Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites’ new documentary on the 1990s Norwegian Black Metal scene, Until the Light Takes Us is a film I’ve been meaning to write my thoughts on for some time, but its UK launch last Saturday at London’s Rio Cinema has finally prompted me. Ironically, it fell upon the same day as the Kakera event at the ICA, meaning I couldn’t make the screening – I say ironically because both films had their UK premieres at Raindance last October on exactly the same day too. Well, going on subject matter alone I’m not sure if there’s much of a crossover audience, although curiously it was me that introduced both films to Raindance. I’d heard rumours of a number of films on this particular subject for some time, and stumbled upon this particular title, almost completely by accident, when looking for suitable films for the festival around this time last year – I was actually looking for something else, but more on that later…
Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites' documentary Until the Light Takes Us
On a personal level, my interest in the subject stretches back almost to day one, when Tommy Vance played the Mayhem song ‘Necrolust’ on the BBC Radio One’s Friday Rock Show way back in 1987. At the time I was deep into some pretty extreme and obscure music, and this seemed more extreme and obscure than most. The damning review in UK metal mag Kerrang! clinched it, and I ended up sending my international money order for $6 (was it?) to Norway, and not long after, my copy of the Deathcrush EP, one of a limited edition of 1000 pressings, with its infamous shocking pink cover, flopped through the letterbox and onto my doormat. If I’m honest, it was probably a little too raw for me at the time, but it got dragged out every so often over the next few years every time I felt like clearing a party, before my musical tastes moved on and it ended up in a box in the attic along with the rest of my vinyl collection. It remains there to this day, although I think it might well be time to drag it out again very soon….
Mayhem's self-released debut EP, Deathcrush
The next time I heard the name Mayhem was in 1993, in the notorious article in Kerrang!, which all Black Metal fans should remember well. The article, entitled “Has Black Metal Gone too Far?”, detailed the killing of Mayhem guitarist and founder member Oystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous) by rival musician Varg Vikerne (aka Count Grishnackh) of the one-man band Burzum over money and the spate of church burnings in Norway with which the latter was linked. The description of the Deathcrush EP as “now a much sought after rarity” immediately caught my notice, but I was away at university and wasn’t entirely sure where the record was at that time. Unable to capitalise on my investment, I assumed the subject would soon go away, and forgot immediately about it. How wrong I was.
A page from Kerrang!'s notorious 1993 expose
Five years later, I was wandering around Tower Records in Leicester Square when I spied a copy of Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind’s Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, which rekindled my interest in my headbanging past. Now, over the years, this book has attracted a considerable degree of criticism, especially directed at Moynihan (not least on Vikernes’ own website!), but if you haven’t read it, I strongly advise you do – whatever one might say about either Moynihan’s own philosophical, political or religious convictions, or his reading of those of his subjects, this is certainly the most exhaustive take on the genre and its history, and a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking read. Still, one can’t help but get the inevitable feeling that it contained only part of the story.
Book cover of Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind's Lords of Chaos
Rumours of a film adaptation of Lords of Chaos have been circulating for a couple of years now, and it was while Googling for further news on this that I came across Until the Light Takes Us. It came as a particularly bizarre coincidence to discover several months later that the director now attached to the project is none other than Sion Sono, whose Love Exposure I was also desperately trying to get my hands on for Raindance last year. Christ knows what Sono is going to make of the subject in his first English language feature, but the Black Metal contingent have been pretty vocal about it on various discussion boards (check out, for example, this imdb thread). It’s been a bit touch and go as to whether this project is going to happen or not, but as far as I know, it’s going ahead, and there’s already a holding page up for the movie.
Even Until the Light Takes Us is not the first film on the subject however. As far back as 1998 there was a Norwegian documentary directed by Torstein Grude entitled Satan Rides the Media (Satan rir media), which examined the rather histrionic treatment of the murder and the church burning incidents by the national press and how it literally fanned the flames by leading to further copycat arson attempts, as well as how the aforementioned Kerrang! article was largely responsible for the huge surge in popularity that made Black Metal what it is today. More recently Pure Fucking Mayhem (2008) recounted the suicide of vocalist Dead and the murder of Euronymous through the eyes of Mayhem’s surviving members. You’d think there wouldn’t be room for another take on events, but the whole subject is something that’s so hard to get one’s head around in all its Rashomon-like complexity that Ewell and Aites’ film certainly can be said to add something to the discussion, as well as serving as a perfect introduction for those not familiar with the story.
All dressed up and no place to go: Oystein Aarseth a.k.a. Euronymous
The main interviewees here are Fenriz of Dark Throne, one of the original bands associated with the movement, and Vikernes himself, from his prison cell in Trondheim, where he was serving a 21-year service, the maximum possible in Norway, before he was released last March after only serving 16 years. Fenriz’s main beef is the way that a musical movement that revelled in low-fi production values and gloomy obscurantism has now been co-opted by the mass media (one might draw parallels with the Seattle grunge scene, and it’s worth remembering that Kurt Cobain’s suicide more-or-less coincided with Vikernes’ sentencing.) It’s pretty clear here that Fenriz was always more interested in the music than the scene’s extracurricular activities, and bemoans the way that Black Metal has been transformed into something it never was. The footage of Harmony Korine prancing around like a tit in full corpse paint with a lurid yellow wig provides ample evidence of Fenriz’s concerns, and as he wanders around an exhibition by a local artist held in an upmarket gallery adorned with photos of his dead or incarcerated friends, one can sense his quiet rage. Vikernes’ description of Fenriz as a “philosopher” might elicit a few chuckles, but on the evidence of his scenes here and in other interviews you can find of him on youtube, he’s not quite as green as he’s cabbage-looking, coming across a little petulant at time, maybe, but genuinely passionate in what he does and blessed with moments of surprising insight. I actually rather warmed to him. He’s the sort of guy I can imagine it would be pretty fun going for a pint with, and lets face it, his role in establishing the genre, its musical style and its imagery, can’t be denied. Clearly frustrated by the way the scene has turned out, he delivers the one of the film’s most penetrating observations, “I guess people just like dressing up.”
Gylve Nagell, a.k.a Fenriz
Vikernes, too, is incredibly poised and articulate, his clean-cut demeanour at odds with the brutality of his early music and his prior actions. For a moment one almost forgets that he’s a both murderer and a racist. Vikernes has had a long time to nurture his own peculiar ideology, and I can see where he’s coming from, up to a point, but his particular brand of spiritist nationalism – Norse mythology filtered through the spirit of Gary Gygax as much as JRR Tolkein – seems depressingly similar to sentiments I’ve heard espoused by certain right-wing elements in Japan. One can be sympathetic to ideas of a national culture emerging from a particular landscape, and if he’d stuck to firing shotguns at McDonalds rather than advocating the destruction of historically significant cultural artefacts, I’d be more won over to his cause. One doesn’t have to be a Christian to appreciate the beauty of Norway’s wooden stave churches. Worse still is the exclusionist philosophies of right-wingers such as these. Whatever quasi-mystical terms they are couched in, the unadulterated racism of some of the comments he has made in the past are a real turn off. Those who have been following the ideas on his website over the years, or in the interviews he has given since he first emerged into the public eye, will also have noticed the chameleon-like manner in which he is constantly shifting his ideological position, juggling such various ‘isms’ as Satanism, paganism, Odinism and Nazism in an attempt to articulate his own belief system; discrepancies between his private and public thoughts are often attributed by him to misquotation, mistranslation or miscomprehension. I seem to remember some time back him saying that he would never return to the Black Metal genre, something to do with rock music’s Jewish or African roots, but exactly a year after his release, his latest album and first in eleven years, Belus, is out already. Vikernes is clearly an intelligent guy, but I’m not sure his spell inside has actually done him much good. The trouble is, I do actually rather like his music.
Varg Vikernes in Until the Light Takes Us
And then there’s the central enigma of the whole story, the character of Euronymous, absent from proceedings save for a few ghostly photographs and fuzzy VHS recordings from Mayhem’s early years. Aarseth comes across as a thoroughly unsympathetic character in other sources; check out for example this radio interview from 1993. You get a better portrait of the man in the Pure Fucking Mayhem official band documentary, but one really wonders where this character would be today had he not met such an untimely demise.
Euronymous of Mayhem
While providing a really good introduction to the Black Metal scene, there are still a few points that I feel Until the Light Takes Us left underexplored, especially for those unfamiliar with the history of heavy metal music around this time. For example, the dark theatrics and self-consciously fuzzy sound that mark the genre are often described as a reaction to the increasing commercialism of Death Metal, notably the clean production values and more down-to-earth baseball cap and black T-shirt look of bands such as Obituary or Death, but the true nature of this counter movement is hard gauge for those not familiar with the longer history of thrash or speed metal. One can, of course, only fit so much into one film, but to the outsider such specialist musical genres might sound much of a muchness, and for many Black Metal’s adoption of corpse paint might seem more in the tradition of more mainstream cock rockers such as Kiss or Alice Cooper.
'A Blaze in the Northern Sky', Dark Throne's early classic of the genre.
The other thing that I’ve never been entirely clear about is to what extent a Black Metal ‘scene’, as such, actually existed at the time. There were the core agents in the drama that congregated around Aarseth’s shop Helvete, but how significant a crowd was this exactly? One thing that should be remembered is that many of these “bands” hardly ever played live; they were essentially studio acts consisting of a couple of members who bolstered their profiles with gloomy photos and tacky videos of themselves prancing around forests (I love this Youtube clip!) This was the sort of music that was designed to be sold through mail order, with the musicians masquerading behind outrageous pseudonyms and costumes. Burzum, of course, was a solo project, with Vikernes taking charge of vocals, guitars, bass, drums and keyboards. As far as I can work out, Dark Throne too have hardly ever played live. Presumably, then, these guys wouldn’t have met at each others gigs, and I’d imagine the audience for this revolutionary form of music at this time must have been fairly tiny in relation to the snowballing number of bands. In relation to this, clearly whatever the “scene” was in Oslo, where Aarseth was based, was somewhat different to the one in Bergen, where Vikernes was based. So in what form did this Black Metal movement, if it ever was a movement, exist? As an extended network of penpals or a small group of people clustering in bars, parties or holding demonic rituals? I guess such unanswered questions only serve to contribute to its mystique.
Burnt church on the cover of Burzum's EP Aske (Ashes)
These points are in no way criticisms of Until the Light Takes Us, which is a fascinating work that inspires you to want to find out more about the subject, always the hallmark of a good documentary. I’ve already watched it about four times. All of which should explain why Sono’s film of Lords of Chaos is for me, the most exciting proposition of the year. How will an outsider, from a completely different language and culture and with no real interest or love of the music tackle the material? I think this cultural distance is going to be the film’s key strength. As far as I can see, there’s a couple of inroads into the subject dramatically. Firstly, with regards to the church burnings: on a purely abstract level, the premise of a fringe group of socially marginalised young people who band together to declare all out war on what they perceive as a staid and decadent society, abandoning all vestiges of humanism and common sense in favour of half-baked, ill-conceived ideologies as they egg each other on to more extreme acts without anyone stopping and saying “Hey guys, enough’s enough!”, has clear parallels elsewhere – for example, with the radical leftwing revolutionaries that were the subject of Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army, or with lunatic Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda blowing themselves up on public transport, or even the football hooliganism firms of the 1980s. Secondly there’s the converging fates of Count Grishnackh and Euronymous, two characters who failed to distinguish between reality and the image that they created for themselves. Either way, the story has all sorts of intriguing reverberations.
'It' from Abruptum - "too evil for a human name"!
Sadly, none of the films released so far have made any mention of a rather odd-sounding band that immediately sprang out of the pages of Moynihan and Soderlind’s book – “The bizarre duo Abruptum, who allegedly recorded their music during bouts of self-inflicted torture, was praised by Aarseth as “the audial essence of Pure Black Evil”,” led by a dwarf who, apparently “too evil to have a human name”, went by the monicker of ‘It’ – you can get hold of their first CD, Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me, on Amazon if you’re interested. I certainly hope there’s a small part for them in Sono’s film.
To find out if Until The Light Takes Us is playing anywhere near you, you can check out the film’s website or join the Facebook group Bring Until The Light Takes Us to the UK!
Posted at 18:25 on 01 April 2010
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