Girls Against God

defined by their instruments, their references to other bands, and the hope that their band will lift them up a level in the hierarchy and empower them.
I think about my metal band in 1998 and the disappointment I felt at the banality of the concert format and the concert venue. I think about hundreds of solo shows and projects in the years to come, and the constant pressure of conformity on what I hoped would be another word; the predictability of set lists, the pattern of the album format, the stage edge and stage times and tickets and merch and budget and ads. Hellhammer’s music was created under that pressure, and Norwegian black metal, too, but bands were also formed outside music – bands formed by bonds. The bands’ actions turned violent and tragic, but it could have been different. The other bands, beyond music, could have been art.
I note in my film document, ‘A band is a desire for blasphemy against the disciplines.’ I desire a ritual, multidisciplinary, intricate form of expression where technique and genre and subjectivity and other predetermined systems are subordinate to the community, or the desire to hate together.
Oslo seems different now. It’s as if I can look down at the ground and see straight into the soil. History is there, in ever-changing strata, layer after layer of subculture from different eras.
It’s been twenty-five years, thirty years, since the golden age of black metal, and even longer since Hellhammer’s activist knighthood. Even for me, almost twenty years have passed since I dressed in a cape and searched in vain for black lipstick at H&M. The world is different now. Our corpse paint has long since streaked our cheeks, run into the Alna river and through Lodalen valley, under the train tracks and Schweigaards Street and into the neoliberal brackish water in Bjørvika.
Our hair, which for most of us at some point was long and black, mine even on my driver’s licence photo, and was modelled on capes or lowered stage curtains, has returned to the colour of its roots; our hairlines have receded; strands from our bald spots have run down the shower drain, down to the underground where they came from. My hair was cut short a long time ago and its black chemical pigment is history. Our provincially black clothes were long ago donated to charity shops, Christian thrift shops with a saviour complex.
We’re in Oslo now, and our past is mostly invisible. Our black sign language is broken, hidden away or drained into the sewers along with cocaine traces from Western Oslo, traces of performance drugs from Sognsvann Park and heroin from Grønland. Even the Old Town tilts and slides down toward the Barcode development in the fjord. Subculture always flows downhill, backward. Black metal is world famous now, but it has washed itself clean of subculture, the way social democracy rinsed off socialism. Black metal isn’t black anymore, it isn’t a protest or a warning, it comes dressed in brawnier, more mythical and commercial colours.
But soon our band is complete, our band which is neither brawny nor mythical, but runs over, flows down in spirals to the underground. Around us Oslo East crumbles, corrodes, rots and sinks. The band makes bricks, concrete and steel beams, the places where the city is joined together flake. We pull the structures down with us.
Venke has been standing next to me, staring at the school building where we agreed to meet. Now she follows me along the school’s fenced perimeter, a duffle bag dangling from her back. We’ve been trying to remember what questions we were set in the Norwegian exams at college. Venke claims to remember something about climate change and science fiction, but college exams were long ago, and we remember them incompletely, sometimes so incompletely that I wonder if we’re confusing the essays we wrote with our real experiences.
I’m pretty sure I remember writing about Norwegian fairy tales. The text I chose was the fairy tale that frightened me the most during my childhood, ‘The mill that grinds at the bottom of the sea.’ Venke doesn’t even remember it. She’s sitting on a bench in the sun now, with her arms on the backrest and legs stretched out in front of her. Terese hasn’t arrived yet. The fairy tale, I say, is the story of two brothers who take turns owning a mill that one of them acquired in a trade with the devil himself, in hell. The mill can grind anything the owner wants, be it Christmas dinner or gold, and in the end it gets stuck and can’t be stopped, and one of the brothers almost drowns both himself and his entire family farm in herrings and gruel. It was this drowning motif that scared me the most, more than hell and the devil: the scene where you suffocate in traditional, grey pale Norwegian home cooking.
Maybe this is what I’ve had to travel to get away from my whole life. Herrings, gruel and God.
There’s Terese. Three sisters.
Where are we going? asks Terese.
Hell, says Venke, and I laugh as I always do at the word hell. It’s got to be the South that returns and still exists in me, the hope in hatred.
We’re on our way now. Our feet step on the hard asphalt, but also on something soft. Had this been winter it could have been snow, but the snow has melted, and we’re the only ones who can feel it. We’re in the centre of a sea of invisible herrings and gruel. It’s the refuse from all the white, fermented, rotten and aging stuff. We’ve spent hundreds of years perfecting a totally airtight method for flushing out and down