A label owner was killed by a musician on his own roster, nine months before the album the two of them had made together reached the shops. Everything written about this case in the thirty years since is commentary on that sentence, and a large part of the commentary was supplied by the man who was convicted of it.
Øystein Aarseth was born on 22 March 1968 in Surnadal. He founded Mayhem in 1984 and was the only member who stayed in it from the first rehearsal to his death, he opened a record shop called Helvete at Schweigaards gate 56 in Oslo in the early summer of 1991, and he ran a small label out of the back of it. Varg Vikernes, born in 1973, was the whole of Burzum by himself and had two records out on that label by the spring of 1993. They were also, at that point, one guitar player and one bass player on the same unfinished Mayhem album. The norwegian church burnings and this killing are usually told as one story. They were separate matters that happened to involve some of the same people.
One shop, one label, nine catalogue numbers
Deathlike Silence Productions began in 1987 under the name Posercorpse Music and never got past nine releases. The catalogue, prefixed Anti-Mosh, ran from Merciless and The Awakening in 1990 through Burzum, Mayhem, Abruptum, Sigh from Japan and Enslaved, and it stopped at Anti-Mosh 009 in 1994. Four countries, nine records, one man doing the accounts on a shop counter. That is the size of the empire that the retellings describe as a network with an inner circle and a leader.
The debut Burzum album went out as Anti-Mosh 002 in 1992, the three track Aske followed as Anti-Mosh 005 in March 1993 with the sleeve described in fantoft and the Photograph That Followed It, and by then the shop was finished. It closed in the early months of 1993, after the newspaper coverage that January brought police attention and parental pressure down on it. The label kept going without premises for another six months.
What was actually in dispute
Three explanations circulate and all three come from the people involved rather than from any court. One is money: royalties owed by the label to Vikernes for the Burzum records. One is control of a scene that had acquired a public profile nobody had planned for. One is a competition in reputation between two men who had spent two years talking to each other about extremity. None of the three was tested at the trial, because a Norwegian homicide court is not asked to settle an invoice.
What is documented is smaller and duller. A label with nine releases and no shop was not in a position to pay anybody quickly. The owner had been questioned by police in January and had lost his premises. Both men had spent the previous two years making public statements they could not withdraw. Beyond that, the motive belongs to the category of things that are repeated because they make a better story, and a magazine that prints them as fact is doing the work the 1993 newspapers did.
10 August 1993
On the night of 10 August 1993 Vikernes travelled from Bergen to Oslo with Snorre Ruch and went to Aarseth's flat in Tøyengata. Aarseth was twenty five. He was found in the stairwell on the first floor of the building with twenty three stab wounds, two of them to the head, five to the neck and sixteen to the back. Vikernes was arrested in Bergen on 19 August.
He said then, and has said since, that he had gone to Oslo to talk, that Aarseth attacked him first and that many of the injuries came from broken glass on the stairs. He asked the court to reduce the charge on that basis. The court did not accept any of it.
Sixteen of the twenty three wounds were in the back. That is the fact the self defence account has to get past, and it has never got past it.
The trial
The trial opened in Oslo on 2 May 1994 and the verdict came on 16 May. Vikernes was sentenced to twenty one years, the maximum available in Norwegian law at the time, for the killing, for the arson of Holmenkollen Chapel, Skjold Church and the old church at Åsane, for the attempted arson of Storetveit and for the theft and storage of 150 kilograms of explosives. He served close to fifteen years and was released on probation on 22 May 2009. Snorre Ruch, who had driven him and was in the building, was convicted as an accomplice, given eight years, and released in 1998 after serving about four.
Two things in that paragraph get lost every time the story is retold. The sentence covers arson and explosives as well as a killing, so the twenty one years are not a measure of the homicide alone. And the accomplice served four years and has spent the three decades since making music without giving interviews about any of it, which is the least dramatic outcome available and therefore the one nobody mentions.
What it cost, and what it did not settle
The album that both men played on was recorded across 1992 and 1993 and released in May 1994 with the guitar of one and the bass of the other on the same tape. Aarseth's family asked for the bass parts to be replaced. The drummer kept them, and has explained his reasoning more than once in the years since. Whether the parts on the released record are the original ones is still argued about by people who have listened very closely, and it is the only argument in this whole business that is genuinely about music.
The label did not survive its owner. Voices of Wonder took Deathlike Silence over, the catalogue closed in 1994 at nine numbers, and the Monumentum album that had been announced as forthcoming did not come out on it. Bands who believed they had signed to a company found out they had signed to a man.
What the case did not settle is the motive, and the reason it did not is that no court was ever asked to. That gap has been filled since by memoir, by a book published in 1998, by two films and by the accounts of one of the two participants, who is the only one in a position to give any. A magazine can report what was established and stop there. The man who died was twenty five, ran a shop, put out nine records and played guitar on one album people still argue about. The man who killed him served fifteen years. Everything between those two sentences is unproved.
One more person belongs in this account and is usually reduced to a prop inside it. The singer whose words are on that album had been dead for two years before either of them got into a car, and he is the subject of dead, and the Photograph That Would Not Go Away.
The music all of this attached itself to takes up a great deal more room than the court file does, and it is set out in the main article.
