The infamy surrounding the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s has a way of drowning out the music. Thanks to books like Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s Lords Of Chaos and documentaries like Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s Until The Light Takes Us, even the most marginally informed music fan can probably tell you about the burning of Fantoft Stave Church, the murder of Euronymous, the incarceration of Varg Vikernes, and the circle of young outcasts who hung around Helvete, the record shop in Oslo where “BLACK METAL” is still scrawled on the basement wall, the “T” stylized as an inverted cross. Some smaller percentage of those general music fans has heard anything beyond maybe De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and A Blaze In The Northern Sky; an even smaller group has followed the scene’s survivors through their present-day work. The dark side of Norwegian black metal remains true-crime docuseries fodder, but most of the people who existed in its orbit in the ’90s are simply working musicians today.
