At a quarter to six on the morning of 6 June 1992 the fire service in Bergen was called out to Fantoft, where a stave church that had stood on that hill since 1883 was already past saving. The timber was tarred pine. It burned down to a frame in under an hour. Nobody was hurt, nobody has ever been convicted of setting it alight, and a photograph of the ruin was on a record sleeve within nine months.
Between that morning and 1996 the Norwegian police counted more than fifty attacks on Christian buildings, and in every case that was solved the person responsible had come out of one small music scene. Two men were killed inside the same four years. The trials that followed sent five musicians to prison for terms running from sixteen months to twenty one years, and put a music that had been selling in the low hundreds onto the front page of every newspaper in the country.
This chapter is the court file and what came after it. The shop, the rehearsal rooms, the demo tapes and the sound belong to the previous chapter on Norwegian black metal. What follows is the dated record of what burned, of who was convicted of what, and of the thing that gets written about least of all, which is the bill the coverage handed to bands who were nowhere near any of it.
What burned, and when
Fantoft was not the first. On 23 May 1992 someone tried to set fire to Storetveit Church in Bergen and failed, and that attempt was later charged and proved in court. Fantoft went up two weeks after it. Then the fires left Bergen: Revheim in Stavanger on 1 August, Holmenkollen Chapel above Oslo on 23 August, Ormøya on 1 September, Skjold in Vindafjord on 13 September, Hauketo on 3 October, the old church at Åsane on Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Day 1992 the Methodist church in Sarpsborg burned and a smoke diver died fighting it. Nobody from the scene was ever convicted of that fire. It is the only Norwegian church fire in modern times with a death in it, and it is the fact most often missing from the retellings, which prefer the stave church and the photograph.
| Date | Building | Place | Court outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 May 1992 | Storetveit Church | Bergen | Attempted arson; Vikernes convicted, 1994 |
| 6 June 1992 | Fantoft stave church | Bergen | Vikernes charged; jury returned not guilty |
| 1 August 1992 | Revheim Church | Stavanger | No conviction |
| 23 August 1992 | Holmenkollen Chapel | Oslo | Vikernes and Eithun convicted |
| 1 September 1992 | Ormøya Church | Oslo | No conviction |
| 13 September 1992 | Skjold Church | Vindafjord | Vikernes and Haugen convicted |
| 3 October 1992 | Hauketo Church | Oslo | No conviction |
| 24 December 1992 | Åsane old church | Bergen | Vikernes and Tunsberg convicted |
| 25 December 1992 | Methodist church | Sarpsborg | No conviction; a firefighter died |
The fires did not stop with the arrests either. Buildings were attacked through 1994 and 1995 at Sund, Snertingdal, Drøbak, Vestby, Sandefjord and Rennebu, with failed attempts on the stave church at Gol and on Åmodt chapel. Most of those later fires were set by people with no band, no label and no part in any of this, teenagers who had read the newspapers and wanted the same picture taken of them. By then the coverage was doing a share of the work.
The two killings
On 21 August 1992, in the park below the ski jumps at Lillehammer, Bård Eithun killed Magne Andreassen, a gay man who had spoken to him there. Eithun was eighteen. He stabbed Andreassen thirty seven times and kicked him in the head, and he was not arrested at the time. He confessed a year later, after police picked him up in the investigation that followed the second killing. In early 1994 he was sentenced to fourteen years for murder. He served nine years and four months at Ullersmo prison and was released in 2003.
Two days after Lillehammer, Holmenkollen Chapel burned, and Eithun was convicted of that fire as well.
The second killing was on 10 August 1993. Varg Vikernes, twenty years old and the whole of Burzum by himself, drove from Bergen to Oslo with Snorre Ruch and went up to Øystein Aarseth's flat in Tøyengata. Aarseth was twenty five. He ran the shop, he ran the label and he played guitar in Mayhem. He was stabbed twenty three times: two wounds to the head, five to the neck, sixteen to the back. Vikernes told the court he had gone to Oslo to talk, that Aarseth had come at him first and that many of the wounds were cuts taken from broken glass on the stairs. The court did not accept it.
The two of them were on the same records. Vikernes had played bass on the Mayhem album that was still waiting to be mixed; Aarseth's label had released both Burzum records. Accounts of what stood between them differ according to who is telling it, and money, contracts and control appear in all of them. The plain shape is a label owner killed by a musician on his own roster, nine months before the record they had made together reached the shops.
The interview that made it a police matter
The case did not begin with a body. It began with a newspaper.
On 20 January 1993 Bergens Tidende ran a piece headlined "Vi tente på kirkene", we set fire to the churches, built on a meeting the journalist Finn Bjørn Tønder had arranged with an anonymous young man who claimed to speak for a network of satanists and who was photographed with his face hidden and knives on the table. The paper printed it. The police read it. Vikernes was arrested within days, held, and released again for want of evidence, and the shop in Schweigaards gate 56, open since the early summer of 1991, closed for good as the attention arrived.
What the interview did, and this is the part that matters to the music rather than to the courts, was to hand the story its shape before a single piece of evidence had been tested: an organisation, an inner circle, a leader with a plan. It was a better story than the truth and it travelled a great deal further. No court ever established that such an organisation existed.
Two months after the interview came the object that welded the music to the crime for good. Aske, three tracks and twenty minutes recorded at the Grieg Hall in Bergen in April and August 1992 and released by Deathlike Silence Productions in March 1993, carries a photograph of the Fantoft ruin on its cover. Tomas Haugen of Emperor played bass on two of its tracks and was later convicted of one of the fires. Whatever else it is, it is the most self incriminating record the genre has produced, and it went out with a souvenir attached.
What the courts found
Vikernes went on trial in Oslo on 2 May 1994. On 16 May he was sentenced to twenty one years, the maximum term in Norwegian law at the time, for the murder of Aarseth, for the arson of Holmenkollen Chapel, Skjold Church and the old church at Åsane, for the attempted arson of Storetveit, and for storing 150 kilograms of explosives and three thousand rounds of ammunition. The jury acquitted him of Fantoft. He served just under fifteen years and was released on probation in 2009.
The rest of the file is shorter than the legend built on it. Snorre Ruch, who had travelled to Oslo with him, was given eight years as an accomplice. Tomas Haugen, who records as Samoth, was convicted of the Skjold fire and given sixteen months. Jørn Inge Tunsberg, of the Bergen band Hades, was convicted of the fire at Åsane and served two years. Terje Schei, Emperor's bass player, went to prison for two years for burglary, a knife assault and grave desecration, none of which had anything to do with any church.
Set against what the newspapers had been printing, the file is thin. There was no proven organisation and no membership. There were friendships, a shop, a mail order list and a set of separate acts committed by people who were between seventeen and twenty two years old when they committed them. The word that did the most damage, first in Norwegian and then in every translation of it, was "circle". The police never found one.
The word that did the most damage, first in Norwegian and then in every translation of it, was "circle". The police never found one.
The press, at home and abroad
The Norwegian coverage ran hot for three years and handled the whole business as a satanic panic with a soundtrack, which is how the country's papers had been handling heavy metal since the middle of the eighties and how they would handle it again. The English language version arrived on 27 March 1993, when Kerrang! gave its cover to Jason Arnopp's "Arson... Death... Satanic Ritual... The Ugly Truth About Black Metal". That one issue moved more Norwegian black metal outside Norway than any record had managed in the three years before it, and that is a sentence worth sitting with for a moment.
The book came later. Lords of Chaos, by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, published by Feral House in 1998, became the standard English account by default, because in English there was nothing else. It has been argued over ever since, in Norway harder than anywhere, and a good deal of what an English speaking reader believes about this scene reaches them from that one book by way of a hundred articles that never checked it.
A genre gets its public face once. This one got hers in a courtroom corridor, in a photograph nobody in any band had chosen, and thirty years of records have been read backwards through it since.
Eirik Solvang, KaosMetal
That is the mechanism, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is still running. A music with perhaps a dozen records worth arguing about acquired a public image assembled out of court photographs, corpse paint and one burnt roof beam, and every record made afterwards had to be heard through it. Bands who leaned into the image sold more. Bands who refused it were assumed to be hiding something.
What it cost the bands who were not there
Here is the ledger nobody keeps.
The first bill landed on Emperor. The quartet from Notodden had recorded a first album at the Grieg Hall in July 1993, and by the time it needed mixing three of its four members were in custody or serving sentences, which left Ihsahn to finish it with Samoth beside him and Faust sending his notes in by letter. In the Nightside Eclipse came out on Candlelight on 21 February 1994, keyboards laid over blast beats like frost settling on ploughed ground, into a country where the band could not play it. Emperor released nothing else for three years. Two of the four never returned to the band at all.
The second bill was a label. Deathlike Silence Productions, run out of the back of the Oslo shop, had reached nine catalogue numbers and a roster that ran from Sweden to Japan: Merciless, Abruptum, Sigh, Mayhem, Burzum and Enslaved. It died with its owner in August 1993. Monumentum's album, already announced, never appeared at all. Bands who thought they had signed to a label discovered they had signed to one man in a back room, and that he was gone.
The third bill was paid slowly and by everybody. From 1994 onward a Norwegian band could not get an interview in which the first three questions were about anything else. Ulver, Enslaved, Immortal, Satyricon and a dozen more spent the decade answering for acts they had no part in, and their answers were printed as though they were admissions. Some hardened and played up to it, because it sold records. Others went quiet, or left the genre outright, which is one of several reasons the second half of the nineties in Norway sounds so unlike the first.
From 1994 onward a Norwegian band could not get an interview in which the first three questions were about anything else.
The fourth bill is still being paid. A music defined in public by transgression and by nothing else drew in people who wanted the transgression and had no use for the music, and the openly political fringe that fastened itself to black metal in the middle of the nineties has never entirely come off again. That has its own article and its own set of names. It belongs here only as a line on the invoice.
The records that got made anyway
The temptation, thirty years on, is to let the court file stand in for the music, and it is the worst habit in the writing on this subject. The four years the trials cover are the four years that produced the records which put this music into any serious account of the history of black metal. They were made by people who were being arrested, questioned and sentenced while they made them, and not one of them sounds like reportage.
The two men from Kolbotn recorded Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger on a four track machine in a bedroom in November and December 1993, and Peaceville released it on 17 February 1994: eight tracks, one tempo held without mercy from end to end, a guitar tone thin as rime on a window and about as warm, and no interest whatever in being liked. It is also the clearest case of what press pressure did to judgement. A line in Norwegian on the back cover was refused by the distributor, and the band answered the objection with a statement so ugly that Peaceville printed its own rebuttal beside it. Darkthrone apologised, explained the wording, and put "Darkthrone is certainly not a Nazi band nor a political band" on the following album. Fenriz has since called the episode disgusting and has never tried to soften it. The record survived. The statement follows it around.
Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, recorded across 1992 and 1993 and released by Deathlike Silence in May 1994, is the strangest object in the whole story. It is a cathedral acoustic with nothing left standing inside it, guitars recorded so cold they seem to be coming from another building, and a record whose guitar player was murdered before it appeared, whose bass player was convicted of murdering him, and several of whose lyrics were written by a singer who had died in 1991. Aarseth's family asked for the bass parts to be taken off. The drummer has said he kept them, on the grounds that the record ought to carry both men. Whether he did is still argued over by people who have listened very closely indeed.
And Vikingligr veldi, five tracks and none of them short, recorded by teenagers from Haugesund in the same Bergen room as half the rest of it and released in 1994 as Anti-Mosh 008, is the record that shows the exit. It trades the courtroom for Norse metre and weather and never looks back at it, and the band that made it is still working more than thirty years later, which is not an outcome anybody would have forecast from the newspapers of 1994.
Four years, more than fifty fires, two men dead, five convictions, and a dozen records that outlived every word printed about them. That is the honest proportion and it is the one worth keeping. What was happening at the same moment on the far side of the mountains and across the Gulf of Bothnia had very little to do with any of it, and that is the subject of the Swedish and Finnish chapter.
