DIMMU BORGIR

Purists may pooh-pooh the slickness of their riffs and the sheen of their orchestral synths, but hell itself knows that they are the giants of their once-marginal genre

By Dan Epstein

It’s lunchtime at La Parilla, the famous East L.A. shrine to home-style Mexican cuisine. As is typical for a Saturday afternoon, the place is jammed with Latino families happily stuffing their faces with carne asada and carnitas, while wandering mariachis serenade them with traditional songs. Unlike most Mexican joints in this part of town, La Parilla doesn’t serve birria, a rich goat stew that’s considered a delicacy, but Dimmu Borgir’s Silenoz—who is presently occupying the restaurant’s back booth, along with fellow Dimmu guitarist Galder—doesn’t mind the dish’s omission from the menu. “I wouldn’t have eaten it,” he says, digging hungrily into a roasted Cornish hen. “I don’t eat any animal with cloven hooves,” he laughs. “Those we hold too dear!”

In a neighborhood where it’s virtually impossible to walk 10 feet without seeing a mural or poster of the Virgin Mary, the presence of two members of Norway’s biggest self-professed Satanic band makes for an amusing contrast indeed. Most of the restaurant’s patrons probably wouldn’t be too amused to overhear Silenoz calmly making his case against Christianity, but the clatter of the kitchen and the music of the mariachis render the soft-spoken Norseman almost inaudible beyond Revolver’s tape recorder.

“Christianity is based on so many lies,” he says matter-of-factly. “Why do people go with it? Why don’t they just question things, you know? The Church just enslaves people, and I can’t help but think it has something to do with intelligence. If you are intelligent, then why would you settle for that?”

These are the thorny questions that lie at the very heart of Dimmu Borgir’s new record, In Sorte Diaboli (Nuclear Blast). The album’s title is Latin for “By the Choosing of Satan,” and its songs revolve around the story of a young man who’s studying to be a priest but realizes that he must make the choice between God and Satan—and that he’s definitely leaning toward the latter. “He has almost like a spiritual transformation from one side to the other, in the course of just a few weeks,” Silenoz explains. “He gets these visions, and they’re like an awakening, you know?”

But though it’s been billed in advance as a “concept album,” and the story itself is set in Medieval Europe, Silenoz insists that In Sorte Diaboli is not your stereotypical conceptual rock opus. “When you hear ‘concept album,’ you think about something that’s totally thought through, with, like, 10 million songs and all these characters with names,” he explains. “But we didn’t even think about doing stuff like that, because it’s not a concept in that sense. It’s more like King Diamond’s The Eye meets Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son—not to compare it to that, but just to have some sort of reference.

“You don’t really know what happens to the kid in the story, or what he becomes,” he continues. “But he starts to believe that he is the incarnation of the Devil, or that he is God on Earth. Other people around him start to believe this, and he gets his own cult following. I haven’t really gone into details, either in the story or in the lyrics, because I don’t want to have a conclusive story. I want to leave that open. The symbolism in itself is that nothing is absolute: There’s a lot of questions asked, but not all of them are answered.”

But while In Sorte Diaboli may be short on obvious plot points, its music is positively cinematic in its power and scope. On thrillingly epic tracks like “The Serpentine Offering” (the album’s first single), “The Fundamental Alienation,” and “The Foreshadowing Furnace,” the band—which also includes vocalist Shagrath, keyboardist Mustis, bassist ICS Vortex, and legendary Mayhem drummer Hellhammer—whips up a dark firestorm of sound that’s part Norwegian black metal, part melodic thrash, and part operatic horror-movie score. It all makes for a challenging and deeply affecting listening experience, especially on headphones; so it’s surprising to find out that the album actually came together fairly quickly, intricate arrangements and all.

“It was a more spontaneous record than we’ve done for quite awhile,” Silenoz admits. “We didn’t make proper demos, like we did on Death Cult Armageddon,” he says, referring to the band’s previous album.

“A lot of songs we actually finished in the studio,” laughs Galder, as he drains his second Corona of the day. “For us, that’s very unusual.”

“And the vocals weren’t arranged, or anything,” adds Silenoz. “So it was very spontaneous, and I think that keeps it still interesting for us to listen to now. By the time we were finished with the last album, I was tired of listening to it.”

Unlike Death Cult Armageddon, parts of which were recorded with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, In Sorte Diaboli is heavier on the guitars, while all of its orchestral moments were created entirely by keyboards. “The sounds you can get today, they are so realistic, it’s impossible to hear the difference,” Galder shrugs. “We’ve done the orchestra already, and we just wanted to do something different. We thought it worked fine live with keyboards anyways.”

According to Silenoz, the lyrics and story for In Sorte Diaboli were actually completed long before the band even began to write the songs for the album. It was only while listening to Shagrath track the lead vocals, he says, that he realized he’d put far more of himself into the lyrics than he’d originally intended.

“When we did the vocals in the studio, I was looking more and more into the lyrics and tried to decipher them more and analyze them more, and I realized there was quite personal stuff in there, too,” he says. “It wasn’t intended to be personal, but it came out pretty personal as well.”

Though not raised in a religious family, Silenoz spent his early childhood Saturdays in the Norwegian equivalent of Sunday school, “because there wasn’t anything else to do around where I lived,” he recalls. “Each kid who went there had a card, and you got a ‘heaven star’ on it for each time you were there. I wasn’t there as often as the other kids, so my card didn’t have as many stars as the other kids, and I think it triggered something in me back then—I got the feeling that I was supposed to think that I wasn’t as good as the other kids, simply because I had less stars. I’m still proud of that to this day, that at the age of 6, I already knew the hypocrisy of religion. So I think that’s part of the personal stuff in the story of the album.”

“Hey, my mother forced me to go to dance school,” laughs Galder. “I had to dance with girls and shit. Foxtrot—all that.”

Silenoz soon ditched Sunday school for good, concentrating instead on soccer and ski-jumping—and later, of course, music. When asked whether his subsequent embrace of Satanism was based on actual beliefs or just a symbolic rejection of organized religion as a whole, he doesn’t hesitate.

“It’s a mixture,” he says. “I don’t view Satanism as a religion at all. It’s something totally opposite of that. To me, it just means the freedom to do whatever I want, but at the same time be aware that what I do towards other people can come back to me. It’s more based on reality than any other stuff out there. It’s just natural thinking for me. Common sense, you know?”

Dimmu Borgir have always been firmly aligned with the dark side, ever since Silenoz and Shagrath founded the band in Oslo back in 1993. Named for an Icelandic volcanic formation whose name roughly translates as “Dark Castle,” Dimmu didn’t exactly radiate “commercial potential” from the get-go; not only were they playing black metal and surrounding themselves with demonic imagery but their first two albums, 1994’s For All Tid and 1996’s Stormblast, were sung completely in Norwegian.

“We’ve never analyzed what we do too much,” says Silenoz. “We go by gut feeling. The decision to start singing in English after the Stormblast album was simply, ‘Let’s do English—it sounds better.’ It’s whatever comes natural.”

And yet, over the next decade, Dimmu somehow became the best-
selling black-metal band in the world. At this writing, Death Cult Armageddon has sold more than 110,000 copies in the U.S. alone, while the global sales of the Dimmu catalog total well over a million.

“Well, that’s if you want to call us a black-metal band, because I think we’re so much more than that,” say Silenoz of the “best-selling black-metal band” title. “But I don’t mind the tag. We like the old black-metal bands. But we’re 30 years old—for us, it’s like, it’s either good music or bad music. We’ve created our own sound by now, you know? I mean, we have a lot of traditional black-metal riffs, as well, but we do it differently, and we incorporate so much other stuff.”

“I think our music is maybe a bit more technical than most black-metal bands,” Galder explains. “As a guitarist, I like to do things a bit more technical. But for a lot of people who like black metal, if it’s a bit technical, then it’s not ‘old school’ in the right way.”
Asked how the band is perceived in Norway, where black-metal albums typically share retail shelf space with the latest pop hits, Silenoz just laughs. “Like sellouts,” he says with a grin. “We get shit from all sides, but we still manage to sell more records than regular pop bands.”

Not that Silenoz and the rest of the band are losing any sleep over the name-calling. “We don’t make music to sell albums,” he says. “We make metal with blast beats, you know? We would still do the same if we didn’t sell albums, though maybe not on the same professional level. You start out with a band name like ours, and the music we play—it’s not like world domination is the first thing you think about, really!

“Of course, we had luck, like any band needs on their way,” he continues. “But we’ve also done a lot of stupid things that we shouldn’t have done, and that we regret. But that’s something you have to go through, and you just have to take the chances when they are there. Otherwise, you’ll regret not taking them.”

Prodded for a prime example of Dimmu stupidity, Silenoz sighs and recounts the following tale: “In ’98, we went to Finland, and we did this Christmas photo shoot, because we thought, ‘Oh, Venom did it back in the day, so why can’t we?’ Aw, man, we were so drunk—totally intoxicated—and it came out so fucking hilariously stupid and childish, you know? But it was just one of those things that happened. I just laugh about it now. But as I said earlier, we don’t sit down and analyze too much before we do stuff. And that’s probably one of the times we should have thought a bit more before we did it,” he laughs. “Finland is still one of the countries where we’re most popular, so I guess it didn’t hurt too much.”

Silenoz doesn’t drink at all these days. He stopped back in 2005, due to “health reasons.” (“Now I have to drink twice as much, to make up for him,” cackles Galder.) With a world tour for In Sorte Diaboli looming, Silenoz admits he’s slightly worried about falling back into his old habits. “We’ve played festivals since I stopped drinking, but that’s not a problem, because you just fly in and fly out,” he explains. “But when you’re on tour, there is so much dead time where there’s nothing to do but drink.” He says he’s thinking about writing a novel that takes place during the German occupation of Norway in World War II, and hopes that sticking to a daily writing regimen will provide sufficient distraction.

Whether it’s due to an ingrained Norwegian work ethic or simply a compulsive desire to make music, the men of Dimmu certainly do manage to find ways to keep themselves occupied. In the time between Death Cult Armageddon and In Sorte Diaboli, Galder recorded the 2005 disc Vermin with his black-metal outfit Old Man’s Child; Silenoz collaborated with Old Man’s Child guitarist, Jardar, in a “dark death-metal” band called Insidious Disease; and Shagrath waxed the 2006 album Doomsday Rock N’ Roll with his biker-metal combo, Chrome Division. In 2005, Shagrath and Silenoz joined forces with Hellhammer to rerecord 1996’s Stormblast—still in Norwegian, of course, but with significantly beefed-up production values.

“It’s been bugging us ever since we first did the album,” Silenoz explains. “We’d just been waiting for the contract for that album to run out, so we could redo it. I know a lot of our old fans think, Why fix something that’s not broken? But for us, it’s always been broken. And it’s not like the old version is going to go away—they already have it. It was just something we wanted to do for our own peace of mind. But I do think even the original recording shows that we had something going back then, even if it’s totally different from the stuff we do now.”

It’s unlikely, however, that Silenoz will want to give In Sorte Diaboli the same treatment 10 years from now. The most fully realized Dimmu album to date, it’s the sort of record whose black majesty will surely only deepen with age.

“We had so much material that didn’t make the album,” Silenoz reveals, as we wrap up the remains of our lunch and call for the check. “We probably wrote enough for three albums. But we just wanted to go with what sounds best, and we are very satisfied with the results. In the end, no matter how we do it, it’s going to sound like Dimmu.”