Øystein Aarseth

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Øystein Aarseth (born March 22, 1968 in Egersund , Norway ; † August 10, 1993 in Oslo ), better known under the pseudonym Euronymous , was the guitarist of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem and the founder and owner of the label Deathlike Silence Productions and the Record store Helvete ( Norwegian " Hell "). He was murdered in 1993 by his former friend Varg Vikernes .

Musical career

Aarseth founded the band Mayhem in 1983 together with Jørn "Necrobutcher" Stubberud and Kjetil Manheim; with Manheim he also played in the projects Flowers in the Dustbin and LEGO. He changed his pseudonym Destructor in reference to a being from the underworld and gave its meaning according to the refrain of the Hellhammer title Eurynomos ( " Eurynomos , the prince of death, has come to take you home " ) with" Prince of Death ", but chose the (incorrect) spelling" Euronymous ", which was probably borrowed from the list The Infernal Names in Anton Szandor LaVey's Satanic Bible , where it is also referred to as" Prince of Death ". While the band's early tracks glorified violence, in the late 1980s he increasingly gave way to satanic content. In the summer of 1986 played Euronymous and Necrobutcher with members of the German thrash metal band Assassin under the name of Checker Patrol a demo recording one in the song Metalion in the Park had Jon "Metalion" Kristiansen , who traveled together with the Mayhem members to Germany was with as a background singer.

Influenced by Euronymous, some of the death metal bands at the time, such as Darkthrone, changed their style to black metal. He himself is seen as the "father" of the movement, whose ideology he shaped just as decisively as the typical Norwegian black metal riffing that on him and Snorre "Blackthorn" Ruch von Thorns goes back and sees in the Darkthrone drummer Fenriz the actual beginning of "New School Black Metal"; his band dedicated their first black metal album to him, A Blaze in the Northern Sky . Euronymous' importance beyond the Norwegian scene is also reflected in the numerous publications dedicated to him by bands such as Sigh (Japan), Ophthalamia (Sweden), Blessed in Sin (France), Enslaved (Norway), the funeral wind page project Inferi ( Netherlands) and the project Myrkwid of the Ewiges Reich drummer FMH and Malthökk (Germany) as well as the song dedicated to him Red for Fire, Black for Death by the Norwegian band Solefald .

When the then Mayhem singer Dead (Per Yngve Ohlin) shot himself in April 1991, Euronymous made recordings of the corpse that he wanted to use for later album covers. One of the pictures appeared on the cover of the bootleg The Dawn of the Black Hearts - Live in Sarpsborg, NORWAY 28/2/1990 after Euronymous' death . In his opinion, Dead's suicide was "the best promotion he ever did for Mayhem". Rumor has it that Euronymous ate parts of Dead's brain, which he denied but claimed to have planned it. He is also said to have made pendants from parts of Dead's skull and sent them to befriended bands. Euronymous' handling of Dead's death also met with criticism within the band, the bassist Necrobutcher turned away from Euronymous as a result.

After Dead's suicide, Euronymous opened the Helvete store, where members of the Norwegian scene met. This led to some church fires and other criminal acts, so that the media targeted it, according to which this scene had formed an organization led by Euronymous and Varg Vikernes called Svarte Sirkel ('black circle'), whose center was Helvete and the dem Christianity declared war or carried out attacks on death metal bands. After church fires broke out in 1992 in the area around Helvete, the alleged meeting place of Svarte Sirkel , the shop had to be closed.

ideology

Euronymous was temporarily a member of Rød Ungdom (Norwegian "Red Youth"), a communist youth organization. He assumed that sooner or later the world would become communist, but saw classical communism as philanthropic and therefore undesirable and instead advocated real socialist dictatorships: “The world can go to hell. We want the old Stalinist dictatorship back, under which it was gray, miserable and evil. The Berlin Wall should come again! ” He saw himself as a proponent of other authoritarian forms of government: “ We support all extreme and oppressive states like old Albania, Iran, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and so on. ” Accordingly, Euronymous turned away Rød Ungdom when this was too moderate for him. He also preferred the LaVeyian form of Satanism , which he rejected as life-affirming, a Satanism based on the inversion of Christian dogmas. Nevertheless, he tolerated neo-pagan supporters of the black metal scene that formed in his environment under the influence of Mayhem and also released an album on his label by Enslaved , the band that pioneered the emergence of Viking Metal and whose lyrics deal with Nordic mythology.

assassination

In 1993 Euronymous was killed by his former friend and then bassist Varg "Count Grishnackh" Vikernes, the only musician of the Burzum project , with 23 stab wounds (2 in the head, 5 in the neck and 16 in the back). The murder marked a turning point in the history of the black metal scene - Fenriz von Darkthrone said in an interview: “It was a shame. I would have liked to have seen the 'experiment' Black Metal go on without the media's attention. ” - and is seen by parts of the scene as the end of the history of Black Metal.

The exact motives are unclear as Vikernes spawned different versions of the story. In addition to Euronymous 'communist sentiments and his alleged homosexuality, debts of money and Vikernes' girlfriend at the time were also cited as motives. Most recently, Vikernes claimed to have killed him in self-defense.

Since the then unreleased album De Mysteriis Dom Sathana's bass tracks contained Vikernes ', Euronymous' mother asked the drummer ( Jan Axel "Hellhammer" Blomberg ) to remove them. Although he promised to re-record her personally, the tracks are included on the final album.

After Euronymous' death, a riff he wrote for Mayhem was recycled by the band Emperor in the song Ye Entrancemperium on their album Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk .

Discography

with Mayhem

with Checker Patrol

  • 1986: Demo '86 (Demo)

with Burzum

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kjetil Manheim: Flowers in the dustbin. April 13, 2009, archived from the original on March 6, 2010 ; accessed on March 15, 2010 (English).
  2. ^ Jon Kristiansen : Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries . Brooklyn, NY: Bazillion Points Books 2011, p. 53.
  3. ↑ a b Gypsy boy: Interview with Fenriz ( Memento from October 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ Alex Donks: Thorns - Stigma Diabolicum ( Memento from November 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).
  5. ↑ David Rocher: Of the Lupine Lords That Lurk in the Shadows .
  6. ↑ The Legend Dead .
  7. ↑ a b Kari Laakso: The True Mayhem ( Memento from May 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive ). In: Isten , No. 6, pp. 9ff.
  8. ↑ a b c interview with euronymous 1992 .
  9. ^ Black Metal Documental, Norsk Rocks Historie, 2007
  10. ↑ Varg Vikernes: A Burzum Story: Part II - Euronymous .
personal data
SURNAME Aarseth, Øystein
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Euronymous (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian black metal guitarist
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Egersund , Norway
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1993
Place of death Oslo