Girls Against God

occult fire of hatred.
I’ve been taught to think far too much about the autobiographical, about what could be called private or even weak in the art that rewrites other art. As if how close the ‘I’ is to reality overshadows all other questions. Shouldn’t we rather think about the bonds that are formed, that connect us? I imagine the shadow of Puberty, the bond, stretching out toward me and embracing me, enveloping me in its flame. In this connection, art is a magical place where reality and fiction finally are just the end points, not the underlying substance, they are full stop and capital letter, comma and line break, while the place that actually emerges, that’s what’s magical.
This is what fascinates me: not writing as art, I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to understand that, never figuring out what it is, for that I’m too primitive or inadequate to understand. But writing as magic, that appeals to me, and writing as the creation of bonds and bands, that I can understand. Connect-the-dots drawings and the invisible links between them. The band is a desire to blaspheme the beloved icons of the art institutions; a desire to save and be saved, and to rewrite: the desire not to be a passive recipient.
I haven’t considered my work blasphemous since my early student days. Many years have passed since I told myself I hated God. I’ve never thought about magic. But in the days following my visit to the National Gallery, all this is woven together in my head, and on my old American keyboard I create a new document and begin to write something, a film, without a commission or a project in mind. The first thing I do is type Æ, Ø and Å, again and again, internalising the keyboard shortcuts as if I were playing a theme on the piano, again and again. Suddenly I’m sitting studying the old black metal clips on the bonus DVD in the Darkthrone records. Now I feel all that black returning, as if it never really left me, as if everything I’ve done to reinvent myself as mature and subtle and a natural creamy blond has been completely eradicated with a tiny click. The black metal clips make me want to start a new band, not to play music but to start creating something here, in community, in bonds, in hatred, in the simplified complexity of swirling tree tops in black and white, in the pixelated fractals. The creation has to begin with blasphemy, the hope in hatred. I have to get back there.
In blasphemy there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit. Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic.
A few days after we first meet at the museum, Terese and I receive an email from Venke inviting us over for coffee and a duel. Terese replies enthusiastically, saying that she’s bringing her metaphorical sword, and asking for milk, sugar and biscuits with the coffee. I send a link to a book in an online bookshop as my reply. It’s the book on the band Hellhammer: Only Death Is Real. The black metal bonus material relates to everything, it sticks to everything in me, and in us.
In the book, Tom Gabriel Fisher recounts how Hellhammer’s members, later regarded as the most important forerunners to Scandinavian black metal, used to stage sword fights in the middle of the night at a traffic crossing in the Swiss suburbs. At that time they spent their evenings rehearsing and recording cassettes, while working menial day jobs in garages and factories. The band members, sick of the stifling Central European post-war era, had to invent their own rituals, and the music, inspired by heavy metal, punk and lots and lots of hatred, was the catalyst.
They put on costumes and hid by the traffic lights late at night, and when a car stopped for a red light they charged into the street and started to fence, stopping only when the car got a green light. This was the early eighties, long before there were live-action role players or metallers in black capes and medieval outfits, and seen up close through a thin car windowpane, it must have been a frightening and absurd sight.
Driven by anger and the urge to rebel, Hellhammer’s members wanted to play the part of knights on that boring suburban stage. They wanted to find meaning in an existence marked by submission, quietude, conformity and tradition. The sword fight was band practice, a gig, a protest against uniform everyday life and the hopelessness awaiting them in modern adulthood. Their battle was fought on the streets, in front of warehouses, shops, housing estates, parking lots, garbage dumps and the Swiss Alps.
After reading the book I had a clearer idea of that role-playing scene than of Hellhammer’s music. At first I thought it was because sound is more difficult to describe, or that I didn’t understand the music well enough, but there’s another reason. Sword fights feel like complete rituals, almost like activism. They are problematic and violent, but also absurd and distinctive. Music, on the other hand, is accommodated in existing formats like records and gigs, and the descriptions of how Hellhammer found its musical expression are saturated with references to other bands and genres. As musicians, its members are