Schweigaards gate 56 in Oslo, an evening in the winter of 1991. The shop on the ground floor has black walls, medieval weapons and picture discs hung on them, and a polystyrene gravestone in the window. Almost nobody comes in. Downstairs is a basement with next to nothing in it and a handful of people in their late teens who between them have no money at all, and the rent on both floors is being covered by a record shop that does not sell and a label that has released almost nothing.
The shop was called Helvete. Its owner was Oystein Aarseth of Mayhem, who signed himself Euronymous, and it stayed open from around May 1991 until early 1993, which is less than two years. In that window a scene of perhaps thirty people produced the records that the rest of the world still means when it says the words. This chapter is about the room and the music. It is not about what those people did outside the room, which has a chapter of its own and does not need borrowing from here.
What makes the story worth telling in musical terms rather than criminal ones is how little there was to work with. No industry, no money, no rehearsal culture, no audience, no venue that would book them twice. Norway in 1991 had a strong death metal underground and a much stronger indifference to it. The second wave of black metal history was made by teenagers on borrowed equipment in a country of four million people, and it went out on labels that could press a thousand copies and hope.
They also had, unlike almost every scene before or since, an argument. The first wave had left them a name, a set of sleeves and no method. What Oslo added between 1991 and 1994 was a doctrine about how the music should be recorded, which is a stranger and more durable contribution than any single riff.
A basement on Schweigaards gate
Helvete was a record shop in the sense that a chapel is a building. Euronymous stocked what he approved of, refused what he did not, and used the counter as a pulpit for a set of positions that hardened month by month: death metal had gone soft, the audience were tourists, anything that sounded produced was contemptible. Deathlike Silence Productions ran out of the same address, and its catalogue is short and international, taking in Mayhem and Burzum at home, Merciless and Abruptum in Sweden and the Japanese band Sigh.
The basement was where people slept. Varg Vikernes of Burzum lived there. So did Tomas Haugen and Bard Eithun of Emperor, who performed as Samoth and Faust. The building did what a scene needs a building to do, which is to make a small number of obsessives physically unavoidable to each other, and it did so for about eighteen months before police and press attention shut it.
Helvete was a record shop in the sense that a chapel is a building.
What the Inner Circle actually was
The phrase belongs to Euronymous and to a British music weekly, in roughly equal shares. He described the people around the shop as an organised cell of militant satanists funded by the counter takings, and a 1993 piece in Kerrang! repeated the description back to a hundred thousand readers with the word terrorists attached. Faust has since said flatly that the name was invented for whoever happened to be hanging around the shop, and that there were no members and no membership cards.
Both accounts are useful and only one of them is true. The mythology mattered because it worked: it made a scene of thirty people legible to an outside world that would otherwise never have looked, and it recruited a generation of teenagers across Europe who bought the records because of the reputation and then discovered the music was worth the trouble. It also killed the shop, ended two lives and put several of these musicians in prison, which is where the crimes chapter picks the story up. What the mythology never did was write a riff.
Kolbotn, 1991, and a band that changed its mind
The most consequential decision of the whole period was taken by four young men from a commuter town south of Oslo who already had a record deal and threw the record away.
Darkthrone were a technical death metal band signed to Peaceville in England, competent, well regarded and heading for a career. In August 1991 they went into Creative Studios in Kolbotn and recorded A Blaze in the Northern Sky, which is not a death metal record at all: the guitars are stripped of low end and pushed into a treble hiss, the drums sit back in the room like something heard through a wall, and Nocturno Culto's vocal is a shriek rather than a growl. Their own bass player opposed the change and played the sessions as a hired hand. Peaceville received the tapes, decided the sound was too weak to release, and only gave way when the band threatened to take it to Deathlike Silence instead. It came out on 26 February 1992.
Every argument about Norwegian black metal production is settled in those two paragraphs. The band did not fail to make a good sounding record. They removed the things that make a record sound good, deliberately, against the objections of their bassist and their label, and the removal is the music. Two years later Fenriz took the principle to its end point and recorded Transilvanian Hunger in his own bedroom on a four track machine over November and December 1993. Poverty had become a production decision.
The concert hall and the man at the desk
Bergen is where the sound was actually built, and the address is the least likely one in this entire history. Grieghallen is a modernist concert hall of fifteen hundred seats designed by the Danish architect Knud Munk, built between 1967 and 1978 and opened on 23 May 1978 as the home of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. It carries the name of the country's national composer. Its recording studio was let by the hour, and between 1992 and 1994 the state's own concert hall took the money of a succession of teenagers who wanted to make the most hostile music in Europe.
The man at the desk was Eirik Hundvin, known as Pytten, a working engineer with no investment in the ideology of the people in front of him and a great deal of patience. He recorded the Burzum debut in January 1992, released that March on Deathlike Silence with Euronymous co-producing and playing guitar on part of it. He recorded Mayhem across sessions that ran from 22 June 1992 into May 1993. He recorded Emperor in July 1993 and Enslaved in March and April of the same year. That is four of the defining records of the decade cut by one engineer in one room inside eighteen months, which is a concentration no scene in metal has matched before or since.
What Pytten did was not to clean anything up. He captured what the bands brought and resisted the instinct to make it comfortable, and the result is a group of records that share a specific quality of air: a lot of room, very little bottom, guitars recorded so thin they stop behaving like instruments and start behaving like weather. He has said of the Emperor album that he has never wished he had done anything differently.
The specifics matter, because the myth says these records were thrown together and they were not. Pytten worked in the building for twenty four years from the late 1980s, first in a studio attached to the stage, then in the basement, then on the third floor until 2013, and he borrowed the orchestra's timpani and percussion when a session called for them. For the Mayhem album the drums went up on the main concert stage inside a curtained enclosure five metres square, with the overheads about a metre above the cymbals; the guitars were cut in a tight little room built for classical radio commentary; the bass went in direct from the control room; the vocals were done in a curtained corner. His stated principle, given to Sound on Sound, is that without a great room you can never make a great recording. The least hospitable music in Europe was cut in the best sounding building in the country, by a man who treated it as a job worth doing properly.
The Bergen records are not badly recorded. They are recorded, with great care, to sound like nobody was there.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
The ages are the part that gets left out of the retellings. Ihsahn of Emperor was seventeen when In the Nightside Eclipse was recorded, and spent much of the session standing next to Pytten learning how a desk works. Emperor had no permanent keyboard player, so the symphonic parts that made the record famous were composed on the spot in Bergen rather than brought in. Ivar Bjornson of Enslaved was fifteen at the sessions for Vikingligr Veldi and had founded the band at thirteen with Grutle Kjellson, who was seventeen. Immortal in the same city put out Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism in July 1992 and Pure Holocaust in November 1993, and made a virtue of a tempo nobody else could hold.
The roster is wider than the four names that get repeated. Snorre Ruch, recording as Thorns in Trondheim, made two demos, Grymyrk in 1991 and Trondertun the year after, that never reached a shop and settled the guitar style anyway; Fenriz has credited them, alongside Euronymous, with fixing how a Norwegian riff of this kind is built. Satyricon cut Dark Medieval Times at Nesodden Musikkverksted in August and September 1993 and put it out on 25 October on Moonfog, a label the band ran themselves, which is the first sign of the scene arranging its own affairs rather than waiting for the counter at Helvete. Gorgoroth and Ulver were both rehearsing by 1993 and released their debuts in the two years after this chapter closes.
The records, 1987 to 1994
| Record | Band | Recorded | Where | Released | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deathcrush | Mayhem | February to March 1987 | Creative Studios, Kolbotn | August 1987 | Posercorpse |
| A Blaze in the Northern Sky | Darkthrone | August 1991 | Creative Studios, Kolbotn | 26 February 1992 | Peaceville |
| Burzum | Burzum | January 1992 | Grieghallen, Bergen | March 1992 | Deathlike Silence |
| De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas | Mayhem | June 1992 to May 1993 | Grieghallen, Bergen | 24 May 1994 | Deathlike Silence |
| Vikingligr Veldi | Enslaved | March and April 1993 | Grieghallen, Bergen | 22 February 1994 | Deathlike Silence |
| In the Nightside Eclipse | Emperor | July 1993 | Grieghallen, Bergen | 21 February 1994 | Candlelight |
| Transilvanian Hunger | Darkthrone | November and December 1993 | Necrohell, a bedroom | 17 February 1994 | Peaceville |
Four of those seven went to shops inside four weeks of each other in February 1994, which is why the year reads in hindsight like a coordinated release schedule. It was nothing of the kind. Three separate labels in two countries happened to clear their backlogs at once, and one of the three was being run out of a dead man's estate.
The reach was postal and personal. Deathcrush went out in 1987 with no distribution worth the name and still made the top twenty of a Kerrang! chart, moving hand to hand through tape traders and small ads. Five years on the mechanism had barely changed: a Norwegian record arrived in Germany or Brazil because somebody wrote a letter, put notes in the envelope and waited a month. Sigh ended up on a Norwegian label by writing to it from Japan, and Attila Csihar came to Mayhem out of Hungary through the same network of correspondence. The whole thing could be run from behind one shop counter, and for two years it was.
What was actually new
Strip away the paint and the arson and there is a real set of musical decisions here, and they are worth stating without either reverence or sneering.
- The riff moved to the top of the guitar. Tremolo picked lines held for whole bars, played high, with the low end deliberately absent. A thrash riff is a rhythm you can feel in the chest. These are shapes you hear in the ears only.
- The blast beat stopped being an event. In death metal it was a climax. Here it runs underneath entire songs as a texture, which is a completely different musical function for the same technique.
- Production became a position. Reverb, treble, distance and hiss used on purpose, argued about in interviews, defended against labels. Nobody had ever made poor fidelity into an aesthetic programme with this much conviction.
- Melody came back. This is the part the parody always misses. Under the noise these records are full of tunes, and the debt is to Quorthon and to Norwegian folk music rather than to anything American.
- Length and repetition. Songs of eight and nine minutes built on two ideas, structured to induce a state rather than to reward attention. The trance is the point.
The verdict has to be uneven, because the records are. In the Nightside Eclipse is the most complete piece of composition the scene produced and the one that founded an entire symphonic industry, most of it worse. Transilvanian Hunger is the purest and the least generous. Vikingligr Veldi is the one nobody talks about and the one that has aged best, because Enslaved were already writing something the genre had no name for. And a good deal of what came out of Norway in those years is thin, badly played and coasting on the reputation of the ones that were not.
Poverty had become a production decision.
Two deaths and a record that came out anyway
Mayhem's first album took seven years to arrive and half the people who made it did not see it. Per Yngve Ohlin, the Swedish singer who performed as Dead and wrote most of the lyrics, died on 8 April 1991. Euronymous was killed on 10 August 1993 by Varg Vikernes, who had played the uncredited bass on the sessions. Attila Csihar, brought in from the Hungarian band Tormentor to sing it, has said the vocals were done in three days. Hellhammer, the drummer, refused a request from Euronymous's family to remove the bass, on the grounds that it was fitting for the two men to be on the same record.
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas came out on 24 May 1994 on the label of a man who had been dead for nine months, and it is the best record anyone in this chapter made. That is an awkward sentence to write and there is no honest way around it. The performances are extraordinary, Csihar's voice is a genuinely alien instrument, and "Freezing Moon" and "Life Eternal" are the only songs from the period that sound like ritual rather than like young men agreeing to sound like ritual.
By the end of 1994 the scene as a working community was finished. Helvete had been closed for eighteen months, its label was being wound up, Emperor's drummer and guitarist were facing prison, and the surviving bands were signing to German and English companies who would put real budgets behind them. What followed is a different story with different money in it, and most of the men in this chapter spent the next thirty years being asked about four of those years. Grieghallen went back to recording the Bergen Philharmonic. Neseblod Records stands at Schweigaards gate 56 today, selling records to tourists in the same room, which is either an insult or the only sane ending available.
