Euronymous–Varg Vikernes relationship

The relationship between Øystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous, and Varg Vikernes began as a close friendship within the emerging Norwegian Black Metal scene. Aarseth helped bring Vikernes’s one-man project Burzum into the scene and planned to release it through Deathlike Silence Productions; the two later became ideological provocateurs to one another. Their association joined friendship, musical work, and a struggle over what counted as authentic extremity, before ending with Aarseth’s murder in 1993.

Friendship and musical patronage

By mid-1991, Aarseth was in contact with several Norwegian bands and intended to release much of their work through Deathlike Silence Productions. Vikernes, who lived in Bergen, was a newer arrival. Reaching Oslo meant a six- or seven-hour journey over the mountains by car or train, but Vikernes made extended visits, and he and Aarseth quickly became friends. They arranged for the label to sign Burzum, whose debut album had already been recorded.

Aarseth was enthusiastic about Burzum’s sound and presentation. Its depressed atmosphere and high, wailing vocals distinguished it from other bands in the scene, while its fit with Aarseth’s pursuit of music he regarded as truly evil made the project especially appealing to him. The relationship was therefore more than a personal friendship: Aarseth’s role as label owner and a central scene figure gave him influence over whether Vikernes’s music would be heard and how it would be positioned.

Shared space and collaboration

For a time, Vikernes moved into the basement of Helvete record shop in Oslo, sharing the barren space with Samoth, the guitarist of Emperor. The close living arrangement reflected a scene in which musicians moved among one another’s projects: Vikernes also served as a stand-in bassist for Mayhem and played on the band’s debut full-length album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. In a Mayhem interview from this period, he praised Aarseth and the other band members, describing the group as stronger than before and Aarseth as a musical genius. He also said that Hellhammer would play drums on Burzum, although that plan never came to pass.

Their closeness developed inside a social world organized around Helvete as well as around music. Ihsahn later recalled that visitors had to be trusted and accepted, and that younger people showed deference to Aarseth and older scene members. The shop’s atmosphere could feel powerful and demanding; its informal standards helped define who belonged. Aarseth’s influence was thus personal and cultural as well as commercial, while Vikernes entered the group as a newcomer whose music and presence were being taken seriously.

Ideological escalation

The book describes Aarseth and Vikernes as both projecting increasingly intense pro-evil and Devil-worship ideas in underground interviews and among their companions. Although some people in the scene later credited Vikernes alone with this shift, the account argues that Aarseth was already moving in a similar direction and suggests that the two charismatic men encouraged one another. This interpretation makes their relationship a source of escalation rather than a simple story of one man converting the other.

Vikernes’s own later account gives him an active role in that process. He said that the men had initially joked about Satanism, then described challenging Aarseth to take the professed identity seriously by treating Satanism as an inversion of Christianity. In his telling, Aarseth followed the provocation. This is Vikernes’s retrospective version of their exchange, not an independently established account of every step; the book sets it beside the broader observation that both men were advancing comparable attitudes. The distinction matters: Vikernes claimed to have pushed the argument, while the account resists reducing Aarseth’s development to Vikernes’s influence alone.

Rupture and significance

The available evidence traces a sharp reversal: Vikernes’s early praise of Aarseth and participation in his band’s work stand against the later hostility implicit in Vikernes’s own reference to killing him. Aarseth was stabbed to death in 1993, ending their relationship in violence. The book’s account preserves both the collaborative history and the competing explanations of their ideological turn, without making the friendship a sufficient explanation for its fatal ending.

Their relationship also shows how the Norwegian scene’s boundaries were shaped by personalities as much as by music. It had no fixed rulebook; influence rested with prominent participants who set expectations, controlled access to platforms, and helped define the scene’s outlook. Aarseth offered Vikernes a place in that network and a route for Burzum’s release. As their shared posture hardened, the friendship that had brought them together became part of the story of how the scene’s pursuit of extremity could intensify and fracture.