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"May it please Heaven that the reader the reader, emboldened and become of a sudden and momentarily ferocious like what he is reading, may trace in safety his pathway through the morass of these gloomy and poisonous pages. For unless he is able to bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a spiritual tension equal at least to his distrust, the deadly emanations of this book will imbibe his soul as sugar absorbs water."

So begins Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautreamont, or Isidore Decasse to use his less aristocratic-sounding, born name. The author died at an early age, and was almost unknown during his life. It was only posthumously that he was recognized as one of the fathers of the Surrealist movement. Further excerpts from the work are replicated in the boxes over the next couple of pages. It's a favourite literary work of a man who lives in Norway and calls himself Garm. I managed to hassle him into an interview in the week before Christmas, 1997.

"So look for him vainly,
He, the incarnation of evil:
And by arrangements of a magickal nature
He turns unrecognisable
even to the experienced eye."

Just like His Infernal Majesty in the Arcturus track "Master of Disguise", Garm was a hard fellow to track down. When the man fails to telephone me at the arranged time, I obtain his number from Century media and give him a buzz. He apologises for the misunderstanding and we rearrange the interview. At the second time of asking I'm informed that he is not able to phone, and that he will try another day from his friend's house. Third time lucky. Although Garm apologized for being tired and uninspired, I think we got somewhere over the course of the fifty minutes. The man represents a lot of what was good about the black metal scene post-Euronymous, and although evidently he is losing interest in that scene per se, his involvement in Arcturus has helped forge a new direction in extreme music. I listen to La Masquerade Infernale and it makes all the listening to the crap I've forced upon myself in the past year-and-a-half seem worth it. If this is the indirect result of multiple churchfires, then fuck it all, set them all ablaze.

I started the interview with questions on Ulver and followed up with more detailed interrogation regarding Arcturus. I'd heard nasty rumours about the singer, but thought at times curt and even defensive, he fell a long way short of being rude.

I started by putting it to him whether reviewers and listeners had been overly disconcerted by the raw production on Ulver's The Madrigal of Night:

"It's certainly a possibility" he muses. "some of the people who like the melodic black metal thing but don't like the '92 style of black metal, the new-guard fans or whatever, obviously don't really like the production on that album much. That's fine by me. So it might certainly be a possibility."

The actual music on the said album is really pretty neat; melancholic and relatively melodic blackness barely touching the softer aesthetics of Bergtatt... Could not the music itself convey the primal black metal atmosphere without a one-dimensional production?

"It can, but not in the kind of sense that we wanted to convey, not really a musical message. It is a traditional sound, so we felt that the time was right for another production which was kind of like an anti-production, like some magnificent predecessors have done before us."

For the rather grand, typically Garm-sounding "magnificent predecessors", read Darkthrone. The other thing the album shares with the work of Fenriz' lot is the artwork of Tania Stene.

"I don't know," the singer says when I ask whether the art is a little rough-around-the-edges, "I think it's not really that rough, just a traditional oil painting image so that's pretty much her style. I mean, if you look at some of the stuff she did for Darkthrone and stuff like that, that's even more foggy and dim, in-the-edges, so that's basically her style of painting."

Garm laughs when I mention the irony when I mention that the album with the least accessible and least commercial approach was released on the biggest label the band had yet been signed to:

"Yeah, they weren't taken by shock. I pretty much told them that OK, we can sign a contract for three albums now but you must know that the first one we're about to make now is a very vain kind of work, so you won't sell heaps of records. So they were aware of that, but in spite of that I think it's sold 12,000 records, so that's really not that bad."

Was it a distraction then putting out an album that was recorded such a long time ago?

"No, it wasn't recorded a long time ago, it was created in the beginning of '95 and then our guitarist went to Denmark for a year to study guitar."

"Our drummer went to the military so we had a year's pause, and then we rehearsed a couple of months when we were all together and went to record it, so that's the story basically."

The first Ulver release struck a chord with me, as with many other people. It was a very much a new slant on a genre that was already beginning to get hopelessly overcrowded. The folky touches, together with the wonderful singing, brought a more romantic approach to a black metal scene not accustomed to hearing so much feeling in a record. Kveldsfanger was even more pastoral, if a little inconspicuous. Is it the restless creativity of Ulver that has resulted in three very different styles of trolsk metal?

"I don't know," Garm answers, "it's becoming like that, but we hadn't planned it form the start because when we made the first record – which was a concept album – we decided that we wanted to continue doing concepts but at the same time parallel to creating The Madrigal of Night, we, or Havard (the guitarist) and myself really wanted to do an acoustic thing which was solely based on the acoustic thing we did on the first record again. So we decided to do both that plus a blacker album, because we really wanted to make something more Darkthrone after the first record. It was a coincidental plan, so to say."

"I've never said that" he snaps, before softening his stance and going back on himself. "I don't think so, I may have said that we got several offers to do it but we won't. I don't like them [the tracks] very much, and besides, the whole thing of releasing demos on CD is a waste of both people's money and bad quality."

Having said all that, Vargnatt was a real rough diamond, and is certainly worth tracking down on the tape-trading circuit.

You also said, in the interview with Godreah "sine that The Madrigal of the Night was a musical union of romance and evil?

Are you playing with people's perceptions, because pure evil is surely not romantic? Moreso banal and boreing, it tends to be fantasized evil that is romantic.

"I don't think so", Garm says, "because...I remember what I said: "it was a glorification of the fiery crossroads between the opposites'. That was what I said, although I don't really agree with you that evil can't be romantic because romanticism is a feeling or sentiment based on something passionate, and there's a lot of passion in cruelty, so I don't agree with you. What I remember I said was that it was a glorification of the crossroads or the path balancing between the two opposites, so I think that was the original intention."

Whatever Garm did say in the interview with Crin, not all of it, clearly, was printed. He as something of a point though, as Tomas of At the Gates once screamed: "What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?"

Garm has hinted that he future Ulver albums will be more folky and atmospheric with additional computer effects:

"Yeah, we'll use the computer more or less as an editing instrument, and it will be a little further from black metal, which doesn't really attract us much. That was the thing with the Madrigal... record, I recently said in Terrorizer I think, we kind of got that out of our system by doing that record. Don't get me wrong; I like the style and we really needed a record which was that way but I won't be doing like two or three more of them, y'know?"

Later on we'll discover that his divergence from black metal has been on the cards for some time.

Garm has, in previous publications, drawn attention to himself and his bands through some rather interesting interview answers. In the first Dawnrazor magazine, the man answered all questions referring to himself in the third person. He's well aware he's said some rather embarrassing things. Take MorticiaNumskull magazine's first issue, where he stated: "I am born in the wrong century, and Ulver will be my camouflage until then!"

"Ah shit," he laughs, cringing at the other end of the line, "that's actually very funny, because that's a statement that several people have written, shit like that, y'know it's such a immature manner of speech."

"Yeah it was," he agrees, "I remember the magazine it was done in as well; Mortician, because people referred to it so many times, we hadn't released a record yet. I was more into the little, super-sentimental, longing back to a time and a place where you've never been and you never really knew, and all that shit that a lot of bands use."

I get the feeling that things have changed; his cellular phone keeps going off throughout the interview for a start. Hardly medieval. I suppose he's taken camouflage off now then?

"I'm much more up-to-date with society now, and not only up-to-date but also very interested in modern aspects of life, even though I don't really take aloof from inspirations form the past, but it remains stupid to say it the way I used to do." Nevertheless, if we were all judged by what we'd written at that age, few would pass unscathed. Just look at my first issue. Or rather please don't!

Has the success of the unusual aspects of the last Arcturus album surprised Garm at all?

"No, I have to say no because I knew when we made the record that it would become a bestseller, I think I knew all along because it is a very good album and – besides being strange which perhaps isn't a commercial trait – you can certainly pick out a very technical and melodic aspects to the whole album which I knew all along would appeal to a broader audience. So, I think I knew it would become a bestseller."

A bestseller, sadly is certainly not what La Masquerade Infernale became. More like a financial disaster, not least because of the £10,000 production costs. It's a crying shame when one considers the quality of the music and the impact it had on the metal scene.

The original working title for the album; The Satanist, would certainly been ironic. Satanism is for many the keyword in black metal, so why not unleash such a beautifully bizarre album with a generic name?

"Yeah, I know," he recognizes, "but that was my idea; to be very direct and do something that was extremely up-front. And then give it a whole new outlook through the music and the lyrics, give the subject or the connotation; the Satanist, a new face. I'm certainly eager to paint Satanism in other forms than Marduk and Cradle of Filth."

I don't think one can paint Satanism in any baser colours than those of Marduk. Garm presumeably is in favour of a more highbrow approach.

"Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't really go around and say, "Hey, I'm an intellectual, look at me" but yeah, I'm more concerned with Satanism as portrayed in literary traditions and both the symbolic and ideological meaning than being the evil bugbear, you know."

I remember listening to a tape-traded copy of the Constellation shortly after it was released. The guy who taped it for me was convinced it was the best thing since sliced bread, but as I listened to it and as rays of sunlight pierced my living room, I just didn't get it. Those synths were so fucking obvious, and it took me a long time to readjust. In due course I recognized it for the masterwork it was. The debut was generally applauded but one criticism of Aspera Hiems Symphonia I read made the point that sections sounded to staged and pompous.

"Yeah, but with more room for self-irony, so I can understand why people don't like pompousness, because in many ways I don't myself. If it's done cleverly then it's perhaps the most powerful thing to do ever; to be pompous but at the same time not to ridicule yourself. The new album is a lot more mature in its pomposity than Aspera...so what can I say?"

And it's exactly this element that makes the band such an attractive proposition.

One revelation on La Masquerade Infernale was the delightful song of one Simen Hestnaes, how did you come to use him?

"Basically, to get some diversity, because on this record I've had more prominent role as a producer maybe more than only as a singer or whatever, so quite early on we decided not only to use him but other people, and it's actually strange that we didn't use more people. We'll probably use even more people in the future because it adds to the album, gibing people more impressions of diversity. I think when you can start thinking whose the benefit the music is, instead of thinking of your own egotistical reasons to play music then you're starting to really become a musician. We chose him because we thought he sang well, I mean I've known him for many years so it came quite naturally."

It amazes me that the only other singing the man appears to have done were the live vocals for Ved Buens Ende. If I remember rightly Kerrap! Reviewed the Impaled Nazarene gig in London that Halloween and even printed a picture of Simen prostrate on the stage.

For me, "The Chaos Path" is the most impressive track I've heard from the weirder end of metal. I just can't listen to it without dropping whatever I happen to be doing at the time. Nick Terry was spot-on: this is idiosyncratic beauty par excellence. And it's the singing of Hestnaes that tops it all off.

"Yeah, sure", Garm is content to agree. "I mean that was actually a song that originated in a project that he was having with the keyboardist, which never really became anything, it was just a couple of rehearsals. So, it was basically a goodwill from my side. I just said, "Hey, fuck, you sing like hell on that song, I don't see any reason for me to go and fuck that up", so he sang on our record, that's the whole story."

He wrote the lyrics to that song as well, and together with some of the aspects of the CD layout it concerns itself with the chaos magick, does it not?

Let's just say A Mind Confused, Sacrementum, Eternal Dirge, and perhaps even Bolt Thrower to name a few. Khaostars everywhere.

"Only that it's very open. Very, very open. You have the center of the star which is, for me, the brain and then you have the arrows going out in all directions, so it's basically a symbol of open-mindedness."

Unlike for example, the Kabbalah, there are no religious hang-ups or history with it, are there?

"No, it's more of a modern philosophy," he says, "I think it's not based on old icons and stuff like that. It's pretty much an up-to-date philosophy."

From the little I have read about it, things tend to be couched in speculative quantum physics and stuff like that. It seems pseudo-scientific.

"yeah, that's actually more of the mathematical part of it, that's the part of it which interests me least. I really like the provocative thought-patterns and the acknowledgements of all and everything, and the right in everything; the right in wrong and the right in right, so to speak."

Look on the back of the La Masquerade Infernale CD box, and along with the chaostar you will see another symbol. Now what on earth could that be kids?

"Also," Garm proceeds to explain, "we've used that symbol with the Black Sun, which is basically an old symbol used in some Surrealist literature, so it also becomes closely tied to life-Surrealism, where everything makes sense and at the same time makes no sense if you know what I mean. So we play around with a lot of those aspects as well as the pure chaos."

The Black Sun, Thagirion, The Realisisation of Dreams, The Ubermensch, The Goal, The Bease 666, Fenrir. It's not the first reference to Kabbalah, judfing from the serpent of wisdom coiled around the Sephiroth printed on the Aspera Hiems Symphonia CD. This kilppoth, Thagirion, is home to the animal in man, struggling up from the unconscious to control him. Apparently. The Black Sun was also postulated as the source of Vril, a black light fromt eh cosmos clearer and purer than any known of Earth and beyond corruptibility of human failings. Biktor Schauberger, a Nazi "scientist', developed this concept under government backing, in the search for a clean, eternal energy source. Are you bored of tenuous Nazi connections yet?

I wondered what Garm was thinking when he postulated a future extreme musical direction in Terrorizer as a mixture of metal and jungle rhythyms. Why?

"Because that's what's happening", he says bluntly. "It's not really a speculation, it's just how I see things develop, especially in your country actually, where the whole computer-edited rhythm thing is very big these days."

"Yeah, definitely The Prodigy, but you also have American superstars, Marilyn Manson and that you know, incorporating the same things into metal and becoming extremely popular with it. You know, bands like Massive Attack go more crude, more guitar-based, so it's just what's happening, it's pretty much the future of metal I think. Just look at Fear Factory for example. Even though I don't really like that band, I don't really like the style either, I just see that's the way things are going. But I don't like, y'know, the Pantera thing with drum "n' bass rhythms. There are a lot of bands who do that stuff and they tend to get extremely huge."

Lyrically speaking, does the Edgar Allan Poe poem you used in one of the new songs ("Alone") relate to Garm?

"Yes, certainly, I wouldn't have used it if I couldn't find any values I could identify with."

Putrefaction Records released the first Arcturus 7' in a batch of 1,100 copies. At that time the line-up only had Hellhammer, along with Steinar (guitar and keys) and Marius (vocals and bass). The song "My Angel" was in fact a love song in which Marius screamed for his Hawaiian girlfriend to come back to him. His lyrics go, "I love you, I need you, you are my angel". Could you, ahem, twist a love song into the Arcturus concept?

"I wouldn't have any aversion to it" is Garm's only marginally surprising response. "Yeah, certainly, but I won't be doing it this week so I wouldn't know... That's pretty much how I am, I have no aversions against that, if I really wanted to write a lyric that was kind of focusing on goodness in me. If I wanted to do that, I'd do so."

"Yeah, that's inevitable, because when you have strong ideals in life and become aware of the fact that you can actually never become your ideals, you tend to get depressed about it. At the same time you can also have an intellectual rejoicing in the fact that you are who you are. A guy who lives 100% for football and beer doesn't care too much about the bigger issues in life so obviously he or she would lead a happier life than some intellectuals."

But it is nonetheless preferable for you to become more broad-minded, intelligent and wise than not having a care?

"I wouldn't say that, I'd say that it's beyond my control, I can't do anything about that. As Fenriz once said: "When Hell calls your name there's no way back." A very wise statement."

Was the new Arcturus song "The Throne of Tragedy" based on the same Svaeron poem as the Ulver demo song "Tragedien's Trone"?

"Because it's a good theme, and I didn't really think that much about it. We had our Norwegian early version of that poem on a demo that was sold in, I don't remember, 350 copies or something, so I decided, "What the hell", and we used it again."

This dedication to the "Perilous Quest of the Faustian Spirit", how do you relate to this?

"It is a very grand and poetic myth about a guy with the same reasons to live as myself, so that's pretty much it, it goes without further delving into. I guess you understand what I mean."

The vocalist has stated in the past that Arcturus reflects his love of classical music, but he is clearly annoyed by the way in which any remotely musically-concious bands tend to make a thing out of some pretentious appellation to more highbrow tastes.

"Why the hell should one say that one's influenced by classical music? I don't see any grandeur in the statement itself, it's just that in Arcturus that's a fact, a lot of the music is based on classical music. On Aspera... we even had a lot of riffs that were practically stolen from classical music, so that's a fact."

"Even though Arcturus was based more on...I don't know the English word, in Norwegian I'd say [something untranscribeable but most likely referring to the Viennese school], which was more the Bach and Mozart, well myself I am into the more early 20^th Century composers."

You said in Terrorizer that your new "art syndicate" and remix album would enable you to reach an audience better qualified to understand your work.

"To a certain degree, yeah, because both here in Norway and abroad we've certainly come into close contact with a lot interesting people during the last year or so, so it seems that we are in fact in the process of building up a status in different, what can I say...subcultures."

I put it to him that his biggest audience (by far) at present is from the extreme metal scene. Surely, there'd have to be a drastic change in Arcturus if they are to appeal to a different cross-section of people, by which time they could lose the fanbase that originally acclaimed them. He's not so sure.

"That doesn't necessarily mean to lose all the people that listen to what I do now, but I've always been the way that I do what I want to do, no matter what people think, and I wouldn't allow myself to continue playing black metal if that's not really what I want to do. I mean, I've released several albums now with material more or less related very closely to black metal, but now I'm not really listening to that much black metal, I'm not really interested in the black metal kind fo philosophy or the way to clothe yourself or whatever black metal basically means. I've lost a lot of interest, and therefore it's quite natural for me to take a stop further and do different things. I also hop that the same time that some of the people who have followed what I've don will be interested in my new stops, but it's not really my responsibility whether they will or not."

Someone in Haninge, Sweden knows my next question is a personal favourite, eh Timo?

Whatever one thinks about the man personally (and from proceeding here there's no reason to begrudge him anything), he's certainly cgot a lot on his curriculum vitae. Beside the undeniable success of both Ulver and Arcturus, he's got a line in producing music and even, eyars ago, had a little-known fanzine of his own called Eclipse. Is the drive to expand his horizons mainly ther ebecause he's accomplished a lot in a short time?

"I don't know," he sighs, "it's a sign of growing up. People tend to grow out of the whle black metal thing without really claiming that it's immature, even though that's basically what I'm saying here. In 1992 especially, when Euronymous and that whole thign was at it's peak, all the peple involved were from 16 to 18 years old, when Euronymous at that point in time 24 or 25. All the people were basically very young and ignorant and I see also now that a lot of pele I was in touch with at that point in time have certainly widened their perspective on things a little bitk. Another intersting thing is that a lot of the people not necessarily interested in the heavy metal thing, but more into the aesthetic side of black metal, hyou know the whole Satanic, dark or whatever thing, have used some years reading some books and stuff and when they do that, as a consequence of that, they cahnagee their minds, because they get more insight and see it from another angle."

To Garm though, is Satanism still effectively the thin line betyween romance and total destruction?

And what would be your reaction to a cynic like me who would say that Satanism is purely a reaction against the meaningless nihilism inherent in atheism? The search fro a spirituality albeit in a curiously reversed manner.

"I'd recommend certainly The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, and Maldoror written by a French Surrealist called Comte de Lautreamont."

That's all very well, but he might as well have said Winnie the Pooh, if I reduce things to the absurd. It's all fiction, and interesting in an aesthetic context, but is it really grounds for saying that Satanism is anything more than a romantic affection?

"I'm not necessarily speaking of Satanic works here but if you study the origin of Satan a little bit you tend to understand Satan as something different from what Euronymous used to believe He was, or it was. And I'd say that after all the years that Lucifer's been denied bliss, he's certainly changed his mind once in a while about his profession. It would be absurd to thin that the Devil never really learned anything from all his years as an outcast, y'know. Because to me, to me Satan is an icon of being a pariah, basically."

"In a sense, it ties in with living with it. Living with, what can I say, a demonized frame of mind and being happy about, so it's actually a very positive lyric because it's based on the happy side, the jolly side of being a Satanist, ha ha!"

He's right, in so far as if sympathy for the Devil (and all the traditional demonic imagery) is to exist, it should at least be channeled into something individually constructive and positive.

It might be short-sighted to finish the interview without a recognition of what Garm has contributed to Borknagar. The tour supporting Rotting Christ never came to anything after all.

Can he tie up things for us on that front? Garm reveals that tings came to a head around the early autumn of 1997.

"No, I was never going to tour with them", he insists. "I laid my cards on the table long before [it was arranged]. I mean, I wasn't sure I was doing anything after the second album. When I did the second album I said to Century Media that I really didn't have the strength of dedication to go far on that, so when we got to Germany this guy from Direct Management came up and told me, "Hey, you're going on the road in one month!" and it was like, "Oh hey, cool, nice of you to let me know". I didn't really say that much until we got home because I was focusing on just doing the vocal stuff, and so then I basically said, "Fuck you". I mean we never rehearsed with the band so it would have been impossible to tour with them anyway."

Garm reveals that as far as he's concerned, the Borknagar chapter is well and truly closed.

"I've quit. I'm pretty happy with having quit as well. I don't see Borknagar as especially representative of what I'm into, either musically or aesthetically. So, even though I had a good time with them and I really like the people in the band and all that stuff, and we're still friends, I'm very happy to be back to the more "Garmish' kind of things. I like things taken more to the limits than being just somewhere in between, which is basically what I deem in Borknagar to be: it's not particularly original, the lyrics and the aesthetics aren't particularly clever and it would get too boring if the band continued doing that. If I'd had more to say, I'd definitely have changed the whole outlook of the band."

What more can I add? Except to say that if you haven't already, listen to La Masquerade Infernale. It should change you!.