A studio in Athens, 1993. There is no rhythm guitarist in the room and there is not going to be one, because the two men who started this band four years earlier have decided that an eight string bass will carry the chords instead, and that a saxophone can go on the record if the song wants a saxophone. The album was released that year by a French label. Almost nobody in northern Europe heard it, and thirty three years later almost nobody in northern Europe has corrected that.
Records vanish for reasons that have nothing to do with how good they are, and the reasons repeat so exactly that they can be listed. Once you know the four of them you can predict which albums a canon will drop before you have heard any of them. The shelf that most of these are missing from is the one holding the records to own, and this piece is the argument with it.
- No anecdote. Nothing burned, nobody was arrested, no equipment story. There is nothing for a writer to open a paragraph with, so the paragraph never gets written.
- Wrong country. English language coverage went to Norway in 1993 and has never entirely come back.
- The band stopped. No second album means no second wave of write-ups, no reissue campaign, no anniversary.
- The label folded. A thousand copies pressed by a company that closed in 1997 is a record that effectively did not exist until somebody put it online.
The Greek generation, filed as a footnote
Three bands from one city arrived in the same year with a complete and separate sound, and English language coverage has been treating them as a regional curiosity ever since. Rotting Christ recorded Thy Mighty Contract at Molon Lave Studio in November and December 1992 with Sakis Tolis singing and playing guitar, his brother Themis on drums, Jim Patsouris on bass and George Zacharopoulos on keyboards, and Osmose Productions released it in 1993. Its melodies come out of heavy metal rather than out of hardcore, and its tempos sit where a mid paced doom record would sit, which is why it sounded wrong to anybody who had spent that year learning that this music went fast and had no tunes.
Zacharopoulos had his own band. Necromantia, formed in Athens in 1989, removed the rhythm guitar entirely and gave its job to an eight string bass, then used flute and saxophone where the arrangement called for them, and Osmose released Crossing the Fiery Path in 1993. Varathron completed the trio. Nothing about any of it was derivative of Norway, because none of it could have been: the records were being written while the Norwegians were still working out what their own second albums would sound like.
Small labels sign in clusters. The album next to the famous one is very often better, and it is always cheaper.
The Norwegian records that are not on the Norwegian list
Arcturus spent from December 1996 to May 1997 at Jester Studio and Misanthropy released La Masquerade Infernale on 27 October 1997, eight tracks across forty five minutes, with Kristoffer Rygg abandoning the shriek for a low clean voice, string players brought in, and one song built on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Chronicles of Chaos gave it full marks on release. It is left off the national lists because it is not really a black metal album any more, which is exactly the sort of reasoning that produces a canon of eight records that all sound the same.
Thorns had existed since 1989 in Trondheim, and the demos that circulated in 1991 fed straight into the writing of the famous albums. Snorre Ruch went to prison in 1994 as an accomplice in the killing of Euronymous, and the band's only full length did not appear until Moonfog released Thorns on 26 February 2001, recorded across 1998 to 2000 with Satyr Wongraven co-producing and singing on part of it and Aldrahn of Dodheimsgard on the rest. Its coldness is mechanical rather than atmospheric, and there is still very little else like it.
The French wing, and everything after 2000
A collective of French bands calling itself Les Legions Noires was recording on domestic equipment while the Norwegian scene was on the front pages, and its first full length album was Mutiilation's Vampires of Black Imperial Blood, released in 1995 by Drakkar Productions in a pressing of a thousand copies. The reviews then and since are split down the middle between people who find it unlistenable and people who regard it as the origin of the depressive strand of the style. Both readings are defensible and neither has produced a place for it on any mainstream list.
Blut aus Nord have the strangest omission record of any band still working. The dissonant albums get written about; the melodic ones do not, and Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age from 1996 is a better record than most of what came out of Norway that year. In America, Krallice released Years Past Matter themselves on 25 August 2012 as a limited compact disc, with Gilead Media pressing the vinyl the following March, and Pitchfork called it the band's most unforgiving album. It remains almost entirely absent from general lists of the genre, which tend to stop counting somewhere around 2007.
The reissue decides the reputation
There is a fifth reason hiding inside the other four, and it is the one that does the most damage: a record's standing is set by when the rest of the world could actually buy it, not by when it was made. Master's Hammer recorded Ritual at Studio C over five days in December 1990 and Monitor released it in Czechoslovakia in February 1991. Osmose did not put it out internationally until 1994, by which point every idea on it had been credited to somebody else, and Fenriz of Darkthrone was left describing it as the first Norwegian black metal album despite the band being Czech.
The same mechanism works in reverse and can rescue a record. Sigh's Scorn Defeat, made in Tokyo in March 1993 and released in December that year by a label in Oslo that closed shortly afterwards, has since been reissued four separate times, in 1994, 2000, 2009 and 2011, each edition carrying more of the band's early material than the last. That is why it is discussed today and why the Greek albums of the same year are not: somebody kept putting it back in the shops. Availability is not a measure of quality and it has been doing the work of one for thirty years.
How to find the rest of them
The method is unglamorous and it works. Take any record you already trust, find the label that released it, and read that label's catalogue from the beginning: small labels sign in clusters, and the album next to the famous one is often better and always cheaper. Then take the musicians off the sleeve and follow every side project, because in this genre the side project is frequently where the person put the material nobody would let them use.
Do that for a month and the received canon stops looking like a canon and starts looking like a sample, taken in one country, in one three year window, by writers who mostly did not speak the languages involved. The long account of how that window came to dominate everything is the main article. The one part of the style that has never suffered this problem, because it arrived after the internet did and got heard everywhere at once, is covered in the Best Atmospheric Black Metal Albums.
