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Black Metal Experiences and Stories


Requiem

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For me, black metal is so much more than just a music genre. It's many things, but it's also a very interesting potential for narrative. 

I've heard some awesome stories over the years of people meeting bands in interesting contexts, gig stories etc. I just posted the following in a different thread but thought it might be a good way to kickstart a conversation about the times you saw a great gig, event, experience. 

Back in 2008 I walked the streets of Bergen, Norway, blasting Taake and Burzum. This album takes me back there (Taake - 'Bjoergvin').

Actually, it's such a small town that I struggled to find an open pub or alcohol store when I arrived in the evening. I ended up buying a six-pack across the bar in the hotel I was staying in. I got nicely wasted when I combined that with a few pints, but for a while there it looked a bit grim. 

I had a buddy living in Oslo, so I left the wife and flew from London to stay with him for a long weekend, and while I was in Norway I did a sort of tour across to the west coast and Bergen. I went by train and bus through the amazing mountains and forests, and boat in the fjords, all with Satyricon, Emperor and Taake in my headphones. I remember standing on the deck of the boat, staring up at the huge mountains on the side of the Sognefjord, listening to Windir and just having the most spiritual experience. 

#truenorwegianblackmetalstories

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The idea of black packing, as they call it, never really appealed to me. I´ve been visiting Norway since the late 80´s when i still was a little kid (vacations with the family). I still remember the papers in the stores when the whole shit storm broke loose in the Norwegian scene but it was only about 9 or 10 at the time so i didn´t pay much attention it it. Although i remember wondering why so many Norwegian papers had burning churches on the front page ?. Kind of ironic since many years later most of my life revolves around this particular genre.

Norway´s appeal for me has always been the tranquility and the beautiful nature. There is no greater place on earth for me. Taking the boat out onto sea to for fishing or hiking through those majestic ancient forests. It just feels like home away from home after all these years. I´ve been to numerous places in Norway throughout the years but never once did i think about visiting certain black metal related places or hoping to meet certain indivuals. Fact is Norway doesn´t give a crap about black metal and most people in the scene themselves like their privacy. It always felt kind of exploitative to me to go visit Euronymous grave or to go to Bergen to Elm Street in hopes of seeing Fenriz. 

I remember 5 years ago we rented a cabin which was only 18 kilometers of Gaahl´s home (Espedal), but it would have never crossed my mind to go there. I also went to Sognadal where Windir hails from, but to be honest it was one of the most boring and ugliest Norwegian cities i´ve seen so far. But after having said all this i have to be honest... Being a black metal nerd nothing beats the feeling of sitting on the rocky shoreline of a fjord while blasting Darkthrone on your mp3 player knowing this is the place that gave birth to the greatest metal genre in existence (at least for me) ?

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@Benjaminc81 Well, I didn't visit Euronymous's grave or the site of the Helvete store or anything like that either.

It wasn't about that for me, and it actually never occurred to me at the time, although I probably would go to those places if I ever went to Norway again. At the time it was more for me the experience of being inspired by the landscapes which had also inspired so many of my favourite musicians. And a lot of viking sites and museums as I'm a lifelong history fan.

Unlike you I haven't had the luxury of visiting Norway since childhood, as Norway is pretty much at the opposite end of the Earth from Australia. Perhaps that was why the experience of visiting was so profound for me, even without stalking musicians, which I would never do. 

Having said that, I'd certainly be interested in reading about people's experiences who did visit some of those specific sites. For instance, I've hung out plenty of times at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Hollywood, and it's 100% due to 80s hair metal scene hahaha. I'm not above a bit of sightseeing.  I can't imagine it's overly stimulating looking at the closed shop-front or a small grave marker though. I've been to Jim Morrison's grave etc in Paris and it was pretty underwhelming, although Oscar Wilde's grave was great. 

When I started this thread I was actually interested in any interesting experiences, like backstage stories and things like that. I remember a forum user posting about how he went drinking with Mayhem and Blasphemer got in a fight etc. which was interesting and funny. I thought it could be cool to have a thread about any scene-based experiences members have had. 

Let's see if there are any takers. I've got at least one more story saved up in case no one else posts and I've overestimated forum interest in this idea. 

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  • 2 years later...

I've been into black metal since I was a teenager so I had a lot of formative/coming of age experiences where black metal was the soundtrack, usually Emperor or Nokturnal Mortum. I think the first truly bad trip I had was while I was listening to Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk in the backseat of my own car because I was too fucked up to drive, so my buddy drove because he was not into drugs at the time. I remember seeing the skies turn pinkish even though it was the middle of the day and the clouds seeming to move in time to the music and that really freaked me the hell out (I had smoked very strong pot, snorted a 10mg oxycontin, and taken mushrooms... because I was fucking stupid in those days).

I remember having a really great halloween when I was 17 that was primarily centered around black meta and we picked up these two hitchiking girls and ended up making out with them while listening to Dimmu Borgir & then we went out with them and did the typical halloween criminal mischief thing because there was not a hell of a lot to do in our town in 2003.

I also remember that we used to go play laser tag, we would bring a mix CD that had Dimmu Borgir, Immortal, and other stuff on it because the laser tag arena would play whatever CD you brought them while you were in there for your ten minutes or however long it was, so we actually used to do that a lot when we had the money to.

Once I loaned my best friend's mom my copy of Lords of Chaos because she was into true crime books and "wanted to understand us better and the music we listen to". Amazingly, she did not look at us any differently after reading that book, but was more familiar with the shirts we were wearing and the bands we would listen to. She ended up getting a tattoo gun and doing some black metal tattoos on us as well and she even started listening to one of her son's Bathory albums that he had left in the truck after he had borrowed it one night and liked it.

It was a ritual to go to the independent record store and buy or order new black metal albums every week. We were able to do this sort of stuff because we worked irregular hours part time. Usually when we'd all be done with work for the night, we'd go to this one party house and just drink and do drugs, have sex with girls and frown. In retrospect, we were pretty lame but we thought that we were the hottest thing since sliced bread back in those days.

We would do shit like hang out in this old graveyard and do rubbings of the tombstones by moonlight, climb on top of churches and smoke pot, and drive around in my car and hit mailboxes with baseball bats or do donuts in empty parking lots. I'm personally amazed that we never got arrested for any of this shit, but cell phone cameras were not as ubiquitous twenty years ago. It was all a pretty "Gummo" lifestyle because we were poor kids in suburban Florida but we used to do other shit like go hunting, fishing, swimming at the beach, riding ATVs and shooting guns once we got them (and we had many guns back in our young adult years but they were eventually all sold after the hurricane destroyed a lot of the town).

Other times there was just a lot of pot smoking, speed snorting, and listening to black metal (and surprisingly a lot of KMFDM) while we played Medal of Honor: FRONTLINE obsessively. Also a lot of skipping school, sometimes showing up for one class just to be marked as present and then disappearing from campus for the day to use drugs and play video games, and generally be dipshits. We also used to get in a surprising amounts of fights with Eminem wanna-bes and rednecks based on our stereotype as being "satanists" (even though we were never into Satanism and thought that it was lame). We got into so many serious fights and confrontations that I'm surprised we were never arrested for this either. One time we beat the shit out of the 40yo neighbor because he walked up drunk and just laid one of the gang out for "making too much noise". The ended in us going to court to testify against him because the kid he laid out was only 16 at the time & the court did not like us very much because we had long hair and wore metal tshirts to the trial.

Most of the gang from those days have either died or gone to prison for life from drugs or various other poor-people crimes. My best friend and I are really the only ones left and we still listen to the music but we have both moved on in our lives and only do stuff like go fishing now.

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