The main stage of a fifteen hundred seat concert hall in Bergen, some time in 1992. A drum kit stands inside a curtained enclosure about five metres square with the overhead microphones a metre above the cymbals. The guitars are being cut in a tight little room built for classical radio commentary. The bass goes in direct from the control room and the vocals are done in a curtained corner. The building is the home of the Bergen Philharmonic and it is being rented by the hour to a band with no money and no singer.
That is where De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas was made, across sessions running from June 1992 to May 1993, with Eirik Hundvin at the desk. Deathlike Silence Productions released it on 24 May 1994. Everything written about this album for thirty two years has led with what happened to the people who made it, so this piece does the opposite and leads with the record, which is the better of the two subjects and the only one that still repays attention. The chapter that holds the shop, the basement and the whole Oslo story is the chapter this belongs to.
The room and the method
The engineer was a working professional with no investment in the ideology of the people in front of him. He did not clean the sessions up and he did not make them comfortable, and what he captured has a specific quality of air that separates every record cut in that building from everything made elsewhere in the period: a lot of room, very little bottom end, guitars recorded so thin that they stop behaving like instruments. On this album the method reaches its furthest point, because unlike its neighbours it is not a fast record. It is a mid paced one, and mid paced music exposes a thin guitar sound in a way that speed conceals.
The songs had been written across five years by three different people, which is unusual and audible. Mayhem formed in 1984, released the deathcrush EP in 1987 in a pressing of a thousand copies, and then spent half a decade failing to finish an album. By the time the tape was rolling the material had passed through the hands of the founding bass player, the singer who had written most of the words, and a second guitarist brought in from another band. Nothing about that process was orderly and the record is stronger for it.
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Euronymous | Guitar, producer, songwriting |
| Hellhammer | Drums, producer, songwriting |
| Attila Csihar | Vocals |
| Varg Vikernes | Bass, uncredited on the sleeve |
| Dead | Lyrics on six of the eight songs, songwriting |
| Necrobutcher | Songwriting, lyrics on one song |
| Blackthorn | Additional riffs and lyrics |
| Pytten | Producer and engineer |
The performances
Three things on this album have never been equalled by anybody working in the style. The first is the drumming. Hellhammer plays with a control and a sense of dynamics that almost nothing else in the second wave possesses, and the fills are placed rather than thrown; listen to what happens under the middle of "Freezing Moon" and it becomes obvious that this is a musician rather than an enthusiast.
The second is the guitar writing. "Funeral Fog" opens the album at five minutes and forty seven seconds and states the whole method, but the tremolo figures on "Pagan Fears" and the slow chord movement in "Life Eternal" are the best things Euronymous ever put on tape, and they work because they are not trying to be fast. The third is the vocal. Attila Csihar was brought in from Hungary and has said the whole album was tracked in three days, and what he does is nothing like the shriek every other band had settled on: it is closer to liturgy, muttered, chanted, occasionally operatic, and it should not work at all.
Mid paced music exposes a thin guitar sound in the way that speed conceals it. This album takes that risk on every track and gets away with it.
The words are the fourth element and they belong to a man who was not there. Dead wrote the lyrics for six of the eight songs, including "Freezing Moon", "Pagan Fears" and "Life Eternal", and they are the reason the album reads as a single work rather than as a compilation of riffs. He had died on 8 April 1991, more than a year before the sessions began.
What happened around it, stated once
Two of the people who made this record were dead before it was released. Per Ohlin, who sang for the band from 1988 and wrote most of the lyrics, took his own life on 8 April 1991. Oystein Aarseth, who played guitar and ran the label paying for the sessions, was killed on 10 August 1993 by the man who had played bass on the album; that man was convicted of the murder and of a series of church arsons in May 1994 and sentenced to twenty one years. The full court record, the dates and the outcomes, is set out in its own chapter and does not need repeating here.
One decision from that period does belong to the record rather than to the courts. After the killing, Aarseth's family asked the drummer to remove the bass tracks. He declined, and the album went out with them on it. Whatever anybody thinks of that, it is the reason the tape you can buy today is the tape that was made, and reconstructing it would have produced a different and lesser object.
The release, and the label that could not survive it
Deathlike Silence Productions was run out of the back of a record shop in Oslo that never made money, and its catalogue is short, international and almost entirely made of records people still buy: this album, the first two Burzum records, Enslaved, the Swedish bands Merciless and Abruptum, and a debut by a band from Tokyo. The label released this album nine months after the man who ran it had been killed, and it did not continue for long afterwards. The record has since charted at sixty in Germany and thirty five in Norway, which for an album made in these circumstances by a band that had no functioning line-up when the tape was finished is a strange afterlife.
What it is worth now
Strip the history away entirely, hand the record to somebody who has never heard the story, and it still stands as one of the two or three best things the genre has produced. That is the only test that matters and it is the one the album is almost never given, because the circumstances are so much easier to write about than the drumming. The record that opened the whole northern chapter a year earlier, and which made the production argument this album refines, is A Blaze in the Northern Sky.
Attila Csihar returned to the band in the 2000s and has sung these songs on stage ever since. The wider shelf, with every record that matters and the reasons, is the essential black metal albums, and the long account of how a music made by about thirty people in one small country came to matter at all is where it all began.
