Call me Ishmael.Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
In 1991 four young men from a commuter town south of Oslo released a death metal album with their own names printed on the back of it. Within a year the same people were playing something else entirely, wearing paint, and calling themselves Fenriz, Nocturno Culto and Zephyrous. Nothing about their circumstances had changed. What changed was a decision about what a musician in this music is allowed to be, and the answer arrived at was: not a person with an address.
The pseudonym is the most visible convention black metal has, more consistent than the logos, more consistent than the tremolo, more consistent even than corpse paint, which plenty of good bands have never bothered with. It is also the convention that is most often misread. A stage name in this genre is a uniform, not a hiding place. Almost every one of them has a real name attached to it in public, and has had for thirty years.
Where the convention came from
It arrives with the first records that carry the word. The three from Newcastle who made Welcome to Hell in 1981 took their aliases out of Anton LaVey's book: Conrad Lant became Cronos, Jeff Dunn became Mantas, Anthony Bray became Abaddon, and Venom presented itself as a set of infernal functions rather than three men with day jobs. Kim Bendix Petersen was already King Diamond in Mercyful Fate by then. In Sweden, Thomas Borje Forsberg had cycled through Ace Shoot and Black Spade before settling on Quorthon, the name under which he made every Bathory record.
Hard rock had been doing this for a decade, but pointed the other way. A stage name in that world was a brand you built up and then travelled on. In black metal it is closer to a monastic name: the ordinary one is set aside at the door, and what walks in is a function with a job to do inside the band's own fiction.
1991, when it stopped being decoration
The Darkthrone of Soulside Journey was a death metal band credited to Gylve Nagell, Ted Skjellum, Ivar Enger and Dag Nilsen. The Darkthrone that emerged the following year was credited to Fenriz, Nocturno Culto and Zephyrous, and the change of names went in with the change of music and the paint, as one decision rather than three. Nagell took his from Fenrir, the wolf that swallows a god at the end of the Norse world. Skjellum took a Latin construction meaning something like the worship of night.
Oslo had already done the same. Oystein Aarseth had been Euronymous since the middle of the eighties, Jorn Stubberud was Necrobutcher, Jan Axel Blomberg took Hellhammer from a Swiss band whose three demos half the scene owned, and the Swedish singer Per Yngve Ohlin was simply Dead. What followed in the next two years reads like a muster roll: Vegard Tveitan as Ihsahn and Tomas Haugen as Samoth in Emperor, Bard Eithun as Faust, Olve Eikemo as Abbath and Harald Naevdal as Demonaz in Immortal, Sigurd Wongraven as Satyr and Kjetil Haraldstad as Frost in Satyricon, Kristian Espedal as Gaahl and Roger Tiegs as Infernus in Gorgoroth. Not one of those bands debated whether to do it. By 1992 it was simply how the thing was done.
| Source | Examples | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Tolkien | Burzum, Count Grishnackh | Burzum is darkness in the Black Speech; Grishnakh is an orc |
| Norse myth | Fenriz, Blashyrkh as a setting | Fenrir, the wolf bound until the end of the world |
| Latin and liturgy | Nocturno Culto, Infernus, Teloch | The church's own vocabulary, turned around |
| Another band | Hellhammer | Taken from the Swiss group of 1982 |
| Flat description | Dead, Frost, Maniac, Necrobutcher | Function stated without ornament |
| Invented | Ihsahn, Gaahl, Quorthon | No stated derivation, which is part of the point |
What the convention is actually for
Four jobs, and they are not the same job. The first is authorship: the name says that what you are hearing was made by a role rather than by a man, so the record is not a diary and cannot be read as one. The second is world building, and it is why the names cluster around one vocabulary per band; Abbath Doom Occulta belongs to the same invented frozen country as the lyrics do, and a real name in that credit list would puncture it. The third is ordinary separation. A man who repairs cars all week and plays this music at the weekend has an obvious reason not to print his surname on a sleeve that says what these sleeves say.
The fourth job only appears after January 1993, and it is the one everybody now assumes came first. Once the years the police got involved put the scene on the front pages, a stage name looked like protection, and a good deal of writing since has treated the whole convention as an attempt to hide. The chronology says otherwise. The names were already in place before there was anything to hide from, and the press had every real name inside eighteen months anyway.
The names were already in place before there was anything to hide from, and the press had every real name inside eighteen months anyway.
A pseudonym in this music is worn, not hidden behind. It goes on at the door of the rehearsal room and comes off on the bus home, and everybody involved has always known both halves of it.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
Outside Norway, the same rule with different sources
The convention travelled with the music and picked up local material everywhere it landed. In Brittany the collective around Brest took it furthest of anyone: William Roussel signing as Meyhna'ch in Mutiilation, Vordb Bathor Ecsed running two projects of his own, the pair behind Vlad Tepes sharing the invented surname Drakksteim, and the whole circle writing sleeves and letters in a private orthography that nobody outside it could read. There the naming was not decoration on the music. It was the membership list.
Finland built its names out of its own grammar and out of demonology, and kept them stable for thirty years across a dozen bands apiece, which is why one Finnish musician can appear on forty releases under a single word. Greece went the other way almost immediately: the man who has fronted Rotting Christ since 1987 uses his own name and always has. In the United States the practice arrived filtered through the tape underground, one word and no explanation. None of these scenes agreed on a source, and all of them agreed on the rule.
What happened to it afterwards
The veil, such as it was, thinned fast. Court reporting from 1993 onward printed birth names as a matter of course, which is how the reading public learned that Count Grishnackh was a twenty year old from Bergen; the details of those cases sit in the Norwegian Church Burnings, in order and with the outcomes attached. Encyclopaedia Metallum has listed both names for every musician in the genre since 2002. There is no secret left in any of it.
One career ran the convention backwards. Kristian Vikernes legally replaced his own first name with Varg in early 1993, and after moving to France changed the whole thing again, so that the legal identity now follows the stage identity rather than sheltering behind it. Nobody else has gone that far, but the direction of travel is general. Fenriz answers to Fenriz in a council chamber. Abbath tours under a name he invented at nineteen.
Modern practice has split into three. Some bands keep the full old apparatus and mean it. Some reduce it to a single initial, which is the current fashion in the Polish and Californian undergrounds and manages to be both anonymous and formal. Some have dropped it entirely: the man who makes Panopticon puts his own name on his records and has never seen a reason not to. And a small number credit nobody at all, which is a different practice with different reasons, and is not a pseudonym in any sense the word will bear.
