Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  Unfortunately, while the musicians had achieved something of a creative breakthrough, the album coincided with the collapse of the band due to both personal—and personnel—problems. Drummer Necroperversor and the more improbably named Black Jesus, who had joined the band in 1991 when Holocausto moved to the city of Kuopio, both departed the band shortly after the recording of Drawing Down the Moon. To add further stress, Holocausto actually had to sell many of his possessions, including his car, simply to fund the album and was eventually left homeless by the turbulence of the period.

  “I even asked Turbo to pay our studio bill, but they told me that they didn’t trust us!” he reveals. “Beherit are the most trustworthy group in the scene! Let those shithouse brothers suffer in Hell! I had to pay the studios myself and wait six months to get signed on Spinefarm Records [whom Holocausto would also soon begin working for]. I had less than five friends in Kuopio city and there I even got ripped off by my (ex) best friend. I paid him the advance rent for a small wooden house on an island near the city area, but then wasn’t able to move there. That was a week after my (ex) girlfriend left me. Fuck, how much that time made me hate this life. Same things have happened again [with the recording of 2009’s Engram], it seems that every fucking time we record a Beherit album, all social life is simply destroyed. Fuck, it’s [such an] intense time [making] an album in the studio!”

  Working alone, Holocausto followed the album with a seven-inch entitled Messe Des Morts—later released as a split with Archgoat—at the tail end of 1993, blending primitive black metal, demented vocals, and programmed drums. It would be the last black metal recording released under the name Beherit for over fifteen years. Unable to find suitable musicians to join him and increasingly enthralled by electronic music and its “crossover” possibilities with guitar music, Holocausto created two electronic albums under the Beherit name in 1994 and 1995. The first was the primitive H418ov21.C (the strange title taken, Holocausto explains, from Aleister Crowley) and the second was the better-received Electric Doom Synthesis, which reintroduced guitars into the Beherit formula while remaining brooding and predominantly non-metal in nature.

  “The studio for H418 was booked just a couple of weeks before [recording]. I had some material written, but the final form was yet to be decided, like [whether] to produce tracks with real instruments or [with] which lineup. That time, we had just opened the first Spinefarm record store in Helsinki, so overall it was a very hectic time. Then doing drugs and studying occultism, [I could] give a fuck about that current metal scene. I was really anti-everything. Tracks for Electric Doom Synthesis I spent much longer on, several months with many variations of every track … it was very fascinating, to have such a freedom from noisy rehearsal rooms. It’s a paradox, ’cos now after fifteen years that’s the spirit I am looking for again. I found, there’s not that much inspiration sitting in front of a computer monitor.”

  Nuclear Holocausto Vengeance pictured in 2009, around the time of comeback release Engram.

  After Electric Doom Synthesis, Laiho abandoned both the Beherit and Holocausto monikers altogether, continuing the electronic themes with a “metamusic” project called Suuri Shamaani and creating hardcore techno under the name DJ Gamma G. It would not be until 2009 that Beherit would return, with an album entitled Engram, which saw the band boasting a full lineup again, Laiho (as Holocausto again) working with original drummer Sodomatic Slaughter and two newcomers, guitarist Sami “Ancient Corpse Desekrator” Tenetz (founder of Thy Serpent) and bassist Pasi “Abyss, Twisted Baptizer” Kolehmainen.

  “I wanted to play with real musicians after years of making music in my home studio,” he explains. “Things just evolved into Beherit. I wanted to concentrate on the music itself, so kept the project top secret, because I think it’s vital to get some distance to the ‘scene’ and close your eyes from the forum rants when writing music. I wanted to have a form of music with not too much candy on it, something that would be easy to play live with some basic trigger pedal. I am not a skilled guitar hero, I just love to play guitar, loud and distorted.”

  Interestingly, Engram drew inspiration from a short-lived project called The Lord Diabolus, something that Holocausto and Slaughter had worked on together prior to the recording of Drawing Down the Moon, a time when they felt it was unsafe to use the Beherit name due to issues with Turbo. Stylistically the record was very much a return to black metal territories, though it made use of a far more powerful production than might have been expected from the band’s previous works. The result was cold, aggressive, and satisfying, but also hinted at the band’s minimalist and hypnotic past, as well as carrying an air of Bathory about it. The unexpected return was warmly received by fans, though the recording process itself proved to be a typically testing time for Holocausto, as summed up by the words that open the album: “Because … I just fucking hate this world,” an apparently candid recording of the man himself.

  “That line was not written before we went to studio,” he explains, “that’s a hate I felt during the session. We were drinking for three weeks heavily with almost no sleep, very chaotic and disturbing in every sense. The perfect setup for a band like Beherit. I think the Earth itself is a beautiful place and with Internet technology, it’s so easy for people to study occultism, learn and enlighten their souls. But it makes me feel sad, when people are not taking their precious time more seriously. Fucking homosapien monkey shit, always with some latest trendy nonsense. I hate their modern lifestyle, their capitalistic dream, political corruption, and headless Western values. I hate blind people acting happily in utter ignorance.”

  Despite the many trials that have faced the group, and more specifically Holocausto himself, Beherit has survived to tell the tale. Even their surprise return is typical of their frontman’s strong determination and refusal to do things by anyone’s terms but his own. As he confirms, the future for the band is impossible for anyone to predict.

  “I think we are lucky to have such a diverse discography,” he concludes. “Beherit is not a prisoner of any particular music style. We have a freedom to do whatever we want in the future and it would still fit the sound of Beherit.”

  15

  MAYHEM

  PART I

  “Pioneers are always important and barely anything was going on in Norway before Mayhem as far as extreme metal goes. They put out the Deathcrush vinyl themselves (with the help of a handful of friends), they gained a lot of contacts through the underground network of that time… And then the black metal thing with Dead. No one had really done that before in Norway, and the way people could communicate with Euronymous was very inspiring for younger black metallers. Besides that, the studio tracks they recorded with Dead and the De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas album is among the best black metal to come out of Norway.”

  —Metalion (editor of seminal Norwegian publication Slayer and co-funder of the aforementioned Deathcrush vinyl)

  “I was first introduced to Mayhem in a local record shop here in Bergen around 1987. Back then metal was almost unknown in Bergen and to explore a brutal metal band from Norway was awesome. Metal is, in my eyes and ears, meant to be provoking and extreme, and the band is one of a kind, and has inspired me from day one. They were, and still are, revolutionary and artists on a high level, and their history is like the most exciting story you can wish for. Salute!”

  —Jørn Inge Tunsber (Hades/Hades Almighty)

  EVEN AFTER CLEARING AWAY the cobwebs of myth and rumor, it’s hard not to conclude that Mayhem remains the most important and influential band in black metal history. Their name has become synonymous with groundbreaking music, strong personalities, Satanism, church burnings, suicide, murder, and perhaps most importantly, the unification and rebirth of the black metal movement in the early nineties. In fact, thanks to a combination of their art and their extracurricular activities, Mayhem have achieved a genuinely legendary status within the genre.

  While the band would make their greatest impact during the
nineties, their initial formation took place much earlier, specifically 1984, a time when the group consisted of three musicians: bassist Jørn Stubberud, better known as Necrobutcher, drummer Kjetil Manheim, then known simply as Manheim, and guitarist Øystein Aarseth, whose stagename Euronymous would become immortalized within black metal history and culture after his premature death in 1993.

  Manheim, Necrobutcher and Euronymous, the three founding members of Mayhem, in an early studio shoot, 1986.

  So much gossip and speculation surrounds the band, even today, that it seemed critical for the story of their early days to come directly from the two surviving founding members: Manheim and Necrobutcher. Though separate interviews were conducted later, the initial discussion took place in person with both men. No longer in regular contact—Manheim left the band in 1987—it had been some time since the two had spoken. Nonetheless, a meeting between them and your author was eventually arranged in a bar close to the centre of Oslo, an establishment whose bizarre taxidermy-heavy décor proved to be a suitably macabre setting for the tale.

  We began our conversation right at the beginning of the band’s story, at the point when the two musicians—who were both living outside Oslo in the village of Langhus and were twelve years old at the time—decided to start a band.

  “It felt very natural for me at least,” begins Necrobutcher. “It wasn’t like a plan, it was what we were, what we did, what our interest was: playing music, listening to music, everything about music. We were big fans of bands and were looking up to them I guess, wanting to do the same thing as them—releasing albums, touring…”

  “We were probably not different from other kids at that time,” points out Manheim. “If you were into punk and hard rock at that time, that was a part of it, wanting to play.”

  “I started out with friends who were in the same block of flats that I was living in,” continues Necrobutcher. “I wanted to start a band, bought some instruments and said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to have someone who has some clue about notes and things like that.’ And Manheim, we were schoolmates, so I brought him into the band. Also his dad was a principal in a school—though not our school—so we could arrange rooms for rehearsals.”

  “It was a small school,” Manheim explains, “we met in second grade when we were eight years old. I played in the school band, a brass band, I joined that to learn how to play drums and that was really the start of it. My first record was [British prog/symphonic rock band] Procol Harum, I got it from my uncle and loved it. I never got into Kiss, which was big then, so my approach to it was more diverse. I liked a lot of different music, still do. But heavy metal, it was something that as soon as you heard it, you liked it, it was the energy around it.”

  “Bands like Iron Maiden, AC/DC, and Motörhead started showing up,” Necrobutcher continues. “We were already playing in the band when we discovered these bands. I think that we all had this ‘bad boy’ attitude, we wanted to play something aggressive, mix it maybe with what we were into and what was around at the time; punk, metal, also rhythm and blues and funk, everything that had some aggressiveness to it. Basically everything that nobody liked, we were kind of interested in. It could be the electronic music coming out of Germany like Kraftwerk, or on the other side Motörhead or the Sex Pistols.”

  “I think people have a tendency to think that if you are into metal that’s all that you are into,” Manheim adds. “But that’s a fan thing, if you talk to musicians, they have all kinds of influences behind them….”

  “The third guy was Øystein, Euronymous,” explains Necrobutcher. “He was in an elementary school in the next town, Ski, like five kilometers from us. If he were living a couple more kilometers toward us, he would have been in our class, he would have been in the band for sure, it was just the fact that we’d never met….”

  “I met [Euronymous] at a station. He was going to show me the way to a friend’s house, ’cos I was auditioning for a band, though I was still in this band we had at the time [with Manheim] called Musta and a side project [without Manheim] called &co. When we met up we were like, ‘Wow, we have similar interests’—that we didn’t know about each other was a shock—and in the fifteen-minute walk to his friend’s house we decided to form a band. So I told him that we already have a band, a good drummer, we have a rehearsal place and it turned out he knew a couple of cover songs we were already rehearsing; a Venom track, a Black Sabbath track and a Judas Priest track, that was our first rehearsal. We were very excited.”

  “Love at first sight,” laughs Manheim.

  The three became Mayhem almost immediately, the pair explain.

  “We started in ’84,” recalls Necrobutcher, “the first months we were rehearsing cover tracks, and first song we wrote—‘Ghoul’—I think was the beginning of ’85. We just finished elementary school. [Manheim] and Euronymous went to high school and I went to a school that taught a craft, bricklaying, that sort of stuff. That year I dropped out of school, and the year after Euronymous more or less dropped out of school.”

  “He was quite good at school actually,” Manheim adds, “he quit the last year with top grades, but he didn’t finish his exams, he decided to go for the band.”

  Looking to the recently emerged pioneers of extreme metal, the band’s name was directly inspired by a Venom song, namely a fifty-eight-second instrumental from Welcome To Hell.

  “‘Mayhem with Mercy,’” Necrobutcher confirms. “The name [came from] Euronymous. He had played the graduation day with a couple of friends at school, put together a band and played a song or two and called it Mayhem. We also had a second guitarist, Per Nilsen, who was member for half a year in ’84.”

  “He was a good guitarist,” adds Manheim, “but it wasn’t raw. It was more [virtuoso] Yngwie Malmsteen-style.”

  “We had a show in April 1985,” continues Necrobutcher, “one year after we started the band, we did a Celtic Frost cover and two Venom covers. We hadn’t got that far yet to write our own songs, actually that came straight after that, we started to rehearse our own shit.”

  Though a tight unit, the three musicians had somewhat different ambitions at this point. “I think we had different goals,” Manheim ponders. “I can only speak for myself. First of all, my thing was to play. It was fun to create things to record and it was fun that people recognized it, talked about it, wrote about it and liked what we did. I think Øystein had a much bigger ambition.”

  “I think I knew that I was going to be in a band and that that was going to be my thing,” states Necrobutcher. “Øystein wasn’t that guy who sat at home practicing his guitar, he was creating this ‘world network,’ even at that point.”

  “We decided this was going to be something totally different,” Manheim elaborates. “Even before we’d released or even recorded anything, magazines were writing about Mayhem. Which turned out to be a good thing.”

  “The magazines wrote that this was a fresh breath,” Necrobutcher remembers, “some guys doing new shit, coming from Norway. Some of them had been in the rehearsal space.”

  “Like Metalion [Jon Kristiansen] of Slayer zine, he wrote a lot about it,” adds Manheim. “You can decide to look at it in terms of brand strategy, which was not the case at the time, but looking back, what we did was brag about how special this was going to be. We had journalists and magazine writers who visited us in the rehearsal, and that confirmed that this was something that was completely different and very wrong, and hard, and aggressive. So the rumors started to go round and people were waiting to hear what we were going to release. That’s the way to build a brand and I think this is what was happening, Mayhem became a ‘name’ before people even knew the concept, they just knew the stories. And these stories were blended with Satanism and a lot of dark things. That made it more interesting I guess, for people in the communities.”

  The obvious question, therefore, is whether any members of the band were actually Satanists.

  “No,” Manheim replies simply.

>   “Not even Øystein,” adds Necrobutcher. “We were looking at the Satanic thing to see if there was any possibility to write some good lyrics. We bought [LaVey’s] Satanic Bible and some other books to see if we could get inspiration. So we were interested in that, started to investigate, but found out that it was nothing for us. [It was] anti-society yes, but not Satanic. Anti-social, but here in Norway, the constitution is based on Christian values. Everything, the government, school system …”

  Peace and love? Manheim, Necrobutcher and Euronymous appear on the cover of newly acquired vocalist Maniac’s Damage Inc. fanzine in 1986.

  “The establishment actually,” interjects Manheim, “the morals, the state, religion …”

  “So how to rebel against society? To rebel against the laws they build up?”

  “Everything that was extreme, [was] good,” Manheim smiles. “Everything that could upset a Christian was good. Behind it was rebellion, which was nothing new to youth culture. But at the time, that was our expression and it turned into what you write about [in this book]: the emerging of the black metal genre, and the influence that Norwegian black metal has had around the world. And it’s not like we say it was all bullshit, it is something real there, but it’s not based on Satanism and rituals and religion. On the contrary, it was more in opposition to people in power and people who don’t believe that you are a free man who should be able to have free will. Of course we used Christianity as an enemy in the expression, but if you lived in Norway you would understand why.”