Garm

Garm is an Ulver member whose account of Black Metal is shaped by both attachment and refusal: he credits the movement with awakening his interest in music and darkness, yet increasingly rejects its narrow definitions of belonging and resistance. His position distinguishes a formative subculture from a permanent identity, and sets intellectual independence against the scene’s tendency to turn rebellion into another conformist pose.

Identity and Formation

Garm describes Ulver as emerging from the Black Metal scene and acknowledges the decisive part Black Metal played in forming his musical interests and attraction to darker subjects. That origin, however, does not settle his identity. As Ulver developed musically, lyrically, and philosophically, he found it harder to regard himself as part of the movement. The label, in his view, had become too restrictive for a group whose work and outlook had changed.

His distance is therefore not a denial of origin. Garm continues to value the period that helped form him, while refusing the idea that an origin must dictate a lasting allegiance. He measures identity against the capacity to change and remain curious, rather than against continued membership in a scene whose boundaries and expectations can narrow over time.

From Display to Maturity

Garm recalls that he had matured since his early involvement. In his assessment, many people in the milieu had settled into limited ways of thinking, and he sought to avoid that closure through interests beyond those commonly valued in the circles around him. He describes his desired standard as intellectual and personal exactness, something attainable only through open-mindedness. The emphasis is not simply on leaving a style behind, but on resisting the comfort of a fixed subcultural identity.

This account sits within a scene where visible signs and tests of seriousness had helped define belonging. Earlier, access to the central social world around the record shop depended on being trusted and regarded as sincere in one’s views. The atmosphere could feel powerful and demanding; people sought acceptance from established figures, and even wearing corpsepaint in public during the daytime could mark participation. Garm’s critique of later Black Metal culture responds to that history of identity-making, but insists that signs of initiation can outlive the convictions they once claimed to express.

He sees the later scene as increasingly dominated by people who follow narrow ideas and use Black Metal as a ready-made source of distinction. In his view, some participants appear less committed to its underlying concepts than to the feeling of having entered something eccentric and special. The movement that once helped open a door to music and darkness can thus become a refuge from uncertainty: a ready identity that makes insecure young people feel included rather than challenging them to think more widely.

Society, Satanism, and Christianity

Garm’s criticism of the scene does not lead him to endorse a campaign against Christianity. Another Ulver member describes Christianity as one expression of herd mentality and says that opposing it would amount to opposing society itself. Garm develops a related but distinct argument: actively pursuing Christianity offers no logical advantage to a Satanist. He portrays Christian ideals of humility, charity, subordination, guilt, and bearing the burdens of the world as moral commitments that can be turned to the advantage of someone who does not share them.

In this view, the Satanist is not principally a missionary or a revolutionary seeking to replace one social order with another. Garm presents the heretic as an observer who may also enter the social scene, but whose position remains that of a watcher and artist. He regards a project of converting everyone as self-defeating: a world remade to eliminate the distance that permits observation would also eliminate the freedom to look beyond ordinary social life. His argument makes distance, rather than conquest, central to the stance he describes.

That distance does not mean indifference to Christian morality. Garm depicts the conflict in deliberately severe terms, contrasting the Christian’s submission and burden-bearing with the heretic’s calculating self-interest. Yet he rejects the conclusion that this contrast requires an organized religious war. He is willing to accept attacks on Christianity, but considers it more likely to destroy itself than any church burner could. Against efforts to restore an imagined natural order through militant action, he prefers the growth of knowledge, and argues that the complexity of modern human thought makes the return to such systems an illusion.

Vikernes as a Counterexample

Garm makes the limits of militant anti-Christianity concrete through his judgment of Varg Vikernes. He characterizes Vikernes as a neo-Viking martyr and a prophet of the ego who paradoxically took on the role of a Jesus figure for his own ideals. In Garm’s account, that self-conception has brought him to imprisonment. The reversal matters: a figure who claims to oppose Christian forms of sacrifice has, in Garm’s reading, reproduced one by making himself the suffering embodiment of his cause.

Garm nevertheless separates conviction from judgment. He expresses substantial respect for Vikernes’s conviction and courage, while questioning his grasp of reality. The distinction prevents the criticism from collapsing into simple dismissal: commitment may be genuine and courage real, yet neither guarantees that the political and personal project is coherent. Vikernes’s example becomes a warning against mistaking personal martyrdom for successful opposition.

Garm also rejects the prospect of a militant band of Satanists attempting to wage war on Christianity with Heavy Metal as its spiritual banner. He regards such a project as pathetic and futile, not because he approves of Christianity, but because he sees it as a mistaken expenditure of life and an attempt to impose a supposedly righteous order. His alternative is not reconciliation with the social mainstream; it is to deepen knowledge without claiming a mission to convert society.

Narrative Significance

Garm’s reflections offer an internal critique of Black Metal rather than an outsider’s repudiation. The movement remains part of his formation, but that history does not oblige him to affirm its later habits or political ambitions. His account moves from formative attachment, through maturity and disidentification, to a deliberate choice of observation and study over crusade.

That stance also exposes a tension in the scene’s claim to oppose conformity. A culture organized around being accepted as serious, displaying recognizable signs, and belonging to an exclusive group can reproduce the very pressures it condemns. Garm’s answer is not to propose a new collective doctrine. He treats openness and intellectual growth as safeguards against the conversion of rebellion into an identity that merely comforts its adherents, and uses Vikernes’s self-sacrificial activism to mark the consequences of confusing conviction with a workable sense of reality.