Burzum

Burzum is the one-man music project formed by Varg Vikernes after he left the Bergen Death Metal band Old Funeral. Initially welcomed by influential Norwegian Black Metal figures for its unusual, bleak sound, it became both a prominent musical project and a vehicle for Vikernes’s changing ideas. Its history runs from independent, tightly controlled recording and a brief period of close collaboration with Mayhem to later ambient music made in prison, while its imagery and associated public statements increasingly connected the project to heathen revivalism and political extremism.

Formation and Entry into the Scene

Vikernes had played guitar for years before joining Old Funeral, but he came to regard the band’s concerns as superficial and juvenile. Through that group he met musicians who would later form Immortal and encountered Øystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous. After leaving Old Funeral, he established a one-man project so he could control his own work. It was first called Uruk-Hai, after a reference in J. R. R. Tolkien, and then renamed Burzum, another Tolkien-derived word meaning darkness.

Burzum entered a scene whose boundaries were defined not only by music but also by musicians’ attitudes and beliefs. The scene had no fixed rulebook, and its outlook shifted with the influence of prominent participants. In Oslo, Aarseth’s record shop Helvete became a center of gravity: acceptance depended on trust and perceived seriousness, and visitors were expected to show deference to the older figures. Vikernes arrived from Bergen, a long journey from Oslo, and made extended visits. Metalion recalled that he was initially little known, but had begun discussing Burzum just as he completed its first album. Aarseth was excited by what he heard, and the two became close friends.

Recordings and Musical Identity

By the middle of 1991, Burzum was among the bands in contact with Aarseth, who planned to issue much of the emerging Norwegian scene through Deathlike Silence Productions. Vikernes’s debut had already been recorded, and Aarseth considered its sound and presentation a strong fit for his ambition to release music he regarded as truly evil. The album’s depressed atmosphere and wailing, painfully hoarse high vocals distinguished it from other groups in the scene. Aarseth also helped secure the first Burzum CD with financial assistance from Vikernes.

The project’s solitary design did not prevent Vikernes from taking part in the scene’s overlapping lineups. During a period in Oslo he lived in the basement of Helvete with Samoth, guitarist of Emperor, and briefly served as a stand-in bassist for Mayhem. He played on that band’s long-delayed debut full-length, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. On Burzum’s second release, Aske, Samoth played bass; otherwise, Vikernes maintained the project as his own. This combination of occasional collaboration and sustained solo control reflected the project’s founding purpose: to make work on Vikernes’s terms.

Burzum’s identity also circulated through more than its recordings. An early promotional lighter for Aske used an image of the smoldering ruins of Fantoft Stave Church. A later recollection described the decision as a misguided response to the media attention surrounding Vikernes, made at a time when the people involved did not believe he had actually burned churches; in retrospect, the speaker regretted it. The object’s subsequent meaning therefore differed sharply from its stated original intention: it joined the band’s promotion to the very church-burning association that the publicity had brought into view.

From Friendship to Threat and Public Scrutiny

The close relationship between Vikernes and Aarseth belonged to the early period of Burzum’s development, but the evidence also records a deterioration in relations. Burzum’s second release, Aske, appeared in early 1993, months after the burning of Fantoft Stave Church. Around this period, bad blood arose between Vikernes and Aarseth, amid wider friction between Norwegian and Swedish Black Metal circles. The account does not reduce the changing relationship to a single cause, but places it within a scene where rival claims to influence and extremity were already producing conflicts.

Vikernes’s Count Grishnackh persona linked Burzum to public threats as well as to music. After Suuvi Mariotta Puurunen attempted to set Christopher Jonsson’s house alight and left a note invoking the Count, Jonsson received a letter from Vikernes. Writing as Count Grishnackh of Burzum, Vikernes claimed to have recently travelled to Sweden, joked about losing a match and a signed Burzum record, and threatened a return visit and further violence. Puurunen later said she had acted on the Count’s mission and admired his fantasies; she was sentenced to a year’s observation in a mental hospital. The episode shows how the project’s adopted identity could be taken up by someone beyond the band itself, with real consequences.

In January 1993, after seven major churches had burned in Norway, Vikernes spoke with a reporter from Bergens Tidende. He later characterized the interview as absurd and said it had proved nothing about his involvement in a crime. The article nevertheless drew intense attention to the previously obscure Black Metal scene and connected it in public reporting with the church burnings. It also associated Vikernes with an unsolved killing in Lillehammer, where investigators had exhausted their leads. Burzum’s visibility thus expanded through a press account that Vikernes disputed, in a context where music, persona, and criminal suspicion became difficult to separate.

Heathen Ideas and Political Imagery

From prison, Vikernes developed an interpretation of Norse heathen cosmology centered in part on the Oskorei, a host of the dead associated with Odin. He described ritual initiation as a path to a higher spiritual state and an eventual joining with ancestral spirits, using the phrase Transcendental Pillar of Singularity, which also appeared in a Burzum song title. The book’s account treats these claims as a subject for examination rather than as a shared doctrine of the wider heathen movement.

Vikernes presented Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces and explained his justification for church burnings as an effort to show Odin to people and awaken the god within them. He described the Norse figures not as gods but as ancestral archetypes, and heathenism as a recovery of inherited nature. This was an extreme and violent interpretation, not an uncontested expression of Ásatrú faith. The book notes that contemporary revivalists had not intended to restore lawlessness, and that Vikernes’s account of crimes as demonstrations of heathen belief was as troubling to neo-heathen groups as his earlier Devil-worship imagery had been to the Church of Satan.

The project’s presentation also became explicitly political. In early 1997, a Burzum T-shirt made to Vikernes’s specifications showed the band logo and an SS death’s-head on the front, with a slogan supporting a local Einsatz-Kommando on the back. Sold by Misanthropy Records in England, it drew criticism but sold briskly. Many observers treated it as deliberately offensive merchandise, while the account argues that Vikernes’s commitment to the group named on the shirt was genuine. The book further identifies him as an important spiritual influence on Absurd’s later transformation toward neo-Nazism, and compares Absurd’s use of a burned church image with Burzum’s earlier use of the ruins of Fantoft Stave Church on Aske. The project’s visual language had become a precedent for others who joined musical provocation to political and religious statements.

Later Music and Legacy

Even while distancing himself from Metal, Vikernes continued Burzum. During periods in prison when he could use recording equipment, he developed the project into somber ambient Electronica, with mystical imagery in the liner notes. That direction was later curtailed when his access to recording equipment ended. At the time described in the book, he was not permitted to listen to CDs and could hear music only through MTV. The change was not simply a stylistic choice: imprisonment and restrictions on access determined what kind of work he could make and eventually whether he could record at all.

Burzum’s later ambient direction differed substantially from the early releases that had helped establish it as a Norwegian Black Metal landmark. Vikernes himself rejected the classification of those records as Black Metal, calling them bad Heavy Metal instead, even as the book describes his name as nearly synonymous with the genre. In a retrospective assessment attributed to Absurd’s Hendrik Möbus, Burzum’s Count Grishnackh persona had projected a grim, somber, eerie image of Norwegian Black Metal; that account also singled out Mayhem and Darkthrone as especially influential musically. It characterized Aarseth’s role as essential to the revival and Vikernes’s as central to the transformation of music into action. Burzum’s significance in this history therefore lies in both its distinct recordings and the widening, consequential uses made of the identity Vikernes built around them.