On 26 November 1990, in a cellar club called the Eiskeller in Leipzig, a Swedish singer went through nine songs with a Norwegian band in front of a small East German audience. Somebody recorded it. Three years later it came out as Live in Leipzig on Obscure Plasma, and it remains the only official live document of that line-up of Mayhem: Euronymous on guitar, Necrobutcher on bass, Hellhammer on drums, and a vocalist billed under the stage name Dead.
His name was Per Yngve Ohlin. He was born on 16 January 1969 at Västerhaninge, south of Stockholm, sang for the Stockholm band Morbid on the 1987 demo "December Moon", moved to Norway and joined Mayhem at the start of 1988. He died by suicide on 8 April 1991 in the house the band rented at Kråkstad. He was twenty two. Those are the facts of the life, and they take four lines. Almost everything written about him since concerns what other people did in the days and years afterwards.
Before Norway
Morbid formed in Stockholm at the end of 1986 and he founded it. The line-up that made the demo included Jens Näsström on bass, Ulf Cederlund on guitar and Lars-Göran Petrov on drums, and "December Moon" went to tape at Thunderload Studios on 5 and 6 December 1987. Petrov and Cederlund went from there into Nihilist and then into Entombed, which is to say that the first band this singer built turned into one of the two or three most consequential outfits in Swedish death metal about eighteen months after he walked out of it. He had left for Norway by then, and the Swedes replaced him with the singer he had replaced.
The writer nobody credits
Here is the fact that ought to lead every account of him and never does. De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, recorded at the Grieg Hall in Bergen between late 1992 and early 1993 and released on 24 May 1994, carries eight songs. Seven of them have his lyrics on them: "Funeral Fog", "Freezing Moon", "Pagan Fears", "Life Eternal", "Buried by Time and Dust", and, with Blackthorn, "From the Dark Past" and the title track. Only "Cursed in Eternity" is somebody else's text.
The most argued over record this genre has produced is, on the page, largely his writing, sung by a Hungarian who had never met him, in a Norwegian concert hall, three years after he died. He gets a songwriting line in the credits and no chapter anywhere. That is a strange way to handle the person who supplied the words.
The texts themselves are not what the reputation suggests. There is very little satanism in them and no politics at all. What is in them is cold, distance, sleep, the dead as a condition rather than as a threat, and a persistent sense of a place the writer would rather be than here. "Freezing Moon" is a piece of landscape writing with a dead narrator in it. Read cold on the page, with the band and the court reports out of the way, they are the work of a young man writing about not wanting to be alive, and the genre took them as scenery.
What he actually did with a voice
Death metal in 1990 wanted the voice low. The whole point of the growl was mass, a sound dredged from under a floor, and every band on that circuit was chasing it. What arrives on the Leipzig tape goes the other way: a thin, high, torn register with the strain left audible in it, closer to a shout that has gone wrong than to any kind of roar. Within four years half of Scandinavia was doing a version of it, and the tremolo guitar and the frost got all the credit for the sound of the second wave while the actual vocal template sat there unremarked.
The look was his too, and it was not stage make-up in the sense the phrase usually carries. Corpse paint before him existed as theatre. He used it to look like a corpse, which is a different job. He buried clothes and dug them up before shows so that they would smell of the ground. He kept dead birds in a bag and breathed from it before going on. He cut himself on stage. The people around him treated all of this as an image and traded on it, and the image went on being traded long after there was nobody left to ask what it had been for.
8 April 1991
He died at the house in Kråkstad on 8 April 1991, at twenty two, and he left a note. There is nothing further about the death that belongs in a magazine, and the amount that has been printed about it is one of the clearest measures of what this subject does to people who write about it.
What happened next is a matter of record and does belong here. The bandmate who found him went out, bought a disposable camera, came back and photographed the scene before the police were called. In 1995 that photograph was used, without permission from anybody entitled to give it, as the sleeve of an unauthorised live release. It has been in circulation ever since. The recording underneath it was eventually issued properly in 2017 with different artwork, which is the only decent thing that has happened to it.
Every reproduction of that photograph is a decision taken by somebody who did not know him, about a person who cannot be asked.
What the scene did with a death
The band did not survive the response to it intact. Necrobutcher left within months and has said since that the way the death was handled was why. That is the reaction of the person who had known him longest, and it is worth more than any of the statements that have been quoted a thousand times in its place.
The wider point is about the scene rather than about any individual in it. A group of people between eighteen and twenty five, who had built a public identity out of being beyond ordinary feeling, were handed a real death and responded by turning it into an artefact. Four years later it was a record sleeve on sale in shops. That is not evidence of unusual evil. It is evidence of a very young milieu that had talked itself into a pose and then could not find the exit when something actually happened, and the press that arrived afterwards, described in how the Press Covered the Scene, Then and Since, made the pose the story.
What is actually left
The catalogue is small. A demo with Morbid from 1987, one live album from a cellar in Leipzig, a set of rehearsal tapes, and seven sets of lyrics on a studio record he never sang on. Careers have been built on less, and none of it is the reason his name is known.
What he left the genre is more concrete than the legend around him. Two things fix black metal's identity in the public mind: a face painted to look dead, and a high, lacerating vocal register that nobody in metal had used as a default before. Both of those came from one person, and he was not around for any of the arguments about the church burnings, the trials or the money that arrived after him. He was a twenty two year old singer with a small body of work and a large influence, and the sensible thing to do with him is to read the lyrics rather than the story.
Where he sits in the wider account, and what the music did with the register he invented, is set out in the chapter list.
