MAYHEM

In 1994, before murder and suicide destroyed them, they created one of black metal’s greatest albums. Now, frontman Attila Csihar has returned to take the band back to the top.

By Brandon Geist

Attila Csihar has a skeleton in his closet. No, he’s never burned down a church or killed anyone, unlike many of his corpse-painted peers. It’s something much worse—at least for a legendary black-metal frontman’s street cred: He’s been in a musical.

“Yes, I was in a Jesus Christ Superstar production here,” the Hungarian singer admits over the phone from his hometown, Budapest, his heavily accented voice suggesting Béla Lugosi’s cheerful little brother. “I wasn’t interested at first, but the guys [putting it on] told me I would be Caiaphas, who crucifies Jesus in the end. Then I heard the song ‘Jesus Must Die.’ I said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”

While it’s probably the most unlikely, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera is just one of the many projects Csihar has lent his voice to over the years. As a teenager in the mid Eighties, he fronted communist Hungary’s first extreme-metal band, Tormentor. Since then, he’s sung with everyone from Sunn O))) to Emperor. But without a doubt, what he’s best known for is his work with Norwegian pyromaniacs Mayhem, singing on their greatest album—and arguably the greatest black-metal album ever—1994’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas.

Unfortunately, the lineup on that landmark record proved to be literally short-lived. Just months before De Mysteriis’ release, the bassist on the album, Burzum’s Varg Vikernes, murdered Mayhem guitarist/founder Euronymous, stabbing him 23 times for motives that are still unclear. Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years in prison, where he remains today, and the band was no more. Though drummer Hellhammer reformed the group in 1995—with new guitarist Blasphemer and two former members, vocalist Maniac and bassist Necrobutcher—Mayhem never recaptured the black magic of De Mysteriis. Then came word in 2004 that Csihar had returned to the band, resulting in the closest thing to the classic lineup fans will ever see. And now with the crazed, crushing Ordo ab Chao (Seasons of Mist)—the title fittingly means “order into chaos”—Mayhem have released their most devastating record in more than a decade.

“This whole album was basically done by Blasphemer and me. He wrote the music, I wrote the lyrics, but we worked in parallel together—he lives in Portugal and I live here, but we kept in contact through the net,” Csihar explains. “It was always a question how can we work together. I think for both sides it was a very nice surprise. He is as crazy a guy as me. I mean, he’s really fucking crazy—you can see it in his eyes. We tried to keep [the album] ugly, dark, imaginative, and with a certain intelligence, as much as we could. I thought De Mysteriis was something ahead of its time. And actually, now I feel similarly about Ordo ab Chao.”

*****

Growing up in communist Hungary, Csihar discovered heavy hitters like Motörhead and Black Sabbath at an early age—the Iron Curtain couldn’t keep out the bigger bands of the Eighties metal movement—but he says the country was “completely isolated from the underground.” So, at the age of 14, ravenous for more extreme music, Csihar formed the black-metal band Tormentor.

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one hungry for sonic extremity because Tormentor quickly gained a large cult following that could sometimes get out of hand. “One time, we were waiting to go onstage. Suddenly, the dressing-room door crashes in. This guy [from the opening act] came in with a broken face, and, throwing his guitar to the corner, he said ‘Ah, fuck this! This is fucking bullshit!’ He was almost crying. What happened was that our crowd, they just wanted to see us, so they attacked his band. We could hear them shouting ‘Tor-men-tor!’ I was just a kid, so I was like, What the fuck? It was a little scary.”

By 1990, communism had fallen in Hungary, and according to Csihar, “metal actually went a bit down [in popularity], ’cause people started to be very optimistic for one or two years. No one wanted to listen to a bunch of fuckups. But after it turned out that [democracy] was not the Promised Land, metal came back.” It was also around this time that Csihar got a letter from a Norwegian fan called Euronymous who had his own band: Mayhem.

“It was funny because my artistic name in Tormentor was Mayhem, so the first thing I thought was, Wow, someone is joking with my name. Then Euronymous sent me some tapes. The music was OK—I wasn’t amazed. But when I heard the first demo tapes for De Mysteriis, I thought, Fuck! I had never heard something like it. It had such a dark atmosphere.”

Mayhem had been working on the album for a few months when, in April 1991, their singer, Dead, killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. (Afterwards, rumors spread that his bandmates had made a necklace from fragments of his skull and a soup from bits of his brain.) Bassist Necrobutcher was so distraught that he left the group, and Vikernes stepped in. Euronymous, meanwhile, sent Csihar the demos and asked him if he’d join the band.

Finally coming to Norway in ‘93, Csihar recorded his vocals behind a black curtain in darkness, surrounded by candles, in order to create the proper mood. Judging from the results, that mood was damn disturbing. On De Mysteriis, Csihar snarls, moans, chants, and incants like a demented satanic shaman, delivering a performance so extreme it sometimes borders on the comical. “My style of vocals was pretty challenging to the scene because it was very unusual,” he recalls. “The first reactions [to the record] were pretty confused. People didn’t know what the fuck was this. It took, like, one year for people to recognize it as one of the best black-metal albums.”

But by then Euronymous was dead, and, for the time being, so were Mayhem. “I couldn’t believe when I first heard about the murder. I was really upset,” Csihar says. “I remember after a couple of days [of De Mysteriis rehearsals, Varg and Euronymous] started to say to me, behind the other’s back, ‘Don’t you think that guy is strange?’ and this and that. Then the other said the same. I thought they were just stressed out and tired. I never thought it would go so far.”

With Mayhem dissolved, Csihar became something of a mercenary vocalist, working with more than 10 different bands and continuing to develop his technique by taking opera lessons and teaching himself Mongolian throat singing. He says, though, that as early as 1998, when he met the new Mayhem lineup at a show in Milan (and performed a song, “From the Dark Past,” with them), they were already talking about him eventually rejoining. “We agreed that if they ever needed another vocalist, I would be the first asked.”

That situation finally arose in late 2004, as Maniac tired of the touring life. Csihar stepped in almost immediately and began to take Mayhem’s live set to new heights, culminating in last summer’s controversial show at the Gates of Metal fest in Hultsfred, Sweden. In front of a 2,500-plus-person crowd, Mayhem took the stage surrounded by skinned pigs’ heads on stakes and backed by a crucified human torso. To top it all off, Csihar performed in a butcher’s coat spattered in blood, wearing a deboned pig’s head over his own head. Scandinavian animal-rights groups condemned the show, and newspapers like Sweden’s Aftonbladet ran outraged articles. But they weren’t the only ones unnerved.

“I was freaked out myself,” concedes Csihar, who’s a vegetarian. “Like, Fuck, I don’t know if I want to do this.” Turns out he had lost his luggage—including his military-style stage getup—earlier on the tour; not wanting him to play in his street clothes, the bandmates found a butcher’s shop that was willing to help. So Csihar started performing as what he calls “a mad butcher,” and in Sweden, Mayhem took the concept to its full potential. “I was pretty stressed out, but I sensed that the others in the band became very interested in how I would look onstage,” notes the singer. “They really enjoyed throwing blood on me and making me look really fucked up, and we went onstage in a really good mood. It ended up being one of our best shows.”

It’s clear that even when they’re not splattering each other in gore, Csihar and his new/old bandmates are having a lot of fun together. In fact, though it’s a strange thing to say about a band with such a grim, violent history, Csihar claims that returning to Mayhem has been a lot like coming home. “Mayhem is a kind of family,” he says. “Once you’re part of it, you’re always a part of it.”