The legendary Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez can only be described as an unsurpassed genius, an artist of the highest order. His work is of such a rare quality that it makes virtually all else seem inadequate by contrast. Even attempting to extol Vicotnik’s merits may be viewed as a grand declaration of arrogance; for divine brilliance cannot necessarily be explained in mortal language. Not only has Vicotnik created his own artistic mode of expression, but he is constantly redefining himself and extreme music in general.

Given this and the profound meaning within Vicotnik’s remarkably varied catalogue, his output wields the frightening and wonderful potential to thoroughly transform listeners. Vicotnik’s albums challenge audiences to such a degree that it often takes quite a while to process them. However, once understood and properly absorbed, they become companions for life. In my view, this type of art that is so groundbreaking that it doesn’t immediately find a place within our conceptual framework is the greatest of all.

Remarkably, Vicotnik has crafted several of the greatest masterpieces of all time. In fact, I regard him as the most consistently phenomenal musician of the past thirty years. It’s mind-boggling to consider that not one but two of his iconic triumphs are celebrating three decades of existence this year, as recognized by Loudwire: Ved Buens Ende’s Written in Waters and Dødheimsgard’s Kronet til Konge. Simply stated, these constitute a couple of the most important moments in black metal. While Kronet til Konge certainly helped define the movement, Written in Waters greatly expanded the genre with its unfathomable ingenuity.

Verily, Written in Waters and its precursor, Those Who Caress the Pale, set themselves completely apart by virtue of their awe-inspiring individualism. Their distinctive voices convey an infectious and deeply unsettling brand of dangerously dark romanticism that pushes us toward delirium; regal elegance and absinthine madness intertwine on these insanely gorgeous, acid-splashed, poetic, and cerebral classics.

Aura Noir’s Carl-Michael Eide, also known as “Aggressor” and “Czral,” as well as Arcturus’ Hugh “Skoll” Mingay are the other Norwegian giants who birthed Written in Waters, whereas Thorns’ accomplice Bjørn “Aldrahn” Gjerde and Darkthrone’s Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell appeared with Vicotnik on Kronet til Konge. These are clearly all figures who belong in the history books due to their manifold achievements.

Written in Waters represents Ved Buens Ende’s only full-length effort to date, though we eagerly and impatiently await an eventual sophomore album. Meanwhile, Dødheimsgard has released six full-length gems. Their most recent record, Black Medium Current (2023), seems to be the single most immersive and evocative sonic journey I have ever experienced.

Of course, Vicotnik has wowed us through several other miraculous projects, which demonstrate his remarkable versatility: Doedsmaghird, Dold Vorde Ens Navn, Aphrodisiac, Endwarfment, etc. Even Vicotnik’s early recordings with his Askim-based band Manes continue to bewitch us with their potent and indefinable magical qualities. For over 15 years, Vicotnik has furthermore been part of the legendary Strid, who pioneered depressive black metal with their ’90s output.

It’s always a special and deeply humbling honor to speak with Vicotnik, and we were thrilled to be able to mark the 30th anniversary of Written in Waters with him. Fortunately, we were able to cover other topics as well. Please enjoy the conversation that follows.

Today, I would like to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Written and Waters. So, I thought we would start with the cover art, which is obviously fantastic. That was done by Nemi illustrator Lise Myhre. Did you have any voice in how it turned out, or did she just do her own thing? 

She did her own thing, but I suspect she had the lyrics in mind — the emotions that the music and the lyrics drew out of her. That’s the amount of impact we had. She just delivered something that was made for it, basically. We knew Lise. She was and still is a friend of ours. She knew the music and what it was all about, so it’s not like we just sent her a job to do or anything like that. I guess the Written in Waters cover is what came out of her due to that.

The cover of Those Who Caress the Pale is a sketch by Edvard Munch. It’s funny because your former rehearsal place on Skippergata was close to the Munch Museum and a lot of really great cultural places. So, I was wondering: How did you choose that sketch?

We really didn’t have anything to do with it. It was our manager at the time, who ran the label Ancient Lore Creations. He found the illustration, and he picked up the demo tape straight away. He was a very good and close friend. We lived together for a while and stuff like that later. And back then, even though we were young, he was a very no-nonsense kind of guy in the business aspects of things as well as the promotional and visual aspects. He always seemed like he knew what was going on, how to make things work, and stuff like that, whereas, at that point, I didn’t. I knew how to make music, play guitar, and write lyrics, but I didn’t have much clue at all, basically, other than that. So, Anton Merckoll from Ancient Lore Creations took what we did and made it marketable or made it something other people could approach. That’s all due to him.

Sorry if this is a silly question: I thought that Ancient Lore was a sub-label of Misanthropy Records?

Yeah, I think maybe a year later or so when Misanthropy picked us up to do the full-length, they bought a portion of the label or all of it. I don’t even remember anymore, but I think they only bought this label because they wanted to buy the rights for Those Who Caress the Pale and then signed us further on. So, there was nothing else really there that interested them in regards to having Ancient Lore as a sub-label to Misanthropy. But in all fairness, again, it was Anton who started Ancient Lore, and that picked us up, and made it work initially.

What was it like working with Tiziana Stupia from Misanthropy? She has a really interesting background. She’s a yoga teacher, Ayurvedic consultant, Vedic fire ceremonies practitioner, and author.

She wasn’t all that back then, but me and Tiziana hit it off right off the bat. We developed a very close and nice friendship. She took care of us very well on that human level, and on the band level, and all that stuff. It was very nice to be signed there. It was a very happening label at the time, but eventually that kind of faded away. The business side of our relationship, that kind of sold, but our friendship has never wavered. And you have to consider that she’s, I don’t know, maybe five years older than I am. When I’m signed to a label at 16, and she’s in her 20s already, she had a lot of extra experience and wisdom on a social level. So, in a sense, while still being my friend, she also had that motherly aspect to her. And when we went to play in London, we stayed at her house for a couple weeks, even though it was just one show. So, we got to know each other really well from the get-go.

Those Who Caress the Pale, in my opinion, is so perfect. The songs that you chose to put on Written in Waters are “The Carrier of Wounds” [Note: The title appears both with and without the definite article in the Written in Waters booklet.] and “You, That May Wither.” How did you decide to select those two for the album versus everything?

I don’t know. I think maybe it was easier to kind of select what was not going to be on the album. I think Hugh and Carl felt like “The Plunderer” was too black metal, and maybe we felt “Those Who Caress the Pale” was a bit not eventful enough. So, when we narrowed it down, it ended up being those two songs that transitioned from the demo to the album. I can’t remember there being any more details to it than that. I think then, and I’m not saying that’s how my rational mind would speak right now, we wanted to take the tracks from the demo that we felt were the most experimental because we wanted to become more experimental on the album. So, that’s why the songs that were more blackish, I guess, were left behind.

As for the title track, lyrics are given within the packaging, but they aren’t actually sung on the song. Sorry if this is a dumb question, but why is that?

That’s a good question, no. It works so well as an instrumental, I think. There are so many nice transitions in that song like coming into the clean parts, and all the repetitions work. Maybe Carl never really figured out how to nail it vocally, and you want the vocals to be the exclamation mark. You want to have a great song, and then you want to put on the vocals to lift it even higher. Maybe that wasn’t the case… Maybe the case was that the song didn’t grow with the vocals, and it was better to just leave it and let it breathe. That also makes that song a standout on the demo. It gives every song kind of a separate identity. So, I think, in 20/20 hindsight, it was probably the right decision to leave that song an instrumental.

Yes, I think it was the optimal choice. I love the long opening on “I Sang for the Swans.” How did you decide just to keep things instrumental for the first three-plus minutes? It’s a bold decision, and it works perfectly.

I think that’s all Carl, basically, and I think it just felt natural that the latter part of the song was where we put the lyrics since it ended up being the opener of the album itself. The whole first three minutes feel like an introduction, a welcoming into that universe before the voice appears. So, I think it was probably a bit planned subconsciously in the back of our minds. And then, there’s also a lot of coincidental stuff that just happens, and these things happen to be the right decisions.

I love the lyrics to Written in Waters. They are all by Carl-Michael, except for “Den Saakaldte,” which you wrote, and you’re one of my favorite lyricists. “Remembrance of Things Past” is a Proust reference, and “I Sang for the Swans” becomes a nod to Proust in light of the former — In Search of Lost Time obviously focuses a lot on Charles Swann. Was Proust much of an influence or just not really?

Yeah, I’ll have to put that on Carl as well. I think when you’re younger, you end up stealing some stuff from other people. And then, you don’t tell your 16-year-old bandmates about it, you know. Carl read a lot of books, and there are a lot of references in there. There’s some Shakespeare, I think. And then, he has a lot of H. P. Lovecraft in terms of words and sentences. There’s the book The Lurker at the Threshold. Basically, that’s how inspiration works: New things build on old things, and, if you don’t have the reference of the framework, nothing new will ever manage to appear. But I think that as you get older, you become a bit more clever about how you get inspired by things instead of adopting them pretty much verbatim.

I don’t know. To me, the album, references included, is as ingenious as it could be. It clearly has that wistful, dark romanticism of a bygone era. It’s so elevated, and it seems to belong to a time when people were… let’s say, more intellectual. And yet, Written in Waters was also so ahead of its time. It’s so unlike anything that had ever been done [besides Those Who Caress the Pale, obviously] and that’s been done since.

I agree, and I think borrowing and learning from great art is a very good way also of signaling to other people what you think they should check out. If you take movies or Quentin Tarantino, everything he does is basically borrowed from some other decade. He’s just been really clever and humorous about how he puts it together. So, you can see his movie, and you can be entertained, but he’s also telling you a subliminal story. He’s also telling you: “Okay, all the stuff you see here, I got from slasher movies, I got from Blaxploitation movies, I got from underground movies. Go check those out as well; you will be entertained.” I think that’s a very noble way of using other people’s art because you are, basically, in big part, paying homage to what inspired you to make what you have made.

Sorry, I’m just going to skip ahead and then come back. Because you mentioned Tarantino, I’ll ask you: What was it like being interviewed by your friend Svein Egil Hatlevik for a paper/magazine [Vagant] about David Lynch?

It was Svein Egil who put it together. I wrote something on Facebook about Lynch, and then this editor from a newspaper who Svein Egil knew reached out to him and asked if he could ask me if I could write something about some memories pertaining to Lynch. We had very little time. I had maybe a couple of hours in the morning to do it, to send it off. So, Svein Egil said: “Oh, let’s do it like an interview. I’ll just have four questions to send you, and you’ll answer them.” I think it was cool. It’s a very unpretentious piece. It’s not about myself; it’s more about our experience growing up, how, in one way or another, we formed our perception, and how we eventually brought that into our own art.

That’s really cool. I can’t wait to hear what the two of you will do in the future. You said you were going to guest with Fleurety and expressed that Svein Egil might do something with Dødheimsgard. That or even an appearance with Doedsmaghird would be amazing. Svein Egil’s past work with you has obviously been phenomenal. Back to Written in Waters: You’ve explained that when you were composing the songs, you and Carl-Michael would try to complement each other, rather than copying each other, and you both did that perfectly. What you both do with your voices is so beautiful. Was it hard at all to navigate who came in where?

I think no, not at all. I think maybe that was the most natural music-making period for Ved Buens Ende. Hugh, Carl, and me just had the tools we had, and we brought them all. Whatever we had, we were allowed to use, and that’s just how it all came about. It was really very effortless, which I can’t say about stuff later on in the band’s career. And that’s why that period of Ved Buens Ende, for me, is so fascinating because it was just three guys in the rehearsal room playing. Carl had a riff, or I had a riff, and that’s cool, man; let’s try to jam it out. I think that’s one thing that’s forever lost and can never happen again, which maybe was a bit essential to Ved Buens Ende: all the time me and Carl spent just jamming, you know — me on guitar and him behind the kit, and music came out of that. Of course, we brought riffs as well into the rehearsal space, but we had so many hours where we just were playing and doing whatever. I guess that’s part of why it was so effortless as well. It wasn’t two guys just sitting and sending each other files on computers. It was actually two guys just standing in the rehearsal room for four or five hours almost every day.

And you said that Hugh came in a week or two before you recorded Those Who Caress the Pale, and you and Carl “didn’t give a shit about him” [Read Vicotnik’s Machine Music interview.], meaning you gave him creative license. He just added his parts, and they are magnificent. As you’ve commented, they kind of tie things together. Because Hugh was so new to Ved Buens Ende at the time of Those Who Caress the Pale, I was wondering: What changed in your creative relationship between that and Written in Waters? Did he start rehearsing with you more after that, or did he remain just kind of a separate entity?

I think me and Carl just continued our jamming, and the only difference was that we had one other guy jamming along. Hugh understood the flow, and that wasn’t any problem, and we knew that. We got to experience that when he came to the studio because he did all the basslines himself one week before recording. I can’t remember a single time me or Carl told him: “No, don’t play the bass like that on that; do this or that.” There was nothing of the sort. He did everything on his own, and he did it in a week. I remember it stuck in my head: Me and Hugh would sit there and go through the riffs, and his bass would be beside him, and I would have the guitar in my lap playing a certain riff over and over and over again. He would have a sheep’s stare into the sky almost, you know — you didn’t know if he was asleep or awake. Then, he would take his tobacco package and have a cigarette. He was thinking and thinking and smoking. Then, he said: “Yeah, I got it.” I stopped. He picked up the bass. We started playing, and there was a bassline. A lot of thought went into the riffs before he even touched a single note on the bass, which was very fascinating. So, this is my memory of the process with Hugh doing the bass guitars.

Because the music is so radically inventive, was Hugh really surprised by what was going on? Maybe this is a superficial question, but were people really shocked by the music at the time — how did they accept it? We’ve discussed the fact that some of your fans physically fought you over some of your Dødheimsgard stuff, which, to me, is the epitome of stupidity.

You had some people like Fenriz, for example — he absolutely loved Those Who Caress the Pale. A person like Fenriz doesn’t really have any accountability to anybody, and so he can love whatever he wants. But there were a lot of people that maybe got Those Who Caress the Pale in the mail or through tape trading and stuff and listened to it, and they weren’t really sure what to think about it because they weren’t sure if this was accepted or what other people would think about it. They heard the black metal elements of it. But then again, they were like: “Oh, is this black metal, or is this kind of the way we don’t want to go with black metal?” So, I think a lot of people were on the fence. And then, of course, we also got butchered in a lot of, I remember, German magazines. They even butchered us in regards to our musicianship: It wasn’t only a bad representation of black metal, but we couldn’t even play?! I think a lot of people really didn’t understand what was going on, where to put it, what to think of it, how to analyze it, how to break it down because it came so out of left field. But we were enjoying it all. I never felt like: “Oh, that’s too bad; people aren’t liking it.” I’ve always felt comfortable doing music that’s not necessarily immediate or something people will get straight away. I think that’s kind of the risk you take if you want to add something to something.

Since you mentioned that certain journalists criticized you, I’ll say that sometimes journalists [as in the bad ones] can be absurd and don’t really put the thought and time into trying to understand what they’re hearing. There was a foreign review of one of your albums that was really positive, as should be the case, but it made me laugh because they got certain details very wrong. I remember, in one interview, I think it was a podcast discussion, you said it was so ridiculous because journalists criticized the musicianship of something you did, maybe it was Written in Waters, as you just said. And it’s like, no, it’s actually fantastic musicianship.

I would say Carl-Michael, at the time, was probably the top drummer in the whole black metal world, except maybe Fenriz and Hellhammer, Jan Axel, you know, second to none, basically. So, I thought that was a bit strange, especially considering how innovative we were pertaining to bass guitar and being maybe one of the first bands that highlighted the bass in the manner that we did. I think the bass was fairly technical. I wasn’t bad either. So, again, I think it was just strange journalism. You have the top drummer in Norway, one of three, and you are criticizing our musicianship?! That’s just silly.

So, this is skipping ahead again for a moment, but why not?! You brought up Fenriz — you’ve obviously guested with Isengard, and Fenriz was a part of Dødheimsgard. You have many voices, but you both have a certain… (bombastic isn’t really the right word, but) epic voice that you do sometimes. So, at moments, you remind me of one another. Am I projecting or something?

It’s not conscious, but, if I would say the guy isn’t a big inspiration for me, I would be lying. I basically grew up with Fenriz in my teen years, listening to his records. So, in one sense, Fenriz, and Ted, and Darkthrone are equal to me with Metallica or Iron Maiden in terms of their impact on my musical life. So, of course, I find all those elements in my music. I think that’s only natural. The things that change you the most as a human being in a sense, that’s also what will kind of come out in your own expression.

This comment might seem a bit tangential, but you just mentioned Metallica. The first time we spoke, which was for Metal Injection, you said that James Hetfield is your favorite frontman. Dødsengel is another great band, and James Hetfield is also the favorite of their frontman, Kark. As you’ve said, the term avant-garde doesn’t really mean anything anymore. It’s kind of a stupid term, in my opinion too, but if I have to use it, then I’ll easily say that Dødheimsgard [as well as Vicotnik’s other projects] and Dødsengel are the two best avant-garde bands [and cannot be topped in any other category]. So, I think it’s funny that the two greatest avant-garde frontmen both have the same relationship to James Hetfield, who is so different…

We take Metallica a bit for granted now, and I don’t enjoy probably half of their discography, but that doesn’t matter. What they did was very avant-garde and was very cutting edge, even some of their ’90s stuff. Some people say that if you make it big, it’s commercial — it’s not really interesting anymore. And that that’s fine… But I think you also have to consider that in the case of Metallica, their popularity is also due to how recognizable their sound is, and recognizability is also something that’s really tied to individual expression. So, of course, they’re old guys today, but I think they’ve been on the forefront, you know. I’m even sure that, in some way, they’ve helped all of us who are attending and playing small festivals today because they’ve kind of dragged up the general public to metal. And so, it means it’s accessible to more people. I think there’s probably no band that’s done more for both the metal scene in general and also music composition. If you look at Ride the Lighting and Master of Puppets, they wrote really epic songs there. And I think a couple of those songs like “Orion” are quite comparable with black metal when it comes to the atmosphere and build-ups, and it’s unconventional in the sense that it doesn’t have any chorus or stuff like that. So, I think I can draw a lot of comparisons, basically. And James Hetfield is the best frontman just because he’s so damn charismatic, you know. He owns the stage.

But if I’m going to say who my favorite frontmen are even in general, again, it’s you… Kark, as I said, is amazing. In addition, maybe there’s another individual whose name is Niklas. Anyway, “Autumn Leaves” features Lill Kathrine Stensrud. She has appeared with Ulver and is highly educated in regard to what she does. How did you make the decision to bring her on?

It’s not very mysterious or deep. She was the girlfriend of one of our friends. I think we were practicing “Autumn Leaves” at Kjetil Haugstad’s, who was her boyfriend at the time. Carl was singing along, and suddenly she was singing along and sounded great. So, we decided to bring her into the studio when we eventually recorded. That’s how that came about. Back in the day, we really had no money. We had no contacts. So, everything here is built upon the community we had — the friendships, and the bonds, and whatever utility resided within that structural norm. Everything is self-made in that respect. It’s just a bunch of friends with different abilities. Sometimes, you can put those abilities together and create something, and that’s what happened.

For a little bit, Carl-Michael’s vocals on “It’s Magic” kind of sound like the “My Favorite Things” melody. Was that intentional?

No, I don’t think so. I would definitely remember that. We got to experience a lot of aha moments. When we were in the studio, for example, the engineer had never heard us before starting to work with us, and he was like: “Yeah, I bet you guys are big Crimson fans because that’s written all over your music.” And we were like: “No, we’ve never heard King Crimson before.” People have all these associations. That’s not wrong, but they don’t pertain to us. So, we hear stuff like that all the time: “You guys, you’re big King Crimson fans.” No, we had never even heard about this.

On the topic of the engineer, Pål Espen Johannessen, could you tell me more about working with him? And did you have any production challenges?

The production challenges back in those days were that when you had an engineer, and his name wasn’t Pytten, it was almost certain that he had never worked with music like this before. So, whatever reference points he had for producing music would probably be wrong for us. I remember we were practicing “Remembrance of Things Past” in the studio because that has a section with heavy double bass drum playing. We went back to the control room, and Pål said: “Yeah, those bass drums, I’m going to do them really-really Pantera-like.” That was his point of reference — that double base drums in that kind of tempo, that’s the Pantera market. But we were like: “No, you can’t do that. What fuck are you talking about, man?!” So, it was always a bit of a struggle being in the studio back in those days, but I also think that a lot of those tensions kind of benefited the product: We didn’t really know what we were doing, and the engineers weren’t a hundred percent sure what they were doing, and, in that kind of unpredictability, something just arises that cannot be pre-planned, basically. And I think that, for lack of a better word, that’s the magic. “It’s Magic.”

There are many versions of Those Who Caress the Pale, and “Strange Calm” and “Insects (Part I)” are a couple of the bonus tracks. Is there anything you would like to say about those two songs?

“Insects” was just me and Carl goofing around in the studio, just improvising with a lot of sounds and stuff like that. In hindsight, it’s really cool. I don’t know if I consciously thought about that when we were doing it, but the thing is that when me and Carl were hanging out back in the day in his apartment, or in the rehearsal place, or whatnot, we were very goofy. We did a lot of silly recordings of ourselves doing silly voices, pretending maybe to be Finnish TV and having Finnish accents. I think maybe “Insects” reflects that behavior a bit. There’s honesty there in the sense that it’s translated with Ved Buens Ende into an artistic setting. But that’s where it comes from: all the silliness back in the day. I think that “Strange Calm” was more or less just Carl’s doing. I had a couple of riffs I hadn’t utilized, and he called me, and he said: “Hey, can I use them?” And he stuck them into this song, and he sent it back. And I said: “That sounds cool.” I think he had maybe Kai Halvorsen to engineer for him on a four-track, or something like that. [Note: Halvorsen co-engineered DHG’s Monumental Possession, acted as a member of the band itself for a time, and co-founded Dold Vorde Ens Navn.] He had a few hours, and he had a couple of his own riffs and a couple of mine, and he smashed them together. The song is what came out of that.

During our previous interview, we discussed the influence Bataille had on your lyrics, which applies more to Dødheimsgard. Your lyrics have so much philosophy in them, and your explanations are incredibly intellectual and rewarding. So, maybe this is a weird question, but because of the way you sometimes use language, I was wondering: Do you have any thoughts on Heidegger?

You know, I haven’t dug a lot into Heidegger, but can you tell me something about Heidegger I would like?

Well, I guess one thing I can tell you about Heidegger is that my Heidegger professor was actually the one who sparked my interest in black metal. One day, he said that he was going to participate in a black metal symposium and began describing black metal as an art form. I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about because I didn’t know what black metal was. I’d heard Burzum, and that immediately became one of the most important bands to me, but black metal is kind of a strange thing… When I first tried to get into it, I didn’t know about Dødheimsgard. Instead, I found a bunch of clown bands, and I got scared away from it. There are so many bands that maybe are not as authentic as they should be [but that applies to all genres]. I mean, that’s maybe too judgmental, so I shouldn’t say that…

It’s a very different time now, and I think people’s motivations have changed for why they make this music. So, I think the authenticity claim is a very hard one to define in the sense that if you’re just a guy now that wants to play black metal because you think it’s cool, you have all these blueprints from 30 years of history that you can pick and choose from. That’s an honest take… It’s not that interesting of a take, but it’s still honest. But I will say it this way: I think today you can’t get away from the fact that black metal, be it on an album or onstage, feels a lot like a tribute to something — a tribute to something that was, or a reenactment, or more staged because the costumes are ready-made. And, again, the blueprints are there: You can just read them, and pick up on them, and you can bring them along. So, in that sense, I will not understand this approach because that was not my approach. That wasn’t my connection to it initially because there was nothing. Our biggest inspirations were bands from other genres. It was death metal and thrash metal because there wasn’t a lot of black metal around yet when we started playing it. We drew inspiration from other established metal genres. And so, I don’t know what to say… I think black metal is less interesting now in the sense that it’s not really that different than anything else, like if you’re a hip-hop artist setting up a club concert and getting a share in your pocket of the money and sales from T-shirts. That’s also, in a sense, what a lot of black metal has become: It sells tickets, it sells shirts, it brings people together for beer drinking and stuff like that. There’s no way of hiding that fact. I’m not saying that is necessarily a good or a bad thing. I’m just saying that’s how it is, whereas, of course, we had a few reference bands like Mayhem, but even Darkthrone was a death metal band when I started playing myself. So, again, there weren’t really a lot of bands to draw inspiration from. You had, of course, the ’80s bands, but most of those ’80s bands were from other genres. So, you had a few, maybe: Hellhammer and Bathory, obviously. Yeah, it was just a different world, and there were no festivals to go to, at least for me anyway. There were no festivals in Norway, and we had no ambitions of a record deal, really. We had no expectations for that, whereas, if you start today or started even 20 years ago, I think you have all these expectations: You can go print your T-shirt the next week, and you’re pumping your demos out to record labels, and you’re hoping to be booked for some slot at a festival. These are the new aspirations. Considering these aspirations exist, these are also the elements that go into why people are doing this today. They want to do this stuff.

Speaking of concerts, you’ve been playing a lot of really awesome shows. I just saw that Dødheimsgard is booked for Avantgarde Music Festival, for example — I’m really happy that the label signed Trondheim’s Manes. Anyway, you have been wearing these fabulous stage outfits, and fashion is very important. It adds a lot to the visual component. So, would you like to say anything about that, or is that a silly question? Like… your suits are amazing, and you hide behind the veil, right? You know, there’s the concept of the veil of ignorance, which has come into play in your lyrics, and you have your physical veil.

It’s a sign of respect for your vocation, I guess, that you take on your suit, and you go to work in a sense. It’s a sign that you want to celebrate the occasion. It’s our band, and so we should definitely dress up for the occasion. We should definitely be the frontrunners in hyping up the performance of our music. The other side is also that I feel that you can allow yourself to take a break from the historical blueprints of black metal and instead immerse yourself in how to expand on it and get new representations of it because, you know, I just shake my head: There’s a new black-and-white corpse-paint band coming up, and they’re posing onstage and in photos as if they invented it. It makes a bit of a silly byproduct because this great genre was kind of built upon such individualistic thinking patterns and opposition. Fast-forward 30 years, and it just seems so full of conformity, so extremely stale and void of foreign ideas. So, I don’t want to call it [Vicotnik’s superior fashion sense and artful stage paint] an act of provocation because that’s not really what it’s about, but, if it provokes somebody, that’s also cool. When I’m standing onstage as an artist, I want people to meet me, not just the abbreviation of what’s coded in the blueprint of the black metal history books — that seems irrelevant in a sense. I think of a decision I made a long time ago as well: not to just recreate my own albums, just living in that time loop spanning from, say, ’91 to ’97 and repeating those years over and over and over again. I think that’s a bit sad. So, I never wanted to do that.

Yes, there’s definitely too much conformity in the black metal community, and I always rant about that… [And that, of course, is even more reason to appreciate the radical individualism of Vicotnik’s projects.] On a similar topic to your concerts, I’d love to hear more about your involvement in the theater in Sweden in the ’90s — you mentioned that last time. I’m really interested in that because your performances are obviously amazing and theatrical in the artistic and true sense of the word. Did your theater participation have an impact on your work as a musician?

It did, and it was a conscious choice in the sense that when I got the offer to do some theater, my thought was that the utility I could gain from doing theater was kind of breaking the barriers to benefit my live performances for my band. That was basically the win for me: “Yeah, I should really do this because then I will be more comfortable playing music onstage.” And so, the offer came from a friend that I grew up with. He was directing an absurdist play. He asked me if I wanted one of the roles, so I flew over to Sweden. I stayed there for about three months, I think. They had already started rehearsing. I couldn’t join them when they started everything, but I could join them a month later, and my character was interjected into the play. We did 20 shows or something like that at the Revolver Theater in Stockholm, which is small, but we had, I think, a couple of hundred people every day. It was a great experience for me. I was really terrified coming into that room with all these aspiring actors that wanted to do this for a living eventually. The director gave me my first couple of lines. I was sitting on a sofa, and he said: “And when this woman says this, then you just go absolutely crazy on the couch.” And then, she said the cue, and it was my turn. I was absolutely frozen. I couldn’t do shit. I was just sitting there, you know, and I was scratching my head. I thought: “How can I mend this? I’m totally confined within myself here. I can’t really express anything.” So, I went into the other room, and I undressed myself naked. And then, I went back into the theater group acting like nothing, you know, but I was standing there without my clothes on, having conversations with them and stuff like that. And after that, every barrier was broken, so, from there, it was smooth sailing. I couldn’t do anything in the play that was more intimidating or more naked both figuratively and literally than what I just did. So, that’s how I solved it, and I hoped that people would like it.

You’ve said you’re interested in becoming more involved in that again, and I hope you will do more theater in the future. In interviews, you’ve obviously spoken about growing up in Norway and India. However, I believe you’ve spoken less about growing up partially in Sweden as well and the musical influence that had on you. I know that one of your neighbors was in Katatonia.

Yes, he’s not in Katatonia anymore, but I grew up with Guillaume. I think he’s three years older than me. He was kind of the guy with the death metal record collection, and the death metal posters on the wall, and stuff like that. I remember my parents being really worried that I was visiting him because he seemed like a very scary individual. He’s the nicest guy in the world, but, you know, sometimes you judge the book by the cover. It was fascinating visiting this guy with all those books on the shelves, all the vinyls, and the incenses. He was definitely an inspiration for me early on. And when you’re small, a little bit of time is such a large amount of time. Maybe he just started with this a year before me, but, when you’re 13, that seems like ages, you know: “Wow, he’s been into this for a long-long time!” But then again, it was probably just a year or so. A lot of my neighbors and friends have ended up in artistic occupations like Simon Kølle — he makes music for movies — and Erik Bolin — he’s an actor today. So, it seems like we naturally just found those vocations, even though we didn’t really know that when we were doing our math homework in school — we couldn’t articulate that.

I’ve been meaning to bring up the fact that Øyvind left Dødheimsgard, which is a shame because he’s fantastic. But Camille [Giraudeau from Doedsmaghird], for now, has replaced him on drums, and he is also fantastic. I asked you the last time whether Camille might end up joining Dødheimsgard. Since your Facebook post, have there been any changes in the situation? Do you think his stay will be permanent?

I’m not sure, but he wants to do it, and I’ve told him: “Go for it, and we’ll talk about it after this year, maybe. Let’s see how it goes.” He’s booked for the shows, and I’m not really worried about his dedication, or if his drumming is going to be good enough, or fast enough, or whatever. I care more about accessibility, you know, having your band members live pretty close by. So, it’s perhaps more of a geographical problem. But if that isn’t the case, I see no reason why he shouldn’t continue on. I think that was also Øyvind’s problem… I saw he was struggling to find the motivation. I think he felt exhausted. I’ve been there where he was, but I’ve grown past it now. This is what I want to do, so it doesn’t really matter how exhausted I am. But I think that Øyvind’s experience for the last couple of years now was: “Oh, fuck, this is really too much. I can’t find the right mental energy to really do it.” So, it was undramatic. It was also something that was written in the cards for a couple of years in the sense that we all knew that it was going this way. And, luckily, we had a guy standing idly by ready to take over.

On the topic of Doedsmaghird, I hope that Ole Teigen will contribute more piano pieces in the future, as you’ve told me the two of you would like. The lyrics by Ole Svensli were obviously so powerful as well. It’s tragic what happened to him, and it’s, of course, moving and inspiring to hear what you did with his words — that you gave him the chance to be part of an album, which is something he always wanted to do. And I really love and connect with the lyrics that Frode Opsahl wrote, which is funny because, based on what you said, I think he probably hadn’t composed lyrics before. So, I was wondering: Do you think he’ll write more in the future either for you or for something else?

I definitely think he will continue writing. We talked about this before he contributed the lyrics as well because he writes Facebook posts and stuff like that. I reached out to him years ago, and I said: “Man, you really have a talent for expressing yourself. It’s very intriguing, and it’s poetic and philosophical at the same time, and really individual, more like slam poetry than any classical form.” So, we had been talking about it. Then, when I decided to make this album, or when I decided to do this Doedsmaghird project, I reached out. He hadn’t written anything structurally before, so I even had to polish up the last version of “Sparker inn en åpen dør” a bit. You’re dealing a little bit with math when you make music, and so you have to have the right number of syllables and stuff like that, at least in some cases. But to get back to your question, yes, hopefully, he will continue writing. I think he’s in a much better place now than he was when he gave me the lyrics.

I can’t say enough about the genius of Black Medium Current. So, you’ve mentioned that you put tangents in the album, and that people pick up on them as you had hoped. Maybe this is too general of a question, but would you like to speak at all about any of the tangents?

It’s tough off the top of my head. For anybody that was part of the substratosphere of Elm Street around the years of, say, ’94 to 2000, there will be an instant recognizability in the lyrics to “Et Smelter.” It’s about that place… It’s not about the bar, but it’s about the people in the bar — the kind of lost souls that huddled together in there for better or worse and every good thing that grew out of that, every piece of art, every painting, everything, because there’s tons. [Note: Elm Street, the now-shuttered institution on Dronningens gate in question, is where Fenriz told Vicotnik that he wanted to join Ved Buens Ende.] It’s not a usual thing; it’s not something that happens at any bar. You can’t just pick a bar blindly and say: “There’s probably a lot of art that came out of that bar.” There probably isn’t. You have this place in the center of Oslo, where, for one reason or another, so many people came together, and a lot of those people have a lot of really incredible stuff written to their names now. And so, it’s about the emotional aspect of that kind of togetherness because it wasn’t all friendly and mushy. It was quite violent with a lot of drugs and alcohol, but, in spite of that, there’s just that current and almost like electricity that came out of there. So, there’s a lot of stuff like that that’s concretely recognizable for some people. But I think what I intended to do on Black Medium Current is to also hone in on some kind of universal emotion that listeners can interpret in their own way — the facticity of moods, how moods are kind of a translation of an emotional state, which is really fascinating because I think we’ve created the music out of moods and vice versa for thousands of years. That was kind of what I was thinking of: How can I kind of strip Dødheimsgard down to where I connect with this stuff — the stuff that’s been hummed and drummed for thousands of years (obviously, not on vinyl, and not with synthesizers, and stuff like that, but all that is irrelevant…)? It’s kind of the core melody there. What have people been singing to themselves for generations for soothing purposes? Or, if they’re happy, what kind of melodies do they emit? And so, I wanted to hone in on that facticity, how moods relate to something factual.

(We send our infinite gratitude to Vicotnik both for this interview and his immortal art. Hail the Supervillain Outcast. Thank you to leading metal photographer NecrosHorns as well for the stunning images.)