I WAS SHOCKED WHEN NOCTURNO CULTO STARTED LAYING DOWN THE SONG
by Richard Lagergren (Sweden Rock Magazine)
20 years have passed since Panzerfaust was released. An album that was recorded when Darkthrone had neither a record deal nor access to recording opportunities other than standard demo tapes. Fenriz recalls the tours around what he considers the culmination of the band's madness.
Fenriz emphasizes several times during our conversation that Panzerfaust is not actually a 20 but over 21 year old album. - In a better world there would be a drummer who also contributes bass playing as well as some vocals and guitar playing. Then you wouldn't have to wait ten months for an album to come out after it has been recorded. With today's queues for vinyl pressings, we are back in roughly the same situation as we had with Peaceville years ago. An album shouldn't be dated by its release date but by when it was recorded. It would be fairer to the bands. From the outside it looks like our records came out in 1991, 1992, 1993 and so on, while to us they are always a year older. When Transilvanian Hunger (1994) was released, Panzerfaust was already recorded and finished. An album that was very much a result of 1994. And back then, when you were around 25 years old, a year was a long time.
1994 was not the brightest year in Fenriz's life. - Between 1998 and 2002 I was depressed, but in 1994 I just kept going. This was after my father had passed away and my then-wife left me. I had started working shifts and it made me lose control of my private life. There was an unusual amount of drinking, because I was looking for a soulmate. And at the same time I was very active musically and recorded as much stuff as possible. Between 1993 and 1995 I made about twelve albums... It was a mess. 1994 was definitely the year I probably didn't go crazy, but I definitely ended up on the edge. I was constantly searching for some kind of order in the middle of everything. In retrospect, I seem to have had a death wish as big as Colorado.
Under these circumstances, Darkthrone's fifth album was recorded. At the time, Fenriz was living upstairs, which he had until recently shared with his ex-wife, in his parents' home in Kolbotn a few miles north of Oslo. The living room, which a few years earlier had served as Darkthrone's rehearsal space, now housed the band Valhall's equipment. Among this equipment was a portable four-channel studio, known as Necrohell. With its help, Transilvanian hunger, as the solo project Isengard's debut album Vinterskugge (1994), had been taped together.
- Darkthrone rehearsed for the last time in the summer of 1992. The following year I rejoined Valhall (which he had left in 1989) and we started rehearsing at my house. I recorded a lot of music on their stuff on my own. Also the solo project Fenriz' Red Planet. What kind of guitars or amplifiers they had, I have no idea today.
Just like with Transilvanian hunger, Fenriz wrote and recorded all the music on Panzerfaust on his own. Second guitarist Ivar Zephyrouss Enger had disappeared into the periphery shortly after the recording of 1992's Under a funeral moon. The partner Ted Nocturno Cultos Skjellim (guitar and vocals), who had moved from Oslo, had more and more other matters than black metal to contend with.
- Ted lived very far from me at this time. I hardly knew where he was. He changed jobs and addresses all the time. And his private life probably looked pretty bad too. We fucked up our lives a bit since we got into black metal, and fell into a pretty chaotic way of living and thinking. I myself tried to keep things together in 1992 and 1993, when I got married. Things seemed okay for a while there. But in 1994 everything was, as I said, chaos again. Anyway, I was glad that Ted wanted to come and do the vocals on these two albums. It was good for Darkthrone and kept us together.
With only four channels, the Necrobell studio offered limited recording options. A dilemma that musicians at the demon level all over the world have had to find different ways to get around. But not many bands have struggled with such concerns while recording their fifth studio album.
-The process was that I first laid down drums - with a single microphone hanging behind my back - and two guitars. When Ted later had laid down his vocals, there were no channels left to record bass on. I solved this during the transfer to the so-called master tape - a regular cassette in a rock blaster. I had to lie on my back while the recording was being transferred. If I made a mistake, I just had to redo everything. It was sweaty. In return, I ended up close to the strange, clean bass sound that I had been striving for. The one you hear on Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales. I'm still very happy with the bass sound, as well as the lead drums.
When Fenriz talks about Panzerfaust in terms of the culmination of Darkthrone's madness and the most necro album we've ever made, in addition to the above-mentioned working method, there is also Nocturno Cultos singing is included in the equation.
- I was sitting in the kitchen drinking and got a shock when he started making the bed. He screamed so loud that the kitchen table shook. I had to rush out and turn down the recording volume really low so that everything wouldn't go red. He didn't want any effect on the bed. Also, we put it very high in the mix. I like to do that. One of the big mistakes made when the compressor made its debut in the 90s was that the vocals were also baked into the whole, instead of ending up at the top of the soundscape. If you want to make a classic record, you mix the vocals high. I've always said that. You don't want Phil Lynott's bass to be heard more than his voice! That said, the vocals, as they came to sound on that record, weren't exactly a strategic career move to increase the band's popularity, so to speak. There we went in the opposite direction from what many others did during that year and the following years.
On the back of Panzerfaust it is trumpeted: The most hated band in the world. After Fenris used the word Jewish in a negative sense in a press release for Transilvanian hungers, and later adorned the album with the product declaration Norwegian Aryan black metal, most distributors boycotted the band. Soon Peaceville, which had released Darkthrone's first four albums, tore up the contract and Panzerfaust was recorded by a band without a label.
- When we then signed to Moonfog (which Satyricon's frontman Sigurd Satyrs Wongraven had started in 1992) we had zero distribution. Our career was pretty much ruined. It was our own fault, of course. We were told by Moonfog that the distributors hated us. I reflected on this and asked myself which other band had managed to lose all their distribution, and assumed that at that stage we were simply the most hated band in the world. It was hardly a lie. I didn't know what the hell we were going to do. At the same time, I felt that what we were doing was completely in order: We went from having a slow, too-bad production and playing style on our first album, and then with each release we lowered the sound quality and became more and more lo-fi and primitive. Of course, going from a big label to a smaller one was completely in line with our development. It felt like we were crashing with style and doing everything wrong. And wrong meant right. It was difficult to do what we did, but we just followed our hearts.
Just to be on the safe side, however, the album's demo booklet declared that Darkthrone was definitely not a Nazi group, or at all political, and that those who still thought otherwise could lick the Virgin Mary's rear regions forever. Something more controversial was that on Transilvanian Hunger, released six months after Euronymous's murder, the band used four lyrics written by his assassin Varg Vikernes. Varg also contributed lyrics to the song Quintessences on Panzerfaust. In issue ten of the black metal bible Slayer, published in 1994, there is both a rather sullen Fenriz's interrogation as a threatening greeting from Dissection's Jon Nödtveldt.
-It didn't have much to do with it. Those who were really close to the conflict that escalated with the murder knew that there was no black or white. But from a spectator's perspective, everything looked like a soap opera: "That guy is stupid! That guy is great and I hate that guy. That wasn't the case here. We had to deal with the situation while it was going on. I was never totally anti-Euronymous or super pro-Vikernes. What happened was that Varg had no channel to express himself through, so I thought he could do it through me. Later I found out that people were pissed about it. But I didn't think it had so much to do with Darkthrone as it did with me. I made those decisions myself. As for Ted and Zephyrous, they had moved from Oslo a few years earlier. Much because they thought that the circle around Helvete Butiken had become too much of a boys' club, where the sights had become increasingly aligned. I didn't really agree with that. I always thought that we were thinking in many different directions, which the great conflict that followed of course shows.
The first generation of Norwegian black metal bands started from the pioneers of the 80s, but ended up sounding completely different from each other. For a definition of the style that would most of all be associated with Norwegian black metal, Transilvanian Hunger comes in handy. Perhaps no Darkthrone Album, either before or since, has been as concentrated, or above all, generated as many copies, as the fourth. As Fenriz likes to point out, six songs manage to go by before the drums even change tempo. With the exception of two songs, the follow-up Panzerfaust is a quick U-turn from the chilly tremologists on Transilvanian Hunger. The majority of the playing time was instead spent by Fenriz on what I consider to be the best Celtic Frost material written after Into the Pandemoniums (1987). These tracks are much closer to Fenriz's heart today.
- Hans siste vinter is clearly our worst song ever! I'm not a huge fan of listening to our own stuff, but I discovered this a while ago. I had to take on the crappy job of going through and rating our albums for the booklet for a triple vinyl collection that's coming out soon. The little one got twelve points out of a possible 60. It's a popular song that many want to cover, but I don't understand why. En Vind av Sorg, the other Transilvanian Hungers-like song on the album, is a bit better. In the other songs, apart from Quintessence which could have been a folk rock piece from the 70s, I may well be ripping Celtic Frost a lot. But I only did them so that people would open their eyes to Celtic Frost, which was very little talked about at the time. I printed my own Celtic Frost shirts because they were impossible to get. Almost every black metal band was doing the Bathory thing at the time. Even today, significantly fewer Celtic Frost bands go the Celtic Frost route. I'm pretty happy to have pushed them as much as I have. For me, they've always been a bit more important.