Scenes From Helvete
1. Gorgoroth
In Bergen, Norway, we are in a dark, candle-lit house. The camera is focused on Gaahl,
though some of his facial features are obscured in shadow. A hollow, nervous voice is asking
questions. The voice is hesitant, and the questions wording forms carefully as they leave his
mouth.
What is the primary ideology
or the primary ideas
that fuel
Gorgoroths music?
There is a long pause. Gaahl strokes his fingers up and down the stem of his wine glass.
He raises his head a couple of times, as if to say something, but seems to decide against it and
continue deliberating. Several more seconds pass. The room is silent and still but feels
overbearingly loud, filled only with the heavy music of history and violence and exclusive
knowledge.
Satan.
His voice is deep, with slight shaky notes of remorse but with a supported conviction.
Gaahl takes a long, slow sip of wine. His interviewer is taken aback and waits several more
seconds before asking another question.
What does Satan
embody, or what does
he represent?
Another pause, this one shorter.
Freedom.
2. Mayhem
Dead followed death.
Not like a duckling follows its mother; closer, but not quite the same, to the way zealots
follow their chosen religious devotion. Death, in its infinite space, needed not move; Dead
walked his own path through his space, and death was always a few steps in front of him, or to
the side, or above, but never far.
Death was his envoy. When he was 17, feeling his band at the time had stagnated, he sent
an audition tape to Mayhem, attached was a dead mouse he had crucified. He joined the band
shortly after.
Everything here is so cold
Everything here is so dark
I remember it as from a dream
Det hr r bara en drm, och snart vaknar jag
To follow death, then, is to seek freedom from the illusion of life. If waking and
dreaming are differentiated only by active sensory experience and memory, to follow death is to
seek to bring the sensory experience of material death into the body, to embody the Euronymian
rot in permanence. Decay transcends memory. Dysphoria is dissonance between the body and the
mind; Deads was between homeostasis and death, so he damaged the body, and cut it up and
shot it until the contradiction was resolved. It was more than his physical state, however. It was
sensory because he had to feel the sensations that a dead body feels, so he painted his face in
quintessential white so he could see pallor in the mirror; and he buried his clothes before he wore
them so they could begin to rot; and he kept a dead crow in a bag so he could inhale its odor and
convince himself, however briefly, that it was his own pungent decomposition filling his nostrils.
And he wanted only the friends a rotting corpse would have. This again was his
dysphoria; his nature needed people to surround it, as all do, but he needed to remove himself. To
be in Deads company was to accept the inhumanity of blood divorced from circulation; skin
divorced from the vulnerability it prevents. To remain meant to be as dead as Dead or to
convince yourself that death was human.
And he would throw a pigs head at you to ensure that you did.
Jag r inte en mnniska
Im not a human
Det hr r bara en drm och
this is just a dream and
snart vaknar jag.
soon I will awake.
Det var fr kallt och
It was too cold and the
blodet levrades hela tiden.
blood was frozen in time.
3. Satanic Warmaster
My first exposure to black metal was not an obsession with death; it was an obsession
with deaths shadow. I was a young guitar player osmosing technique and composition and I read
a tutorial on how to play black metal guitar. It was stylistically written, teaching about trve kvlt
blast beats and grim frostbitten tremolo picking. It opened to me a new world of aesthetic
possibilities: the memetic extreme. The article also taught me the primary riff from Where
Eternity Awaits, the culmination of this aesthetic. Donning corpse paint, medieval axes, trebly
guitar tones, repetitive atmospherics and cheesy lyrics (The northern winds carried the vision of
a time yet to be / when the cold breath of evil once ascends from its throne), Satanic Warmaster
is one among hundreds of copycats and imitators, myself included. The anger vetted by elitists of
the genre almost seem justified; how dare they? Over a decade separated from Deads suicide,
from the closing of Helvete, from Euronymous murder, from Varg and Fausts imprisonments,
from over 50 church arsons how dare they turn corpse paint to Kiss paint and blood to ketchup
like childrens finger paint?
4. Mayhem
Euronymous was the shadow of the shadow of death. He did not follow it, as Dead did,
but he followed Dead towards it, kept Deads path clean, and would himself come to be followed
by shadows, and their shadows; hundreds of listeners desperate to be devoured by blackness,
because in it they could find refuge from the spectres of alienation, overbearing in their glow.
On April 8th, 1991, Dead slit his wrists and shot himself.
Euronymous discovered the body. He arranged it, wrestling the unbridled Dionysian of
death into an Apollonian art piece and took photographs. One of these would go on to be the
cover of a live album recorded during Deads tenure - Dawn of the Black Hearts. He gave
necklaces made from fragments of Deads skull to worthy shadows who lurked in the depths of
Helvete. He died as he lived: in the shadow of aesthetic conspiracy, estranged from himself.
