Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (85 page)

Even today, members within the Norwegian black metal community continue to debate whether the black metal genre ever practiced or promoted Satanic worship. Most Norwegian metal bands were anti-Christian, but not all of them embraced Satanism. And those that did had varying beliefs in what the religion meant.

DEMONAZ:
When I started writing lyrics for the first Immortal album I didn’t want to write about politics or religion. I wanted to have something more evil and based on the Northern darkness and the inspiring black forests and the snow and winters that we have. I think it’s a little like Conan the Barbarian. His God is Krum, who doesn’t care about him, but still, he wants to have a relation to Krum. I have a relation to nature, to the dark path. I never sought God, I never saw Satan, but I saw the darkness that creeps over my house. Nature is everything for humans. We are bound to it. We need it. It doesn’t need us. And that makes it the power. That makes it the God.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
Burzum had an occult concept, but it is more correct to say it was a concept built on fantasy magic. Everything with Burzum was out-of-this-world—even the name. When the Christians called the gods of my forefathers “demons,” “trolls,” “goblins,” and, not least, “evil,” I naturally felt attracted to everything that was seen as evil by the Christians. As most [J. R. R.] Tolkien fans should know,
burzum
is one of the words that are written in Black Speech on the One Ring of Sauron. As far as I remember, the last sentence is “
Ash nazg durbabatulûk agh burzum ishi krimpatûl
,” meaning “one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” The “darkness” of the Christians was, of course, my “light.” So all in all it was natural for me to use the name Burzum.

DAVE PYBUS (Cradle of Filth):
These guys in Scandinavia were taking the
Lord of the Rings
and Venom at face value. [We were from England], and the more we giggled, the more earnest and desperate they were to be taken seriously.

IHSAHN:
That which in Christian eyes would be categorized as evil would not necessarily be seen as cruel or destructive in the eyes of those who are not chained to the narrow path of Christianity. Evil is more or less controlled by the beast in man, also known as free will. Satan is the personification of free will, individualism, and intelligence, so building one’s ideology on values categorized as evil does not make you a ruthless maniac. Just like the beast, one has to adapt to one’s environment.

ABBATH:
The Satan part of black metal has never been our true belief. We follow our own path. We don’t experiment with that kind of stuff. Maybe in the beginning we did, but we quickly found our own road where we were our own gods. But still the dark side of life is very important to us. We created Blashyrkh, our own hell. And that’s where we find inspiration—and it can be anywhere in nature. Blashyrkh is always following us. It’s just our thing.

KRISTIAN EIVIND “GAAHL” ESPEDAL (GORGOROTH):
[Satan] means opponent—as long as the world speaks in a Christian language. I have to be Satan—the opponent of this—the opponent to slavery basically, which the rest of the world is [bound by]. Therefore, Satan means freedom.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
My hope would be that Burzum could inspire people to wish for a new and better reality in the real world and hopefully do something about it. Maybe revolt against the modern world by refusing to participate in the rape of Mother Earth, by refusing to participate in the murder of our European race, by refusing to become a part of any of these artificial media-created “rock-and-roll” subcultures, and by building new and healthy communities, where the Pagan culture—and magic if you like—can be cultivated.

In addition to being a think tank to combat the evils of Christianity, the Inner Circle was a musical breeding ground that encouraged cross-pollination. Euronymous played a guitar solo on Burzum’s 1992 self-titled debut, and released it and its follow-up—1992’s
Aske
(which featured bass by Emperor’s Samoth)—on Deathlike Silence Productions. And Vikernes wrote lyrics for Darkthrone’s 1994 album
Transylvanian Hunger
and 1995’s
Panzerfaust
. But musical and artistic exchanges weren’t all that went down at Helvete, and over time, several of its denizens moved away from philosophy—and gravitated toward crime. While Euronymous was more of the spiritual leader of the group, Grishnackh held more radical views and believed in action over contemplation. To express his contempt for Christian culture, Vikernes advocated church-burning. On June 6, 1992, the Fantoft Stave church in Bergen was torched and seriously damaged. The remains of the building appear on the cover art of Burzum’s
Aske
. After conducting what he claims was supposed to be an off-the-record interview with a Norwegian newspaper about the crime, Vikernes was arrested for arson.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
When I did the anonymous interview in January 1993, I exaggerated a lot, and when the journalist left we—a girl and I—had a good laugh, because he didn’t seem to understand that I was pulling his leg. He took everything dead serious. Unfortunately, he went to the police the next day and had me arrested, and his newspaper printed his version of what I had said while I was in a holding cell and unable to tell anybody that it was just a load of crap I had said to create some interest in a musical genre—to help Euronymous get some customers [in Helvete] for a change.

MORGAN HÅKANSSON:
In the middle of the night Euronymous called and told me, “Today the war has begun,” when the first church burning was a reality. It was something we had talked about many times and we were very excited about it. The problem was, people wanted to brag about what they did instead of just doing it for a specific cause. And that’s their undoing. That’s how they got caught.

FROST:
I never took part in any such acts. I do not support crime. I don’t think we owe anything to Christianity and the Church, but to try to destroy them would not be a constructive way to move forward. It will backfire.

By early 1993, four more churches had been torched, two in Bergen—Åsane Church and Storetveit Church—Vindafjord’s Skjold Church, and Oslo’s Holmenkollen Chapel. After a thorough police investigation, Emperor guitarist Tomas Thormodsæter Haugen (aka Samoth) was sentenced to sixteen months in prison for burning down the Skjold Church with Vikernes. In total, seven churches in Norway were set aflame by black metal musicians.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
Originally, [Skjold Church] was an old pagan holy site where our forefathers used to celebrate the sun. And what the Christians did was move this church from another place and put it not close to this holy site but on top of it in the midst of the circle, actually breaking up the circle. And on the pagan site they put a big stone cross. So if they have no respect for the Norwegian culture, why on earth should Norwegians respect
their
culture?

CRONOS:
Look, civilized creatures on this planet who have all gone to school and learned about society should know the difference between burning churches and fantasy. We are entertainers—if I wanted to be a murderer or a Satanist, I’d do that full time instead of playing songs for a living.

ALICE COOPER:
Now, if you’re in Norway and you want to have any kind of authority or credibility in metal, you have to eat your lead singer. It’s like rap: if you don’t shoot somebody you can’t really be a rapper. I love these advertisements in metal magazines for all these bands that are trying to be more evil than the other band, or they’re trying to be more Celtic or more occult. It’s just hysterical. These guys are role-playing for a couple years, and then they turn into something else. They go, “We are Gothora, and we are Vikings!” No, you’re not. You’re not Vikings at all. Vikings don’t go to McDonald’s.

IHSAHN:
Metal has always been about the opposition, breaking with the rules. That’s why metal has always been associated with the devil. For each decade, when something gets accepted you need to go to more extreme forms to create the same effect—the break from conformity. We were all influenced by each other, then someone took the leap with the church burnings, and the flame ignited. You have to remember, we were teenagers. Euronymous was twenty-three and the rest of us were late teens, and some were twenty. You’re very impressionable at that age.

In the mid-nineties, Emperor was temporarily crippled by the extracurricular activities of the Inner Circle. In 1994, in addition to Samoth’s jail sentence, bassist Terje Vik Schei (aka Tchort) was arrested for burglary, knife assault, and grave desecration, and sentenced to two years. And in August 1994, drummer Bård Eithun (aka Faust) was sentenced to fourteen years in jail for killing a stranger, Magne Andreassen, in the woods outside of Lillehammer. He was released in 2002 after serving nine years and four months of his sentence.

FAUST:
I was walking back home again [after going out to drink]. This man approached me. He was obviously drunk and obviously a faggot. He asked me if we could leave this place and go up to the woods. So I agreed, because already then I had decided that I wanted to kill him. I [had] a black knife with a handgrip. He was walking behind me and I turned around and stabbed him in the stomach. He went down on his knees. I started stabbing him in the neck and face. Then he lay down and I was standing over him stabbing.

IHSAHN [1994 interview]:
I was not surprised at all when Samoth was involved in the church burnings and Faust was accused of murder. Faust has been obsessed with serial killers and murder for quite some time, so when this homosexual made a pass at him in a park in Lillehammer, he took the opportunity to experience the thrill of the kill. Personally, I think human life has very little value in itself, and that it’s the relationship you have to people that give them value. One can only experience emotional affection through one’s own senses. Thus, the death of someone outside my range of personal relations has no emotional effect on me.

FAUST:
All I care about now is making flesh-ripping metal again with Mongo Ninja, Blood Tsunami, and Aborym.

The most infamous and dramatic crime in black metal history took place on August 10, 1993, when Count Grishnackh murdered Euronymous. While the two extreme musicians started as comrades, some believe they became locked in a power struggle to control the Inner Circle. Others claim Grishnackh was irate because Euronymous owed him money. Grishnackh insists he was acting in self-defense and that Euronymous was already planning to kill him.

FROST:
At first, Varg and Euronymous seemed to be the best of friends. Varg even recorded all the bass parts on Mayhem’s excellent
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
[after Necrobutcher left the band]. The rivalry started later. Irritation became anger and just escalated.

GRUTLE KJELLSON:
People felt threatened by Euronymous because of the controversial things he said in interviews on radio and, obviously, because he was trying to establish this so-called “black circle.” But it was more or less just a PR stunt. I don’t think he had any actual enemies—well, except for one, obviously.

HELLHAMMER:
I didn’t believe that it was going to such extremes, but to other people it could likely have gone the other way. Euronymous told
me
that he was going to have Grishnackh killed.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
In 1991, most of the metal musicians in Norway believed Euronymous was a so-called cool guy, but in mid- or late 1992, most of us realized that he was not. When his label released the Burzum debut album in March 1992, he had to take a loan to pay for it; he [borrowed] the money from me. When he sold all the Burzum albums he paid his private bills rather than print more records—or pay me back the money he owed me—and I never saw any royalties either. When the record sold out, he had no money to print more records. This is probably the reason why some people think I killed him for money, but certainly I wouldn’t have gotten my money back by killing him. Breaking his legs would probably have worked, but not killing him.

HELLHAMMER:
I didn’t see Varg very much at the end. But he was writing letters to Euronymous. I know he and Euronymous were angry at each other. I just didn’t know how angry.

COUNT GRISHNACKH:
For some months this dislike for Euronymous spread in the metal scene, as more and more people understood what a moron he was, and he blamed me for all of this and started to hate me. He believed it was my fault people lost their respect for him. In a sense he was right, as I certainly didn’t keep my opinions a secret, but I think he brought that upon himself. He had made a fool of himself. Further, when the media wrote all that crap about me it made him feel less important. Suddenly he was no longer the main character in the hardcore metal scene. As he saw it, that, too, was all my fault.

HELLHAMMER:
One night, Count Grishnackh broke into Euronymous’s house and stabbed him, like, thirty times. He stabbed him in the face right under the eye, and he had to put his foot on his face to get the knife back out again.