#let's say this photoshoot took place before everyone got extremely unhappy

[poelenta]

pinterest has inspired me once again

[euronymous-files]

What follows is a summary of the most interesting information (about Euronymous) that Marius Vold gave during an interview with Thomas Eriksen of Mork. The direct quotes are in bold, and the rest is a concise version of what was said. You should definitely check the whole interview here.

note: M is Marius, E is Euronymous, V is Varg and T is Thomas (the interviewer).

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- M worked at Helvete, he made many of the medieval weapons, chain mail and clothing that can be seen in various bands' pictures in the first days of norwegian black metal - fun fact: M got scared the first time he listened to "Deathcrush" - M talked to E a few months before E opened Helvete. E told him about his idea of opening a record store and M liked it. Then one day E called M and told him to come and see the shop. When M got there he was impressed with the atmosphere but he also remembers there was almost nothing on the shelves. "They painted the whole thing black, he and Metalion, I think". - E was importing records for the store but there weren't many of them... but people came to the store and donated some of their records; everyone was contributing in some way, as a community. Some would also give them other stuff like candles, curtains, or a telephone. - "It was all black. When you came in from outside into the store you couldn't see anything. You had to stop and just wait for the eyes to focus. And the most funny thing was right inside the door there was a step up and EVERYONE tripped! [laughter] We were just sitting there in the dark and waiting for someone to come in and trip. Really fall on the floor and then point and laugh [more laughter]." - So at the beginning they got free records from their supporters, plus E through his contacts abroad managed to import some more records, and by selling them they started to make some capital, but they never actually got any money out of it because all the income was barely enough to pay the monthly rent which was around 6000 kroner. - apart from records (especially demo tapes), they would also sell the weapons that Marius and Sverd (Steinar Johnsen) made. - They would get lots of customers but "E had this idea that you shouldn't make too much money, you shouldn't be greedy, so when he sold an album for like 120kroner he's like maybe 20 kroner for him, so you can't run a record shop." So if he bought an album for 100 he would resell it for 120, but those 20 went all into the rent. "So he wasn't greedy, then?", asks T. "Absolutely not!" replies M. - The staff at Helvete was: E, M, Occultus, Thrasher, a girl named Tove and another young boy who didn't want to go to school anymore and wanted to work in Helvete, so his teacher came down to the shop one day to check the place and asked E if the kid could work there and E was like "sure". - E lived in the back room. "It was no way to live. Mattress on the floor, with all the books [...] then he found kind of a secret room in the ceiling [...] 1.20m high, so he put his bed in there, but it was so difficult to get up and down. [There was no ladder] He had to climb on the shelves and pull himself up there. I think he was glad when he finally got another place to stay when he closed the shop." - "E was a guy with a lot of ideas". "In a positive way?" asks T. "Both ways", replies M. [laughter] "He had all these thoughts about the music [...] what it should mean and the feeling around it, and it was very important for him that most people didn't like it. They shouldn't like it. Less people the better." "It's a funny way to look at things when you're trying to run a business", says T. "Yeah, but he was really not TRYING to run a business.", answers M. [more laughter] He was rather interested in enjoying the sense of community and being around like-minded people, and with time more and more people gathered around the shop, and with them came also "the wrong people". - The satanic part was just image, there was nothing "ritualistic" going on. "It was to scare the guys in the street". "The closest satanic thing was maybe lighting the candles, having a photoshoot in the basement, corpse paint, walking around in capes and stuff, but you didn't talk in old latin and write big pentagrams or anything, you know? No killing sheep...". - M never liked Burzum’s music at all - T says he knows E's girlfriend. M asks "which one?" and T replies "The last one". Then T says "I remember the first time I met her - I'm not going to use any names - but the first time I met her we were in the same room and I was talking about music, as we do, and I happened to say that I like Burzum, as a reference, and she kind of had it with me... We're friends now, there's no problem, but I understand that you guys were so close to it..." - the first time M saw V it was in Helvete. E called M and said "I have a strange guy in the store, he's been here for the whole day... just been there, you know... and he's talking about fantasy and LOTR...". E wasn't into that but knew that M was so E asked M if he wanted to come down to the store to talk to this weird guy. After talking for a night, M says about V: "He rubbed me the wrong way, he wanted everything more extreme. He was talking about 'it would be really cool to make a live with just black metal people'...ok, what's that about?... 'Just hunting each other in the forest with real swords and real knives'... ok, ok, you know I don't want my arm cut off... so I took a step back, let him just talk." - the moment V entered the picture and he became friends with E, M says was the point where everything turned to the worse. - the Black Circle - as it was indeed called at the time, according to M - was just around 10 people. They were in because of the way they looked at things, how they fitted into this cult-like vision. The members were E, M, V, Snorre, Faust, Fenriz, Ted, Occultus and Hellhammer (but he was in and out). Some people asked to get in but that's not how it worked, you needed to be considered worthy. It was essentially like a gang of friends, they would hang out in the basement and have parties, listening to metal and stuff... - Helvete closed in march '93 both because of the amount of attention from the media and because of the rent being too high. E also had some pressure from his family. He was living in the store in terrible conditions, he wanted out, so his parents basically told him that if he closed the shop, they were going to help him get a place to stay. So he accepted, deciding to concentrate more on the label. - there wasn't really any written contract between E and V, it was more a verbal deal. In the beginning V said he could pay for the whole thing, that he wanted his album to come out on DSP because he wanted to use the DSP name to get more attention. M never heard V being unhappy with the economical part and he doesn't know where the hostility came from. M doesn't remember E ever telling him why things got wrong with V. He says "V often lied about things. For me he lied a lot." - After Helvete closed, M remained in contact with both E and V but he never liked V so it was only V who called him and M just listened to V talking and then replied in a disinterested way. M recalls V telling him "If you come to Bergen and if you support me and not that fucking guy in Oslo, then I will buy more clothes from you and the chain mail and stuff". M says "I could see through that, it was just bullshit, he was saying that to butter me up". - M was informed of E's death by Hellhammer. M was shocked and kept thinking who could have done this; he couldn't figure it out but he went to the police because he had to tell them that in his opinion E must have known his murderer, since the only way to get into the apartment complex was to ring the intercom and announce yourself. Also, there was no name on E's button, so the killer must have known which one to push and E must have recognized the person, and let him in, in the middle of the night. M also says that E was very careful about that, he never let in anybody he didn't know, not even someone who claimed to be the mailman. - After E's death, M didn't have any more inspiration and didn't want to stay in the community. "I had kind of a reaction to metal after the death of E. I couldn't listen to metal for several years."

----------------------------------- The Thomas Eriksen Podcast #10 - Marius Vold