Voices of Wonder

Voices of Wonder is a record label co-founded by Ketil Sveen and an early distributor of Norwegian Black Metal. Beginning in 1991 with releases from Deathlike Silence Productions, it connected an underground scene to the record market on which its bands nevertheless depended.

Founding and Role

Sveen was one of the founders of Voices of Wonder. The company became involved in selling Black Metal in 1991, when it began distributing releases from Deathlike Silence Productions, the label associated with Øystein Aarseth. That work placed Voices of Wonder in a practical intermediary role: it helped make recordings available to buyers even as Black Metal often sought to avoid commercial recognition.

The Market for Black Metal

Sveen described a sharp difference between the genre’s reception abroad and its size at home. Black Metal had never been especially large in Norway compared with its overseas sales; he suggested that foreign listeners could find Norway and the Far North exotic. Within Norway, he characterized the scene less as a broad popular movement than as a circle of musicians and numerous bands.

That limited domestic scale did not make sales unimportant. Without record purchases, Sveen argued, most of the bands would quickly cease to exist. Voices of Wonder’s distribution activity therefore points to a central tension in the scene: musicians could reject commercial recognition as an ideal while still relying on the circulation of records to keep their work going.