Girls Against God

over the hills and the rooftops and the car parks and tints the hoods of cars and the pedestrian’s intestines.
It’s early morning, sometime during the spring of 2016. We’ve just finished our first project inside the rock under Ekeberg Hill. This is our band’s first gig. With copper bit, death knells, mistletoe and scans of the root system in the botanical garden, we’ve cooked up a razor-thin infected metal thread that we’ve pushed into one of the city’s main reserves. It doesn’t interrupt the internet or the electricity, and it emits no more sound than a faint peep. Only particularly attentive dogs can hear our gig, and right now they are still waiting patiently for their owners to wake up and take them out for a morning walk. But you’re not supposed to hear anything, either. We summoned smell with our incantations, not sound. We’ve asked for the silent h to manifest.
Our result oozes from the mountainside and continues to do so for the next two years. Colloquially it becomes known as the trash stench, because it smells like rotten milk and wet dog. But the smell isn’t trash or animals. It’s metaphysical waste. Just as a percentage of the dust in our homes is our own hair and skin, the smell comes from internet waste, from email after email of generic asylum application rejections, cuts in social services, social housing rent hikes, press release after press release from government spin doctors. We’ve made porridge out of metaphysical pimple pus. Right now, even God is wading in it out there. Call it our little noise project, our little wool factory.
Frequent updates about the trash stench pop up on news apps throughout the following year:
UNEXPLAINED SMELL IN OSLO
and later
IS THE SMELL HERE TO STAY?
SMELL EXPERTS CRACK THE STENCH CODE
TIRED OF STINKING
THE TOURIST INDUSTRY IN TROUBLE
ESTATE AGENTS FEAR HOUSING MARKET STENCH- COLLAPSE
CITY COUNCIL HIRES TECH GIANT FOR STENCH INVESTIGATION
and
FINANCIAL SECTOR SPONSORS STENCH INVESTIGATION WITH MILLIONS
The final update, a year later, is
TECH GIANT ON THE TRASH STENCH: BENIGN BUT SERIOUS ENVIRONMENTAL TERRORISM FROM UNKNOWN CRIMINAL NETWORK
In the article the private investigators emphasise that while the stench hasn’t brought with it any measurable air pollution, they fear that it creates worry and confusion in the population, and so they are developing new tech to improve air quality as they investigate this unknown criminal network. They add, ‘We believe that we can reverse negative tendencies in social development using the right technology. The right technology could, we maintain, be the answer to questions usually regarded as social issues.’
That last sentence automatically produces an extra puff of stench above central East Oslo. An invisible cloud brews down in Grønlia, only to travel against the wind towards Bjørvika, making good time, and seeping into every air vent in the new Barcode development. It’s a start: a slow, modern church arson, but we need more. We need sound.
Black metal. What is it, when did it begin?
1993, says Terese. Church arson and killings.
1987, says Venke. Mayhem releases their first EP, Death Crush.
1981, I say. Hellhammer’s knight rituals and cassette tapes.
Trash the year then, and let’s stick to Norway, says Venke. True Norwegian black metal.
Is it perhaps the closest we ever got to rebellion? someone asks.
Rebellion against what, someone responds, Norwegian Christian culture? It was just a couple of teenage boys.
Young Munchs, says the third, and all three feel the presence of the Puberty girl. She’s a Munch after all, painted half living, half dead. Munch’s people are exactly that, corpse paint before corpse paint, no real human underneath, nothing either living or dead.
Black metallers didn’t invent corpse paint; it has existed since the dawn of pigments. They didn’t even invent the Norwegian expressionist version. But they reinvented the technique as a post-modern teenage ritual, like a social medium before social media. They invented it for themselves and put their own living human faces underneath. Through this transformation we didn’t become just living dead, but also icons, tools for communication, apps. The mask was more real than my own face, a body part that was only partly my own, and only partly carried my sins. I was death, my own and others’; I was unrecognisable behind the white and black, as we all become unrecognisable when all our muscles relax in the moment of death. I rose from ancient culture to magic, to art, to teenage ritual and back again.
Rock music had already created a connection with ritual, with sex, with role playing, and black metal took that ritual all the way back to its roots. Or all the way back to its body, at least, if the male teenage body could be called the root. In 1997 I’m too late and the wrong gender for being part of black metal, but I get to take part in the aesthetics and the performance: the makeup, the images, the parties. I get to join the white party that is the South, Norway, Scandinavia, the white taciturn gruel, and the vaults of silence.
Black metal and I emerge from this whiteness, in the silent h’s, those that cover complete darkness, total misanthropy, a complete and devouring black hole that gorges its way down and into the Norwegian roots. Perhaps black metallers in ’91, ’87, ’93, like me in 2002, desire a black sheet to write on. Angry, lonely boys, looking for their own negative and a way to redefine the term evil. One winter they decide that everything should be black, the colour of evil, white upside down. When summer comes they decide to stop washing their hair, because the opposite of white is dirty. It’s unclear whether or not they start to stink of rotten milk and wet dog. The next summer people start dying. At that point I’m still a long way from discovering the subculture, and when I become part of the scene six or