Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “The first release I did was the Enslaved mini-LP [Hordanes Land] and that was a recommendation from Euronymous who I was tape-trading with,” Lee clarifies. “He wanted to sign them to Deathlike Silence but he thought it would be a good idea if a smaller label did something with them first, to make them more popular for when the album came out. It was only going to be two mini-albums pressed to a thousand copies each. Back in ’93 vinyl was still outselling CDs and it was decided to put both on one [CD], and luckily both bands were all right with that and that’s when the label was born. I thought I’d just sell a thousand of each, I never had any intention of running a label. Next thing I know the furor around black metal kicked off and I sold ten thousand CDs in about a month and had a label on my hands by happy accident.”

  The band was undoubtedly on a roll—in fact, they were now probably the genre’s leading band, at least in terms of popularity. In retrospect they were in a winning position, riding the back of two fantastic releases as well as the peak of the controversy exploding from Norway—controversy which they were a key part of, since the previous year had seen Samoth and Faust engaged in church-burning and, in the case of the latter, murder. Still, at this point those crimes remained unsolved, and with Candlelight’s support the band made their way to the UK for their first tour.

  This, however, would not take part before a lineup change that saw Mortiis replaced by Terje “Tchort” Vik Schei. Having lost his place in Emperor and become embroiled in the legal aftermath of the black metal crimes, Mortiis would later move to Sweden to concentrate on his highly successful solo ambient project, eventually expanding this into a full band and breaking into mainstream consciousness with more industrial metal-leaning efforts such as The Grudge.

  “I was asked to leave Emperor on account of my verbal abuse and stupid temper at the time,” recalls Mortiis. “I was getting to be a cocky fuck by that time so I was probably perceived [by outsiders] as an arrogant idiot in a great band. I did think it was rough for a while because I loved the band at the time. I wanted to live with my girlfriend who was living in Sweden so I figured move there instead. That of course triggered speculation among people that weren’t even around, like I was running away, which certainly was not true … I have always come clean about my past mistakes and would have come clean about this too if it was true, but it just wasn’t. I was moving away from Norway, where I lived, because it sucked, and to my girlfriend in Sweden.”

  “I met with Samoth at Helvete and we visited a local pub and talked about music,” remembers Tchort, then best known for his death metal band Green Carnation. “He was known as the Lord of Silence back then so it wasn’t exactly a two-way communication—more of a monologue! He sent me a letter (before the a e-mail times!) and asked me if I was interested in playing bass with them and they sent me rehearsal tapes.”

  Amusingly, the two had first spoken when Tchort initially arrived on the Oslo scene, a meeting that proved somewhat more awkward, as the bassist explains: “Actually it was Samoth who asked about Green Carnation during one of the pub visits we had at Helvete,” he recalls dryly. “An ex-girlfriend of mine who lived near Samoth brought the demo tape with her and he somehow got his hands on it and made quite clear that he didn’t like it. Just a couple of months before he had his own death metal band so I didn’t see his point.”

  A flyer for 1993’s Fear of a Black Metal Planet (a pun on the Public Enemy album of almost the same name) UK tour featuring Emperor and Cradle of Filth.

  The original plan for the band’s UK visit was for them to support Deicide at their London Astoria show, but that event was cancelled at the last minute due to death threats by animal rights activists aimed at Deicide vocalist Glen Benton. Looking to save this opportunity, Lee Barrett got together with a like-minded individual, Neil “Frater Nihil” Harding, who had recently reinvented the metal wing of Vinyl Solution under the name Cacophonous Records, and signed cult UK act Cradle of Filth. Together the two men created a tour that would showcase both bands, with Emperor headlining and Cradle of Filth supporting at a number of small venues during July 1993.

  Though modest in scale, the tour was mutually beneficial to all parties, upping the profile of all the groups and labels involved. Fortunately, given the confined circumstances, the two parties ended up getting on famously.

  “We loved them,” recalls Cradle of Filth vocalist Dani. “Being down-to-earth English people we messed them around a bit, but they got used to our sense of humor. At that time Samoth was only called the Lord of Silence ’cos he couldn’t really speak English… but he still understood our crude humor and sarcasm I think. They were nice, they weren’t aloof … we talked about lots of things and then that deteriorated into drinking games. We partied pretty hard. I remember we stayed one night with Darren [White] from Anathema as his dad was away; there were people from Candlelight, Emperor, Cradle… we stayed up two nights, Nick Barker was trying to play Emperor songs on a harpsichord, we had a cake fight, it was proper young lads partying.”

  “We were skeptical about [Cradle of Filth] and their music before we left for the tour, but they were very cool guys and we got on very well with them,” confirms Tchort.

  While partying may have been part of both band’s agendas, darker interests were also at play, as both groups took an active interest in the occult—in fact, Samoth would later marry Cradle of Filth’s backing vocalist/performance artist/Satanic priestess, Andrea Meyer. Of the two bands, however, Emperor were more extreme as characters, and Lee explains that he occasionally struggled in his role as tour manager. While a visit to the West Wycombe caves (former home of the notorious 1700s Hellfire Club) passed without incident, he found himself tested when the band ran amok in a local cemetery, particularly when one member appeared to become “possessed” and had to be restrained by his bandmates and dragged into the van kicking and screaming.

  “They were hard work in some respects,” Lee sighs. “You could never tell if they were happy or not, ’cos they didn’t say much. Ihsahn was a really nice guy, Faust was a nice guy generally but… it’s hard to be polite, but they were trying very hard to be as black metal as possible. Tchort would smoke a cigarette then stub it out on his arm—he had only just joined the band a few weeks before, so was making more of an effort in those terms I think.”

  “I’d heard from other sources that a murder had taken place but if you’re living in the UK hearing all these rumors, you take them with a pinch of salt. Faust did actually get drunk one night and told me what he’d done and if I’m honest I didn’t really believe him. I just thought of it as a bit of an adventure, I didn’t think about it from a moral standpoint. It was all new to me, running a label, looking after a band—it was just a bit of fun, as strange as that may sound.”

  The tour was also stressful for Emperor due to its chaotic organization, and Ihsahn would end up suffering considerable burns to his face while preparing for the fire-breathing routine popular within the band at the time.

  “We couldn’t find any alcohol strong enough,” recalls Lee, “we were buying standard vodka and it’s just not strong enough, so I bought a tin of lighter fluid. It said ‘non-toxic’ on the back so I thought, ‘This is probably gonna do the job.’ He filled his mouth with it, we got the torch going then he blew the liquid out of his mouth and his whole head lit up on fire. Luckily I had a can of beer… he was just running ’round the garden like a headless chicken with us trying to chase him and put it out, he ended up with some quite nasty burns on his face. If you look at the pictures [of the shows] you can see he’s not wearing the normal corpsepaint and he’s got some quite nasty bubbles on his face. The fire-breathing was off the menu after that.”

  This was a busy and productive period for the band, who recorded their debut full-length, In the Nightside Eclipse, at Pytten’s Grieghallen Studios shortly after their return. The album would be praised almost unanimously by the black metal scene when it was released the following February, and remains at the top of countle
ss “best of” lists. An almost cinematic affair, it’s an intensely atmospheric and majestic work. On tracks such as “Into the Infinity of Thoughts” or “Towards the Pantheon”—even the short, nameless intro track—the chilling aura of the early/mid-nineties black metal movement is almost tangible: the excitement, wonder, mystery, and sense of communing with something greater than oneself.

  Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse, an album whose popularity has proved enduring.

  The song structures, wall-of-sound production, and performances are notably refined from the earlier recordings, with greater technique allowing far greater emotional scope. The percussion is organic and dynamic in both pitch and speed, alternating between furious blasting and a steady, thunderous pace when the music slows. Fast, dissonant guitars build and fall endlessly, urgent-sounding riffs piling atop one another until the tension is broken by a slower, soaring passage, the guitars dropping away (an element of the production that seems to trouble the record’s critics) to allow the synths to surge in what almost feels almost like a moment of spiritual revelation. It is an album of great drama, at turns terrifying and life-affirming—as complex and thrilling as black metal itself.

  Though the influence of Master’s Hammer has already been mentioned, it was undoubtedly this album more than any other that established the symphonic black metal sound, one later picked up by numerous bands such as Dimmu Borgir, Diabolical Masquerade, and Limbonic Art, to name but a few. Aptly, the lyrics written by Samoth and Ihsahn (along with Mortiis, since rerecorded versions of two demo tracks also appear) mirrored the grandiosity of the music, with wordy and poetic explorations of Scandinavia’s nature (Norway is explicitly mentioned in the album’s opening line) and Satanism. The fact that the album was the product of four teenagers, one of whom had been turned away from UK pubs weeks before for being underage, is hard to believe.

  “We didn’t really know that we had made a groundbreaking album,” Samoth explains. “It’s hard to know that while you are in the middle of the process of making it. We knew it was a good album that had something personal and unique to it in our genre, but we never really saw it becoming one of the classic black metal albums of all time. We were definitely happy with it when we were done, and I must say I’m very proud of the album, even today. Now I see it almost in a historical sense … it had a great impact on how my life has become today actually.

  Probably the most memorable band logo in the genre, designed by Christophe Szpajdel who has gone to create logos for Horna, Graveland, Nargaroth and Wolves In The Throne Room.

  “It was a fairly easy process as far as I remember,” he continues. “By this time Mortiis was out of the band and for a while we [wrote] together as a three-piece with me, Ihsahn, and Faust. We also rerecorded ‘My Empire’s Doom’ from the demo—but with new lyrics, it became ‘Beyond the Great Vast Forest’—and ‘I Am the Black Wizards’ and ‘Cosmic Keys’ … so basically we wrote five new songs for that album. Ihsahn and I wrote both together and individually; we did a lot of jamming of ideas in the rehearsal room, and added on ideas we had been working on separately. All the song structures were done before entering the studio—many of them we played on our first UK tour in the summer of ’93—however, a lot of the symphonic keyboard parts were actually made in the studio. We didn’t have a keyboard player at the time, so we never rehearsed with keyboards prior to the recording.”

  “I don’t remember much to be honest,” admits Tchort of his sessions. “I remember that I played the bass in a huge hall but that’s about it. Ihsahn was sick so he didn’t do vocals or the vocals were not good enough—I don’t remember which—and I remember the Count came down to the studio one time. He had this chain mail on his chest and was eating an ice cream. I think it’s a great album with a great atmosphere and good songs. It was my first album [and] I wish that I had some more experience before I did that album as I am sure I could have done a lot better.”

  Despite Tchort’s modesty, and the fact that technical ability is not always a must in extreme metal, there’s little doubt that having four members who were all musically skilled, despite their young ages, was essential in realizing such an ambitious album, a point producer Eirik “Pytten” Hundvin expands upon.

  “The guys were really dedicated and we were working bloody hard—and I mean really hard. The whole band was really competent … that kind of music, it’s really, really difficult, drums and guitar, but also bass. The guys were better musicians so we had a really okay studio situation. But it was hard work, late-night, long sessions. We were using a lot of tracks too, up to thirty-two I think, we had to use different recording machines, ’cos I didn’t have a thirty-two-track machine. I think we all felt we were creating something. Both Tomas and Vegard were perfectionists: I like people being serious about things, trying to get the best out of the situation and themselves, and they were absolutely having that attitude.”

  “In some ways it was a bit too much of a success in terms of running a business,” laughs Lee. “I can’t remember what the pre-sale was, but we had to press something like thirty thousand copies. My distribution deal meant I wasn’t going to get paid for sixty to ninety days, but I had to pay for the pressing within thirty days, so I had all these releases lined up—like Monumentum—that I couldn’t do. The bands ended up getting pissed off and jumping ship to a label called Misanthropy ’cos the owner was sort of hanging in the wings like a vulture, hoping to clean up basically.”

  The band now appeared to be in an unbelievably strong position, but any plans of touring the album were smashed when Faust was imprisoned, leaving the band without a drummer. Samoth was spending a lot of his time in Oslo at this point, where he was “basically living” in a rehearsal room used by many bands in the scene. So it was that he ended up contributing to several significant releases from 1994, namely Arcturus’ Constellation EP (bass and guitar), Satyricon’s The Shadowthrone (bass and guitar), and Gorgoroth’s Promo 94 and Pentagram albums (bass only). In early 1995, Samoth was also jailed for his part in the church burnings and with Tchort also imprisoned for his activities in Kristiansand, the band were put on an involuntary hiatus.

  Things remained uncertain for some time, and even upon the release of Samoth and Tchort matters were far from resolved due to Faust’s extensive sentence. Tchort soon departed (going on to resurrect Green Carnation and work with Blood Red Throne and Carpathian Forest, as well as Satyricon and Einherjer), leaving the band effectively a duo once more.

  “When Samoth was released he and Ihsahn wanted to continue making music but they didn’t think they would perform live again in the future with Faust being imprisoned for a long time,” explains Tchort. “If they were going to record again in the future, they could handle the bass themselves. My firstborn had just died and I was emotionally fucked up and lost interest in music, so when they suggested my departure from the band, it totally made sense.”

  “Being incarcerated gives you a lot of time to think and you get to view life from a different perspective,” considers Samoth philosophically. “I think I grew as a person in that period for sure, but I would have done so being free as well. I don’t consider the incarceration as a hard part of my life. Actually, it was a very social part of my life, as I was forced to live around so many other people. I view it as a life experience. As far as the arson case goes, it’s not something I think very much about at all. Basically, this whole ordeal is twenty years old, and I look back at it as a very different part of my life, [it] almost seems like a different life. There was a lot of youthful naivety back then, and I’m sure there are things that were said and done that could have been handled different by a lot of people involved in all the turbulence that went down. I try not to live too much in the past, and rather focus on where I am now and what lies ahead.”

  This would certainly prove to be true, and what appeared to be a badly damaged group would soon rise spectacularly from their own ashes.

  During the first half of 1995 Emperor found the
mselves in the peculiar position of being on a career high, both in terms of sales and acclaim, but also having three-quarters of their lineup incarcerated. Despite this situation slowing the band’s progress considerably, work was never allowed to grind to a halt completely. Prior to Samoth’s imprisonment the guitarist had written three songs together with Ihsahn, and while serving his sentence he was able to write several more (the most notable being the ironically named “The Wanderer”).

  For his part, Ihsahn continued to rehearse with a new bassist called Jonas Alver, though finding a drummer proved an ongoing challenge after Faust’s incarceration. Not that the band were short of interested and competent players—including Satyricon’s Frost and Mayhem’s Hellhammer—but in every case the candidates came with substantial commitments to other bands. The solution would eventually materialize in the shape of Kai Johnny Mosaker, otherwise known as Trym Torson, who had been playing with Bergen’s Enslaved since their inception in 1991, but was now departing the group following a testing American tour and a shift in direction by the band.

  “Right after I left Enslaved, Samoth called me and asked if I was interested in playing with them,” Trym recalls. “Of course I said yes. I met Alver on the train and he told me they had tried different drummers like Hellhammer, Frost, Grim (ex-Immortal, R.I.P.), Erik Lancelot (Ulver), so then I was sure it would be very difficult for me to make a difference. I knew Ihsahn and Samoth from before and we were good friends, we had a good connection already and that probably was the edge I needed to be a member of the band.”