, Faust was arrested one year and one week later. After confessing, he won a fourteen-year prison term.
As the fog of secrecy evaporated between 1992 and 1994, a dozen young people from the black metal scene were convicted and jailed for acts of violence and the arson of twenty-four churches in total. Except for its primary songwriter, Ihsahn, Emperor was especially inspired to commit wild acts: Guitarist Samoth and bassist Tchort were also imprisoned for shorter terms for arson and assault. Tabloids shocked readers with the revelation that Samoth and Ihsahn had previously been guests of the government in 1991, when their former band won a small arts grant to pay for rehearsal space.
Convicted of the murder of Euronymous plus three church arsons, Vikernes was sentenced to Norway’s maximum, twenty-one years in prison. European television reported that he testified, unrepentant, in court, “I want to create a large following, burn all churches, and throw all Christians out. My church-burning army is to consist of young people.” In the tradition of the great scandal sheets of London, the long-running heavy metal magazine Kerrang! broke the story to the rest of the world with lurid, satanic-themed headlines and photos of Vikernes posing shirtless with weapons.
Mock Burzum “church tour” promo flyer
Playing the character of “Count Grishnackh” to the hilt, Vikernes relished his new role as a media figure, baiting the mainstream papers and toying with underground fanzines from his prison cell. A longtime Satanist, though only twenty years old, Vikernes dramatically switched to preaching Odinism after an earlier arrest for arson. He attempted to reach his deeds in the Norse warrior ethic of a bygone era. “The thing with him,” says former ally Mortiis, “is whenever he changes his mind, he takes all the old stuff and changes the concepts to harmonize with what he’s doing now. A lot of other people would see through that. First he was a devil worshipper and then a Nazi who wants to do Norwegian lyrics, for example. Every time he does that, he twists the old style to make it look like that’s what he’s been doing all along. It kind of takes a mastermind to do that, but he’s an intelligent guy.”
The killer also had a latent talent for music. In 1993, after many of the arsons but four months before the murder of Euronymous, Vikernes created the Burzum album Filosofem, a masterpiece intended “to stimulate the fantasy of mortals.” Not released until 1996, this tempered suite of metal-derived, folk-inspired electronic sadness used distant, raking guitars and ominous, heavily distorted and tortured vocals to evoke powerful themes of innocence, violence, and self-reflection. Dominated by simple, repetitive synthesizer riffs, the forlorn “Rundgang um die Transzendentale Säule der Singularität” was a nearly eternal four-note ambient psalm marked deeply by both beauty and horror. A glossy booklet illustrated feelings of withdrawal with etchings of sea spirits, horn-blowing widows, and frightened woodcutters—the fairy-tale protagonists of Burzum’s music.
Had he been assassinated on the streets or executed by the state, Vikernes’s legacy would doubtlessly have thrived as his myth grew. Instead the free press and scrutiny of prison dictated the best treatment for neutralizing his glory as a terrorist, as the troubled musician’s own confused rhetoric was repeatedly exposed to be folly. Continuing to mouth off to fanzines and other media outlets from jail, the murderous Vikernes latched on to the European far-right National Socialist movement, shaving his head and donning suspenders. In 1997 a Norwegian publisher, financed by Vikernes’s mother, Lene Bore, issued a paperback edition of Vargsmâl, the young convict’s version of Mein Kampf.
After a long period of personal change, Vikernes finally disowned black metal completely while in jail, preferring to listen to classical music and marches. He continued composing and recording bleak, fantasy-oriented electronic music as Burzum on a prison-approved synthesizer, to waning interest. “My roots have never been in metal music in the first place,” he protested to the fanzine The Seventh Scroll in 1998, “and
definitely not in black metal.” Eventually Vikernes became a figure of ridicule and even contempt—but not before inspiring many waves of dangerous idol worship and achieving his goal of becoming Norway’s black metal bogeyman.
The murder of Euronymous and subsequent imprisonment of so many key musicians sent discord rippling through Norway but did not stifle the notoriety of black metal. In fact, the subsequent hysteria helped Norwegian-style metal grow to much stronger. Propelled by a scandal-crazed media, it benefited from the most frenzied terrorist chic since the student upheavals of the early 1970s, when the Weathermen stormed America and the fashionable Baader-Meinhof group rocked Germany by bombing department stores. “The media really made it much it bigger than it was,” says Ihsahn of Emperor. “The media also made reputations. In the beginning there were maybe twenty people in the scene [in Norway], and suddenly there were four or five hundred.”
In some misguided way black metal had become the revolutionary force that rock and roll always wished to be. These events added up to more than just the Sex Pistols singing “Anarchy in the UK"—they validated what fans had always believed: that heavy metal was more than merely music. While the world was repelled and fascinated by anti-Christian actions, such radical acts impressed some peers greatly. “Those church burnings and all that stuff?” says Mortiis. “I was not in town when a lot of that happened, which I’m pretty glad that I wasn’t, so I’m not in jail still or something like that. I respect that, to be honest with you. As a symbolic act? I respect it totally.”
The original black metallers, over whose occult-laced record albums the younger generation pored and obsessed, wanted nothing to do with the extracurricular activities of their scions. “For them to claim my lyrics were an inspiration for those actions?” retorts Bathory’s leader, Quorthon, “I went back and checked my lyrics, and there wasn’t anything in there about slitting someone up because of his sexual preferences. I was talking about raping angels and masturbating on the golden throne up there, but I find it very hard to imagine someone raping an angel. I mean, these are abstract fantasy lyrics. For anybody not being able to take that as a horror story—an expansion of Tales from the Crypt or Black Sabbath—they’re screwed up.”
Metal had represented power and force since its beginning. The explicit rhetoric of violence could be traced back to the lyrics of Slayer and Exodus, musically adept thrashers who upped the excitement of Iron Maiden’s horror tales, “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “Phantom of the Opera.” Though Slayer had taken heat in the 1980s for glorifying Nazi sadist Josef Mengele in the song “Angel of Death,” it was all part of an act. In fact, Slayer’s South American-born vocalist, Tom Araya, called the Norwegians “creepy white folks freezing their brains, thinking real slow.” Although James Hetfield of Metallica claimed to have amassed a collector’s arsenal of 150 guns, his primary weapons were skateboards and pyrotechnics, and he sent only himself to the hospital.
The primitive Swiss band Hellhammer was extremely influential to Norwegian black metal—Mayhem’s drummer, Jan Axel Blomberg, nicknamed himself Hellhammer, and even “Euronymous” was a Hell-hammer song title. Yet after the events in Norway the band’s leader, Tom Warrior, declared black metal the music of primitives who would see Europe return to an age of eating with their hands. As for the crimes of Christianity mentioned in Morbid Angel’s Altars of Madness, which Emperor guitarist Samoth praises as “something new” and “a classic,” it was only meant to be a symbolic battle. “I’m not a Satanist. I’m just my own person,” says guitarist Trey Azagthoth. “I don’t believe in attacking Christians and burning churches. It was never about attacking Christians physically, it was about attacking their chains and illusions, their beliefs.”
In the semiotic soup from which values are drawn, however, one metaller’s symbol can become another’s concrete reality. American heavy metal bands simply could not relate to conflict and violence in the same way as could Europeans, for whom war had been a persistent historical reality. Even the bullet-belt-laden German thrash bands Kreator and Destruction were avowed pacifists, a product of their country’s post-war preoccupation with peace. Yet mustard gas and Nazi rubble directly inspired the war metal offshoot of Scandinavian black metal, explored by the groups Zyklon-B, Niden div. 187, and, yes, War. Surrounded by images and memories of war, yet never having experienced war firsthand, the Norwegians seemed intent on creating their own.
As black metal brought its homeland under assault, the longstanding ulcers of Norway’s society burst open and bled. “Norway is a very screwed-up country,” says Scandinavian black metal godfather Quorthon. “The church has a lot of say. They’re not allowed to show this and that on the TV. The women come to Sweden to have an abortion. It’s one of the most beautiful countries in the world, but it’s fucked up, mainly because it lost its identity squeezed in between England, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. Also, I think for anybody to sit down in your basement listening to your music twenty-four hours a day without having anybody knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ is screwed up to begin with.”
To their credit those Norwegian bands not crippled by court cases produced very expressive music—combining black metal fury with techno elements, folk, and other progressive approaches. Ducking the evil stereotypes altogether, Enslaved used the genre instead as a springboard for something expansive, confounding, and clever. On a series of albums titled after the Norwegian names for natural elements, the band wove unpredictable waves of guitars into a fractured, futuristic fabric filled with synthesizers, Viking battle horns, and strains of Norse folk hymns. Not coincidentally, the landmark Celtic Frost album Into the Pandemonium was frequently cited as influential by bands such as Arcturus, which was seeking complexity and nuance. The drum machines and operatic vocals that sounded so bizarre when introduced by Celtic Frost in the late 1980s had become standard issue for progressive black metal.
As Burzum’s Filosofem had proved, black metal didn’t always have to be bombastic or abrasive to prove its point. Besides pressing musicians to physical limits through sheer speed, black metal also explored inner depths. For example, black metal’s connection to electronic music was not a recent affectation. As far back as 1987 Euronymous of Mayhem had named unusual synth acts like Klaus Schulze and the Residents as influences. The first Mayhem EP, Deathcrush, even opened with drumming by Conrad Schnitzler of the early-1970s psychedelic group Tangerine Dream. “Con is a fifty-year-old, bold, and a very strange man,” Euronymous told Morbid Mag. “He once was a member in Tangerine Dream, which is well known to everyone a bit seriously into the rock business. I’ve always loved Tangerine Dream’s music, and I am very much into the music of Con. One day I met him at his place in Berlin. He was very friendly and cool, and I asked him if he’d like to do an intro for Mayhem and he did!”
Probably the most ambitious convert to the electronic side of black metal was former Emperor bassist Mortiis, who fled to Sweden in 1993 at age eighteen. Dressed in spirit-king persona, complete with prosthetic nose and ears, he embodied the soul of metal with little of the sonic heritage. “I was trying to describe it, because there’s not really a category,” says Mortiis of dealing with customs officials during his first trip to America. “The guard asked, ‘I don’t understand, it is heavy metal? And I said, ‘No, it’s not! I’m bringing in keyboards, man.’ They were looking at all this black stuff, and I didn’t think they were going to let me in. They only wanted to know what kind of music I was doing.”
Mortiis in his kingdom (Cold Meat Industries)
The best known in a variety of other Norwegian “black ambient” projects, which included Aghast, Isengard, and Wongraven, Mortiis made a main destination of the odd electronic excursions that had appeared sporadically on metal albums since Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Early Mortiis volumes like Anden Som Gjorde Opprör crept slowly through twenty-minute drones, holding court with rich atmosphere. As his cult grew, Mr. Mortiis became the flagship artist of Earache Records—taking over from Nap
alm Death after its contract expired. Never mind that this was an electronic-ambient musician with a back catalog of meditative minimalism. The key was his image and ebullient written concepts. The Stargate, released in 1999, was barely as heavy as the Kate Bush LP from which it copied its artwork, yet its chants and medieval heraldry danced into the metal imagination.
With many such excursions afloat in the Scandinavian scene during the 1990s, somebody had to stick with the basics. Using a bare minimum of atmospheric interludes, Immortal concentrated on pure power. These self-proclaimed “Sons of Northern Darkness” were a blur of wickedness, baroque bombast, and foul temper, with a host of albums under their bullet belts. Their 1995 album, the blazing Battles in the North, was a hyperspeed assault that guaranteed evil Nordic dominance of the underground in the post-Mayhem era. Furious guitarists Abbath and Demonaz funneled energies into a barrage of Bathory-like blasters, including “Cursed Realms of the Winter-demons” and “Moonrise Fields of Sorrow.” The sound had the hypnotic thrill of crushing ice in a whining blender and was possibly the fastest sustained expression of speed ever released. It was surely the most demanding—the end of Immortal’s great period came when guitarist Demonaz succumbed to tendinitis in both arms as a result of overpracticing. “He couldn’t even wash his hair,” a bandmate lamented to the English magazine Terrorizer.