On 9 April 2024 the fire service in Oslo was called to a basement in Schweigaards gate and the flats above it were emptied of people. What was burning was a private collection of demo tapes, flyers and hand written trading letters, kept in the same cellar where, thirty three years earlier, four or five teenagers with no money at all had been sleeping on the floor.
The shop above that cellar was open for about eighteen months and it never made any money. It is also the single most consequential retail failure in the history of this music, and the reason is not romantic. A record shop decides what a town can buy. When the town is a country of four million with no other outlet for this music, the person behind the counter is not a shopkeeper but an editor, and for two years one man edited an entire genre out of a room the size of a garage.
What was actually in the room
Helvete opened in the early summer of 1991, some time across May and June, at Schweigaards gate 56, on a street of workshops and cheap commercial space a short walk east of the main railway station in Oslo. The walls were painted black. Medieval weapons hung on them, along with posters and picture discs, and the window carried a polystyrene gravestone. There was a counter, a stock that reflected one man's approvals and refusals, and below it a cellar with almost nothing in it.
The rent was the thing that killed it. Stian Johansen, who worked there and sang briefly in the band that owned it, has said flatly that the rent was too high and that this was why the shop never did well. Almost nobody came in. A record shop in Oslo in 1991 selling Swedish death metal, obscure Japanese tapes and its owner's own releases was not a business, it was an argument with a lease attached, and the lease won inside two years.
I looked upon the scene before me ... upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
A shop that did not want to sell you most things
The counter was not a till. It was a filter. Oystein Aarseth stocked what he approved of and refused what he did not, and since there was no alternative supply, his approvals became the reading list of every teenager in the country who wanted this music. He used the shop to argue that death metal had gone soft, that anything which sounded produced was contemptible, and that the audience arriving through the door were mostly tourists. Those positions were not published in a magazine. They were delivered across a counter, one customer at a time, which is a far more effective method and leaves no record.
What that produced is visible in the records made within a mile of the shop over the following two years, and it is set out in KaosMetal's chapter on the second wave. The mail order side did the rest of the work. A list went out by post, records went back by post, and a shop that took almost nothing over the counter in Oslo was supplying correspondents in Germany, Brazil and Japan.
The label in the back room
Deathlike Silence Productions had been founded in Oslo in 1987 under the name Posercorpse and it ran out of the same address. Its catalogue numbers were ANTI-MOSH, aimed at Earache in Nottingham, whose releases ran MOSH 1 upward, and it reached nine of them before it stopped. Four were by bands that were not Norwegian at all, and one came from Japan by letter, which for a label with no staff, no distribution deal and no premises beyond a back room is a remarkable spread.
| Cat. | Artist | Title | Country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ANTI-MOSH 001 | Merciless | The Awakening | Sweden | 1990 |
| ANTI-MOSH 002 | Burzum | Burzum | Norway | 1992 |
| ANTI-MOSH 003 | Mayhem | Deathcrush | Norway | 1993 |
| ANTI-MOSH 004 | Abruptum | Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me | Sweden | 1993 |
| ANTI-MOSH 005 | Burzum | Aske | Norway | 1993 |
| ANTI-MOSH 006 | Mayhem | De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | Norway | 1994 |
| ANTI-MOSH 007 | Sigh | Scorn Defeat | Japan | 1993 |
| ANTI-MOSH 008 | Enslaved | Vikingligr Veldi | Norway | 1994 |
| ANTI-MOSH 009 | Abruptum | In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo | Sweden | 1994 |
Three of those nine went out after the man who ran the label was dead. The distributor Voices of Wonder took the remains on and the operation was finished by 1994, which means the entire commercial life of the most cited label in this genre ran from 1990 to 1994 and produced nine records.
Eighteen months, and then the newspapers
The cellar is the part that matters and it is the part with the least in it. Varg Vikernes lived down there. So did the guitarist and the drummer of Emperor. There was no rehearsal gear worth the name and no comfort of any kind, and its function was purely social: it made a small number of obsessive people physically unavoidable to one another for a year and a half, at exactly the age when that does the most damage and the most good.
The basement worked like a kiln. Everything put down there came back up changed, and very little of it was ever for sale.
The end came from a newspaper rather than from the bailiffs. On 20 January 1993 a Bergen daily printed an interview with an anonymous young man who claimed to have set fire to churches, the police read it, and the attention that followed made a shop with black walls and a gravestone in the window an impossible address to keep open. Aarseth shut it in the early part of that year. He was killed that August, and the label he ran from the back room outlived him by nine months.
The building since
Neseblod Records opened in the same premises in 2005, with less floor space than Helvete had and a very different proposition: a working shop upstairs and, downstairs, a collection of demos, flyers, cassettes and trading correspondence that functions as a museum of the whole business. It is on the route of a sightseeing bus. It appears in the city's own tourist material. People fly in for it.
Then the fire. The cause has never been established publicly, the smoke took out the flats above, a large part of the collection went, and a fundraiser opened within days and passed twenty thousand pounds. A cellar that produced a music defined in the public mind by arson was itself gutted by a fire nobody set on purpose, in the year of its thirty third anniversary, and the coincidence is worth exactly nothing and is impossible to ignore.
What the shop was for, and what the people who gathered in it actually constituted, is a separate question and a badly answered one. It is dealt with in KaosMetal's article on what Was the Inner Circle.
Readers coming to this cold may want the causes first, in why Did Black Metal Start in Norway, or start from the beginning with the genre as a whole.
