The guitarist filled the bassist’s vacancy with Vikernes – who recorded black-metal LPs as the one-man band Burzum for Euronymous’ Deathlike Silence Productions record label – and he dispatched a typewritten letter that year to Csihar, Dead’s favorite singer, who lived Hungary. The first line of the suicide note read, “Excuse the blood.”Įuronymous took photos of the scene before calling the authorities, which disturbed founding member Necrobutcher enough that he left the band.
In April 1991, he committed suicide by slitting his wrists and throat and then turning a shotgun to his head. As fate would have it, though, he would record only one of them in a studio. The album Live in Leipzig, recorded in Germany in 1990, captured the group performing four De Mysteriis songs with Dead onstage. Regardless, the tour gave the group a chance to test-drive some of its new material. “We meant to have a chainsaw but the guy who owned it had left when we came to get it. “We had some impaled pig heads, and I cut my arms with a weird knife and a crushed Coke bottle,” the singer told Slayer of one gig in an interview compiled in the book Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries.
Onstage, it was another kind of horror: Dead wore black-and-white face paint that has become known as “corpse paint” to evoke the look of death and he reputedly buried his stage clothes to give them a death-like aroma. In Turkey, police arrived at the gig with machine guns and shut off the group’s power. Hellhammer remembers having his money stolen and nights without a place to sleep. “It was the worst experience in my whole life actually.” The band had decided to travel via the continent’s robust rail system, rather than with a bus, with all its equipment.
He was referencing the group’s recent tour of mainland Europe, which Hellhammer remembers as particularly arduous. His examples of things that could be radical enough to halt progress on the LP were “if Hellhammer disappears again, if Dead cuts himself too much at a gig or if I lose my passport in Albania.” “We won’t delay it anymore unless something extreme happens,” Euronymous told Slayer magazine at the time, as he reported they were still writing about three more songs. They’d previously put out a death-metal–leaning EP, Deathcrush, with a prior lineup and by 1991 they were previewing their full-length debut, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, in the metal press. It’s an otherworldly experience that gives the singer goosebumps, especially when he looks back on the bizarre path that brought him to this point.Īfter spending most of the Eighties refining their sound and weathering lineup changes, Mayhem had found a steady groove by the Nineties and a consistent membership with vocalist Dead (real name: Per Yngve Ohlin), Euronymous, Necrobutcher (Jørn Stubberud) and Hellhammer.
Now they’re in the middle of a North American run where the group, whose lineup is rounded out with guitarists Teloch and Ghul and founding bassist Necrobutcher, has been playing nothing but the album at concerts in grand, theatrical spectacles marked by some band members wearing monk-like robes and Csihar – morbidly dressed like a living corpse with rotting flesh – manning an altar. Mayhem kicked off a world tour, playing the LP, in 2015, and late last year, they put out the live recording De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive – captured at Norrköping, Sweden’s Black Christmass Festival – which documented their first time ever playing the record in its entirety. The band re-formed in the mid-Nineties and now have a lineup that can play De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas live and separate the group’s music from its bloody past. By the time drummer Hellhammer could put out the album in the spring of 1994, he was Mayhem’s sole remaining member. That, combined with coverage surrounding a spate of church burnings in Norway, carried out by black-metal bands, and an unrelated murder, established black metal as the most dangerous musical genre since gangsta rap. In August 1993, around the time when the LP was originally slated to come out, Mayhem’s then-bassist, Varg Vikernes (who also went by Count Grishnackh in those days), brutally stabbed his bandmate, guitarist Øystein Aarseth (stage name: Euronymous), 23 times, killing him over what he claimed was a contract dispute.
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