Lords of Chaos

by Michael Moynihan

  DEAD HAD BEEN SITTING ON THE EDGE OF HIS BED?

  Yes, that’s right. He had a shotgun, which was Euronymous’s. We had a lot of weapons in our house.

  WAS THERE ANY ADVANCE WARNING HE WAS GOING TO KILL HIMSELF?

  I’d thought about it, because I saw him earlier that day and he told me he’d bought a knife. I said, “Okay.” Then he told me it was very sharp, and I said, “Yeah, so what?” But I didn’t know then. The same night he committed suicide he was talking to a friend near our house, and they were talking very much about it, about suicide in general, and when he left that night he’d seemed very happy.

  HE WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO IT?

  Yeah.

  IT FIT IN WITH HIS PERSONALITY?

  Yes, depressed, melancholic, and dark—very special.

  WAS HE UPSET ABOUT HIS SITUATION WITH THE BAND?

  Yes, because Euronymous was always telling him—lying to him—that, “Yeah, we’re going to be very rich, just wait...” But in fact they were very poor and had no food to eat. Euronymous was a dreamer. The goals he set were far too high.

  WERE YOU ALSO ANGRY AT THE TIME?

  No, I didn’t care about them fighting because I would just go to Oslo. I didn’t care about it. I was concerned about the band, but not in the same way Dead was. He was far away from Sweden and didn’t know anyone because he wasn’t the kind of fellow who could get in touch with people very easily. He just sat in his room and became more and more depressed, and there was a lot of fighting. One time Euronymous was playing some synth music that Dead hated, so he just took his pillow outside, to go sleep in the woods, and after awhile Euronymous went out with a shotgun to shoot some birds or something and Dead was upset because he couldn’t sleep out in the woods either because Euronymous was there too, making noises.

  DEAD IN ISSUE 10 OF SLAYER

  MAYHEM

  WHAT WAS DEAD DOING WHEN HE WASN’T WORKING ON THE BAND?

  He was writing letters, mainly, and drawing pictures all the time.

  Bård Eithun, alias “Faust,” was the former drummer for the Black Metal band Emperor, now one of the most respected and popular groups in the genre worldwide. Eithun has long been involved in the inner core of the scene in Norway, and published a seminal fanzine, Orcustus, at the beginning of the ’90s. He would later become even more infamous for his extra-musical activities.

  BÅRD EITHUN

  WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS ABOUT MAYHEM?

  I was very excited about it because Mayhem was already a big legend in Norway. It might sound a bit weird, but Mayhem was the band that everyone had heard of, but not many people had actually heard because they had released the demos which were quite limited and the mini-LP itself was very limited. But I was lucky because I knew Maniac, the vocalist, so he had some extra copies of the mini-album and he gave me one. I was very impressed because it was the most violent stuff I had ever heard, very brutal. I remember I thought that these people like Euronymous, Maniac, and Necro Butcher were very mysterious, because they didn’t do many interviews but they were always in magazines and I saw pictures of them. They had long black hair and you couldn’t see their faces, it was mysterious and atmospheric. That made a big impression on me back then.

  BÅRD “FAUST” EITHUN

  WHEN DID YOU FIRST MEET EURONYMOUS?

  I met Euronymous and Dead at a gig in Oslo in 1989; it was an Anthrax concert and I met them outside, where Øystein had some records to sell.

  WHAT WERE THEY LIKE COMPARED TO THE IMAGE YOU HAD OF THEM?

  They looked exactly as I expected them to. Dead was about as tall as me and very, very thin. He had long hair draped down and lots of symbols on his jacket, and band logos on the back. They acted how I had expected them to as well, they didn’t talk too much and it was mostly about business, about the records, but they were nice guys.

  YOU ATTENDED THE MAYHEM GIG IN 1990, WHICH WAS ONE OF THEIR RARE PUBLIC SHOWS.

  Yes, it was their first official gig. Dead cut himself very badly—intentionally of course—because he crushed a bottle and took it and cut himself, leaving a big scar. He was supposed to go to the hospital afterward but he arrived too late so it was no use to give him stitches. I remember after the gig he was very sick and in pain because he lost a lot of blood.

  WAS THIS THE INFAMOUS GIG WITH THE PIGS’ HEADS?

  Yes, pigs’ heads on stakes. When this gig occurred I was living with Mayhem and they had to make these pig heads, putting stakes into them. Dead was having big difficulty in getting the stake through the skull of the pig. I remember at the gig one person ate some piece of the pig head, which was very old so he got very sick.

  WHERE DID THEY GET THE HEADS FROM?

  The local butcher, very cheap. It was some leftovers that would be put in the rubbish. But this gig made a big impression on people.

  WHEN DID DEAD MUTILATE HIMSELF?

  It was in the middle, during the set. He had been talking about it before the set, so expectations were high and he had to do it. It was during a track with almost no vocals, so he had time to do it. He took a bottle and crushed it, took a sharp edge and did it.

  HOW WELL DID YOU KNOW DEAD?

  He wasn’t a guy that you could know very well. I think even the other members of Mayhem didn’t know him very well. He was hard to get close to. I met him two weeks before he died. I’d met him maybe six to eight times, all in all. That’s something I appreciate. He had a lot of weird ideas. I remember Aarseth was talking about him and said he did not have any humor. He did, but it was very obscure. Honestly I don’t think he was enjoying living in this world, which of course resulted in the suicide.

  WHAT WERE HIS WEIRD IDEAS?

  He hated cats. I remember one night he was trying to sleep. A cat was outside his apartment, so he ran outside with a big knife to get the cat. The cat ran into a shed and he went after it. Then you heard lots of noise, and screaming, and there was a hole in the shed where the cat came out again, and Dead ran after it with his big knife, screaming, hunting the cat, only dressed in his underwear. That was his idea of how to deal with a cat.

  SOME BELIEVE ØYSTEIN KILLED HIM. DID DEAD REALLY KILL HIMSELF?

  He did. I know that afterwards Aarseth heard these rumors that he might have killed him. I remember Aarseth told me, “Dead did it himself, but it is okay to let people believe that I might have done it because that will create more rumors about Mayhem.” That’s also why he didn’t tell people about how he took the brain pieces and made necklaces and ate part of the brain, because he wanted people to make up their own image of what he might have done. He didn’t want to say yes or no about this, he was a quite obscure person. But he did use some stuff from the brain to make necklaces.

  MAYHEM

  DID YOU EVER SEE THESE?

  Yes. His skull was blown into many pieces, and Aarseth gave them to different people who could make necklaces.

  CAN YOU SEE ANY CONNECTION BETWEEN HIS SUICIDE AND THE LYRICS HE WROTE?

  It was his own choice really. People back then were expecting him to do it. I remember people were talking about how one day he would take his own life. It wasn’t any big surprise.

  WERE PEOPLE UPSET?

  People who knew him didn’t like it, because he was a good guy. The Mayhem guys were upset because they lost a good vocalist. He was supposed to record the album, so he delayed the whole recording. It was an unfortunate thing, because he was one of the best vocalists, at least in my opinion.

  METALION

  WHAT MAYHEM CONCERTS WERE YOU AWARE OF?

  There was a Jessheim gig in ’89. They played in February in ’90 in Sarpsborg, where I live. I organized the gig. Euronymous always wanted to have an extreme stage show, and Dead was also into this, having as extreme a live show as possible. Corpsepaint, blood, and everything else. Dead ripped up his shirt with a bottle. Mayhem also did a surprise gig at a place called Bootleg in Oslo; they only played a few songs.

  DEAD

  HOW MANY PEOPLE WOULD
GO TO THESE SHOWS?

  The gig in Sarpsborg was with other bands, and was quite a big show. I reckon there were 300 people. There is a bootleg of the Sarpsborg show called Dawn of the Black Hearts, released by someone in South America.

  THE CONCERTS MUST HAVE INFLUENCED MANY PEOPLE.

  Yes, I think the guys from Darkthrone and Immortal were there.

  WHAT WAS DEAD LIKE?

  He was a very special person, a good friend. Very shy, very quiet. He didn’t talk to many people. He stuck to himself and a few people he knew. I got to know him in 1987 when he was recording a demo with his former band Morbid, and I got him in touch with Euronymous and he joined Mayhem in early ’88, because his band Morbid was folding. He and Euronymous had the same ideas about music and the stage show, so they fit well with each other. Dead had extreme views about everything: he talked about being non-human, not belonging on earth. He told me stories that he was almost dying when he was a kid, because he was sleeping so deeply and his face turned blue, and he wanted to die when he was only two or three years old. They couldn’t wake him when he was sleeping; I think it was something between deep sleep and unconsciousness.

  HOW DID EURONYMOUS DESCRIBE WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE SUICIDE?

  Euronymous wasn’t worried about it. It was just like a car accident: “Yeah, Dead killed himself.” That’s one thing about worshipping death—why worry when people die? Maybe he was upset, but he didn’t show it.

  VARG VIKERNES

  DID YOU KNOW ØYSTEIN VERY WELL BEFORE BURZUM SIGNED TO HIS LABEL?

  No, not at all. I didn’t talk to him at all, just a few sentences. I talked with Hellhammer a bit, and I was talking with Dead. Dead actually stabbed østein with a knife once; he hated Øystein.

  SLAYER #9 WITH DEAD ON COVER

  YOU WERE IN CONTACT WITH DEAD?

  I didn’t know him at all, I was-n’t interested. I sent him some ammunition and stuff like that. And he actually shot himself with my ammunition, Dead did!

  WHERE WAS HE LIVING THEN?

  He was living in a house with Øystein and Hellhammer, southeast of Oslo. I met them in March 1991, and drove back home and we didn’t have any contact, except I sent them the ammo in a Christmas present, with detonators and shotgun shells.

  DEAD END

  Dead’s name was an ever-looming portent of his destiny. In letters written shortly prior to his suicide, he talked in detail about his obsession with snuff films:

  What I prefer in movies is when they’re underground-produced or of the classical HORROR sort—not “gore” but ESPECIALLY snuff, although I haven’t seen many snuff movies... I like to research how one reacts when watching real deaths, or preferably real corpses (not on video...). A friend of mine who works in a morgue has told me that those who used to work with preparing autopsies, after a long day’s or night’s work have to “return to reality” before they just can walk out from there to go home...3

  Describing what appears to have been a Near Death Experience, Dead once stated about himself:

  I had a weird experience once. I had inner bleeding and it couldn’t be found at X-rays so when it continued to bleed and bleed I finally fainted and dropped down to the floor cos I run out of blood. The heart had no blood left to beat and my veins/arteries almost emptied of blood. “Technically” I was dead. At that moment when I fell down (into a door, I heard later), I saw a strange blue color everywhere—it was transparent so I could for a short moment see everything in blue, till something shining white and “hot” surrounded me.

  …it’s someone I know who’s had many out-of-body experiences and knows much more than I do about “supernatural” experience, that I asked [about] this cos it was so strange about those colors. She told me that the first “plane” in the astral world has the color of blue. The earthly plane has the color of black. Then comes a gray that is very near the earthly one and is easy to come to. The next one further is blue, then it gets brighter and brighter till it “stops” at a white shining one that can’t be entered by mortals. If any mortal succeeds in entering it, that one is no longer mortal and can not come back to the earthly planes nor back to this earth. After the white plane ... it goes further with other colors that I don’t know of—there only spirits and great sorcerers can travel. I was told that the white plane I then entered, without knowing it, was the deadworld and I had died.4

  Dead would return to his own reality soon enough. Stian “Occultus,” the vocalist who briefly replaced Dead in Mayhem after the suicide, recalls, “Dead didn’t see himself as human; he saw himself as a creature from another world. He was very much into death and the other world. He said he had many visions that his blood has frozen in his veins, that he was dead. That is the reason he took that name. He knew he would die...”5

  Dead was a truly unusual personality, judging from the words of all those who did know him. No one speaks ill of him, which is rare in such an insular and competitive realm as the extreme music underground. As many will testify, however, Aarseth appeared to feel little sorrow over the loss of Dead, instead glorifying his violent departure in order to cultivate a further mystique of catastrophe surrounding the band.

  Besides photographing the body before the police arrived and collecting pieces of the skull which later became talismanic jewelry for Aarseth’s close associates, Hellhammer remembers: “We also found some of the brain, and Euronymous took it, cooked it in a stew, and ate it so he could claim himself to be a cannibal.”6 There was even a fleeting idea to retain other parts of Dead before the police arrived. “[Aarseth] thought of sawing his arm off and putting it under a glass display case, but he figured it wouldn’t be very smart because the police would probably ask where his arm was.”7

  Aarseth also chalked up his bandmate’s demise as part of an ongoing war against the other music scenes from which Mayhem had now fully distanced itself. Interviewed in 1992 by Bård Eithun for his Orcustus fanzine, Euronymous declared:

  We have declared WAR. Dead died because the trend people have destroyed everything from the old black metal/death metal scene. Today “death” metal is something normal, accepted and FUNNY (argh) and we HATE it. It used to be spikes, chains, leather and black clothes, and this was the only thing Dead lived for as he hated this world and everything which lives on it.8

  Writing shortly after the suicide, Euronymous told a correspondent:

  We have no vocalist anymore! Dead killed himself two weeks ago! It was really brutal, first he cut open all his arteries in the wrists and then he had blown off his brains with a shotgun [sic]. I found him and it looked fucking grim, the upper half of his head was all over the room, and the lower part of the brain had fallen out of the rest of the head and down on the bed. I of course grabbed my camera immediately and made some photos; we’ll use them in the next Mayhem LP. I and Hellhammer were so lucky that we found two big pieces of his skull and we have hung them on necklaces as a memory.

  Dead killed himself because he lived only for the true old black metal scene and lifestyle. It means black clothes, spikes, crosses and so on... But today there are only children in jogging suits and skateboards and hardcore moral ideals, they try to look as normal as possible. This has nothing to do with black, these stupid people must fear black metal! But instead they love shitty bands like Deicide, Benediction, Napalm Death, Sepultura and all that shit!! We must take this scene to what it was in the past! Dead died for this cause and now I have declared war! I’m angry, but at the same time I have to admit that it was interesting to examine a human brain in rigor mortis. Death to false black metal or death metal!! Also to the trendy hardcore people... Aarrgghh!9

  As usual, Euronymous proves himself a historical revisionist of unparalleled ability when it comes to anything connected to Mayhem. According to others who knew him, Dead wasn’t excited enough about black clothes to ever wear them much of the time. He died wearing a white T-shirt with “I ❤ Transylvania” stenciled across it. Hellhammer adds, “Euronymous spread the rumor that [Dead] committed su
icide because of the scene. That was not the reason for it, but he wanted it to look that way because then he could make more money and make him look more evil than he really was.”10