"It really demanded something from us editors, full devotion in overcoming every manner of obstacle to get our publications printed." That is Jon Kristiansen, who has run the fanzine Slayer since 1985, talking to Bardo Methodology in August 2020, and the sentence is worth arguing with because it undersells the case. The obstacles were not incidental to what a zine was. They were the whole of it, and everything the black metal press achieved follows from the fact that producing a single issue took months of unpaid work with the wrong equipment.
A zine was a typewriter, a pair of scissors, a glue stick and access to a photocopier that somebody was not supposed to be using. Interviews arrived by post, weeks after they were sent, on paper, answered by hand. Pages were assembled physically, columns cut and pasted until they fitted, images reduced on the copier until they turned to grain. The result was collated, stapled and posted out one envelope at a time to an address list built the same way the tapes were, which is the network described in the culture chapter.
What the format made possible
Two properties of that method decided everything the black metal press became, and neither was intended. The first is that a zine had no advertisers worth losing, so there was no commercial reason to be polite about a record and every reason to be entertaining about it. The second is that the interviewer and the interviewee were usually the same kind of person, corresponding as equals about a scene of a few hundred people, so the questions were not the questions a journalist asks a subject. They were the questions somebody asks a friend who has just done something inexplicable.
That is why the surviving issues read as they do. The interviews are unguarded to a degree that no professional publication has ever obtained from these bands, because the people answering did not understand themselves to be talking to the press. They were talking to another person in the underground who would print it more or less as it arrived.
Slayer, and the accident of being in the right room
The Norwegian who started a photocopied magazine in 1985 out of a town most of his readers could not have found on a map ended up holding the primary document for a decade of European extreme metal. Kristiansen, who signs himself Metalion, produced Slayer from Sarpsborg from the mid eighties onward, founded the label Head Not Found in 1992 out of the same operation, and the tenth issue, published in 1994, ran past seventy five pages on thick paper behind a red cover.
What is in that issue is why historians of the period still buy it. Interviews with Bathory, with Dissection immediately after The Somberlain, with Opeth very early, with Nifelheim, with Sadistik Exekution, and one with Thorns conducted while the subject was in prison. The Norwegian scene is documented across it as it was happening rather than as it was later explained, and the difference between those two things is the reason nearly every book about the period leans on it.
We lived so much for the music and broke all kinds of barriers.
Jon Kristiansen, Bardo Methodology, August 2020
The rest of the press
Slayer was the most consequential of them and it was never alone. Mikko Mattila started Isten in Tampere in 1984, a year before Kristiansen began, and it built its reputation on being difficult to please rather than on access, so that a favourable notice in it was understood across Finland as a verdict rather than as coverage. Mattila has described the zine's own character as murkiness and a lingering quality, and the anthology Svart Records assembled from it as a treasure chest, a time machine and an open grave. That anthology, Don't Break the Ghost, runs to eight hundred pages and came out on 12 December 2014, thirty years after the first issue.
Around those two ran dozens of smaller titles across Norway, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Britain and the Americas, most of them lasting three or four issues before the editor ran out of money or interest. Their combined effect was a functioning international press with no offices, no salaries and no legal department, which is why it printed things that a magazine with any of those three would not have printed.
An international press with no offices, no salaries and no legal department, which is exactly why it printed what it printed.
The demo pages, which were the actual service
The interviews are what get reprinted and the demo section is what the readers bought it for. Every issue carried a column of reviews of cassettes that existed in a few hundred copies, each notice followed by the band's postal address, which converted a paragraph of opinion directly into a transaction: read the review, decide, write the letter, enclose the stamps, wait six weeks. No other medium available at the time performed that function. Radio could not, the record shops could not, and the paid magazines would not review a release that had no distributor behind it.
That is the practical reason the zines mattered more here than in genres with a functioning industry. A demo review in a photocopied magazine was the only mechanism by which a band in one country could be heard in another, and the editors knew it, which is why the demo pages were often the longest section and the most carefully written part of the issue. The same pages carried the advertisements for the mail order operations that grew into labels, so a single sheet of paper could hold a review, an address to write to and a way to buy the thing.
The zine as police force
The part usually left out of the tribute is that the black metal press did not only report on the scene, it disciplined it. A movement that defines itself by exclusion has to publish the exclusions somewhere, and the zines were where a band found out in print that it had done the wrong thing: signed to the wrong label, worn the wrong clothes, said something conciliatory in another interview, made a record that was too clean. The feuds ran in full and at length, with both parties given room to make things worse.
That function is the reason the code hardened as fast as it did. Compare the speed with which black metal fixed its rules against thrash or death metal, neither of which had a press that small, that opinionated or that widely read inside its own scene. The zines were not a mirror held up to the underground. They were one of the instruments that built it, and a band that ignored them found the audience had read the verdict first.
What went when they went
The format did not decline gradually, it was replaced. Once a band could be reached by email and a review could be published the same afternoon, the economics of spending three months assembling seventy five pages by hand disappeared, and the writers who had done it either went professional, went into label work, or stopped. Terrorizer and the other paid magazines took over the reviewing, did it faster and more evenly, and lost the one thing the photocopied press had, which was that nobody involved was being paid to be reasonable.
What the reissues and anthologies preserve is therefore not nostalgia but evidence. These are the only contemporaneous records of what the people involved thought they were doing, made before the arrests, the books and the documentaries taught everybody the official version, and they contradict that version regularly. The other thing the underground built once it had somewhere to gather in person, rather than by post, is the Biggest Black Metal Festivals.
