I kept my mouth shut and eyes and ears open. They were the experts on the music and the sound. I used my expertise in recording.
Eirik Hundvin, Sound on Sound, February 2024
That is the whole method, given by the man who ran the desk, and it is the opposite of what the myth requires. The myth wants an accident: a set of records ruined into greatness by teenagers who could not afford anything better. What happened in Bergen was a professional engineer in his forties deciding, session after session, that the least comfortable option was the correct one, and then executing it with the equipment of a serious commercial studio.
Grieghallen is a concert hall of about fifteen hundred seats, opened in 1978 and named after the country's national composer, and it houses the Bergen Philharmonic. Grieghallen Lydstudio operated inside it, and Eirik Hundvin, born in 1950 and known to everyone who ever booked him as Pytten, worked there from 1989 until the studio closed in 2013. The story of the shop, the basement and the people who filled these sessions is chapter two. This is about the room.
How a Philharmonic hall ended up recording this
Nothing about it was planned and nobody in the building was making a statement. The studio was let by the hour like any other, it took whatever work came through the door, and the first extreme metal that came through the door was a demo by the Bergen band Old Funeral in 1990, which was Pytten's introduction to the entire form. He was a bass player by training, in bands with names no black metal reader would recognise, and he had spent the eighties recording pop and rock in a city with no metal industry at all.
Then the teenagers arrived, and they kept arriving. Between 1991 and 1994 one engineer in one room cut the debut albums of Immortal, Burzum, Enslaved, Emperor and Gorgoroth, and the first and only Mayhem album of the period, which is a concentration no scene in metal has matched before or since. None of them had money. All of them paid, at the going rate, in a building the state had put up for an orchestra.
The instrument that made the Bergen sound was not a guitar. It was nine storeys of empty air standing over a drum kit.
The chain, which is the actual answer
Ask what the Bergen sound is and the honest answer is a list of decisions, most of them about air. For the Mayhem sessions the drums went up on the main concert stage, inside an enclosure of stage curtains roughly five metres square and six or seven metres high, under a fly tower nine storeys tall. Two Schoeps microphones in figure of eight sat about seventeen centimetres apart above the centre of the kit, a metre or so above the cymbals, and that pair carried the record. The close microphones are there. They are not what you are hearing.
Everything else was small and cheap and hard. Guitars went into a tight little room built for classical radio commentary, a Les Paul through a Marshall stack and a yellow distortion pedal, picked up by one AKG condenser and one B and K. The bass went straight into the desk from the control room, with no cabinet and no air at all. Vocals were done in a curtained corner with whatever dynamic microphone was to hand. Outboard came down to a Lexicon reverb and an Eventide harmoniser, running to tape, with no automation and no recall, which meant every mix decision was made once and lived with.
Put that chain in front of a listener and it explains the whole aesthetic. The guitars have no bottom because they were recorded in a cupboard through a distortion pedal. The bass has no room because it never met one. The drums have enormous space because they are in a concert hall and the take is mostly two overheads. What sounds like a doctrine about coldness is a physical fact about where the microphones were standing.
What Pytten actually did, and what he refused to do
The engineer's own stated concerns were frequency and stamina. He has described balancing the high end of the guitars against the high end of the cymbals, and clearing the low mids so that a wall of similar frequencies would not exhaust a listener inside four minutes, which is a mixing problem no other genre has in that form. He has also said he works without formulas and listens instead, and that his job on these records was to bring out what had been recorded rather than to impose a shape on it.
What he refused to do was tidy anything. The bands arrived with a position about production and he did not argue them out of it; he built the position properly. That distinction is the whole difference between the Bergen albums and the hundreds of records made in imitation of them, where the hiss is real and the room is a plug-in.
The orchestra's own instruments
The building came with more than acoustics. Grieghallen holds the Philharmonic's percussion, and the studio had access to it, so when a session needed something a metal band does not own the answer was to walk down the corridor and borrow it. On 25 July 1994 Enslaved overdubbed timpani onto a track for Frost, a single microphone on a stand in front of the orchestra's drums, run through a compressor a rehearsal room would have thrown out. Nothing in the second wave rulebook covers borrowing an orchestra's kettledrums, which is roughly the point.
The engineer has said Mayhem's drummer looked like a boy in a toy shop the first time he saw that stage and wanted to record on it immediately, and the story is worth keeping because it corrects the tone of everything else written about these sessions. The musicians were not enduring a room. They had been handed the best one in the country, they knew exactly what it was worth, and they spent it on making a record sound as though it had been abandoned somewhere. He has been equally plain about the vocal booth, which he tries to make safe rather than comfortable, on the ground that singing this material is an intensely private act and hardship does not improve it. Hardship was the one thing everybody outside the room assumed was the method.
Eighteen months, six records
| Record | Band | Recorded | Released | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism | Immortal | 1991 | July 1992 | Osmose |
| Burzum | Burzum | January 1992 | March 1992 | Deathlike Silence |
| De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | Mayhem | June 1992 to May 1993 | May 1994 | Deathlike Silence |
| Filosofem | Burzum | March 1993 | January 1996 | Misanthropy |
| Vikingligr Veldi | Enslaved | March to April 1993 | February 1994 | Deathlike Silence |
| In the Nightside Eclipse | Emperor | July 1993 | February 1994 | Candlelight |
| Pure Holocaust | Immortal | 1993 | November 1993 | Osmose |
| Pentagram | Gorgoroth | Early 1994 | September 1994 | Embassy |
Read the middle column and the coordination everyone assumes was there disappears. Three of those records sat in a drawer for between six months and three years before anybody could buy them, and the reason in each case was a label rather than an artistic decision. The sound arrived in shops in a lump, which is why 1994 reads like a plan, and it was made in a queue.
Why it could not be copied
Every element of the Bergen sound has been available in a box since about 1999 and none of the imitations work, which tells you something about what was actually being captured. A signal chain a covers band would have been embarrassed by, feeding a room the Philharmonic tuned to: that is not reproducible by buying the same reverb unit, because the expensive half of it is a nine storey fly tower and the cheap half is an engineer old enough to leave things alone.
The studio closed in 2013 and the hall went back to doing what it was built for. What came out of it in those eighteen months is the reference recording for an entire genre, and it exists because a working professional took a booking from people nobody else in the country would have let through the door, then did the job properly. The record that opened the whole account, made six years earlier in a different room with nothing like this care, is deathcrush.
