Varg Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth's feud

Varg Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth's feud became one of the defining conflicts of Norwegian Black Metal: a relationship that joined music-making and financial dependence to competition, suspicion, and ultimately Aarseth's killing in 1993. The book does not reduce the conflict to one cause. Accounts point to unpaid money, rival claims to leadership, and Vikernes's assertion that he acted because he believed Aarseth intended to kill him. Their retrospective and conflicting explanations make the feud both a personal rupture and a struggle over who could shape the scene.

A connection within the Black Metal scene

Aarseth and Vikernes were not strangers who met only at the point of conflict. Aarseth released the first Burzum CD on Deathlike Silence Productions with financial assistance from Vikernes. The second Burzum release, Aske, followed in early 1993, after the burning of Fantoft Stave Church. By then, however, their relationship had deteriorated. The book places the emergence of bad blood in the first months of 1993, at the same time that Aarseth was arguing with members of the Swedish scene and friction was growing between Norwegian and Swedish Black Metal circles.

Their positions in the scene were distinct but overlapping. Aarseth had built a record label and a meeting place for the underground; Vikernes had become associated with Burzum and with the church burnings. In one account, both men were central to the scene’s development, but neither was content to remain simply a participant in the other’s orbit. The broader setting mattered: Norwegian Black Metal had no fixed rulebook, and its boundaries shifted under the influence of prominent personalities. Rivalry over standing therefore unfolded in a world where musical reputation and ideological authority were closely entangled.

Money, releases, and competing claims to leadership

Financial disputes form the clearest documented strand of the feud. Metalion later recalled that Aarseth owed Vikernes royalties from the first two Burzum albums, and also owed money connected to the studio recording of the first album, which Vikernes’s mother had financed. Metalion attributed the unpaid amounts partly to Aarseth’s poor business management and lack of cash. He also recalled that Vikernes wanted to move to another record label. In this version, disputes over the releases were not incidental bookkeeping: they accumulated alongside personal aggression and helped bring the relationship to a breaking point.

Another interviewee recalled that Vikernes had lent Aarseth money to release the first Burzum record and was angry that it had not been repaid. The same account stressed that Aarseth needed time to establish the business and questioned whether the debt could, by itself, justify murder. This recollection differs in emphasis from Metalion’s account, but both describe a material dependency that had turned sour: Aarseth had helped put Burzum into circulation, while Vikernes believed money owed to him remained unpaid.

The conflict was also interpreted as a contest for dominance. Ihsahn recalled that both men disliked one another and suggested that each wanted to be the leading figure. He contrasted Vikernes’s role in the church burnings with Aarseth’s record shop and his part in establishing the scene. Metalion, by contrast, rejected the simple idea that killing a rival would make someone the scene’s undisputed king. The book therefore records leadership as one proposed dimension of the feud, not a settled explanation of the killing.

Suspicion and Vikernes's account

Vikernes later presented the conflict as a response to an alleged threat against his life. He said he had heard through other people that Aarseth planned to kill him, and described the alleged plan as involving a stun gun and restraint. According to Vikernes, he went to Aarseth’s home to confront him; he said Aarseth panicked and attacked, and framed his own decision to kill him as pre-emptive. These statements are Vikernes’s retrospective justification, rather than independently established facts in the account.

The surrounding circumstances also appear in competing interpretations. Despite the worsening relationship, Aarseth had sent Vikernes contracts for further Burzum releases on Deathlike Silence Productions. Vikernes brought the signed contracts with him to Oslo. He later said he intended to deliver them so that the business arrangement could end without further direct contact, adding that he had arranged to receive money through another record label. Snorre Westvold Ruch, who accompanied Vikernes, gave the documents a different significance: he said they could help make it appear that Vikernes and Aarseth had met amicably shortly before Aarseth’s death. The same object thus enters the record both as part of Vikernes’s explanation and as a possible element of concealment.

Vikernes’s account also connected his grievance to his view of Aarseth’s conduct as a record-label operator. He described advance orders for Aske that, he said, had been handed over to Aarseth while Vikernes was in prison, and claimed the money was kept without the records being sent. He further said that Aarseth continued asking to stay at his home in Bergen even after Vikernes and others no longer wanted contact. These details belong to Vikernes’s account of why the relationship had become intolerable; they do not resolve the disputed causes of the killing.

Killing and aftermath

The account of the killing combines the feud’s prior history with evidence later presented in court. According to testimony cited by the book, the killing was premeditated. Ruch, a member of Thorns, accompanied Vikernes on the seven-hour drive from Bergen to Oslo; a third friend remained in Vikernes’s Bergen apartment. The book describes alleged steps intended to create an alternative impression of Vikernes’s whereabouts, including a rented film left playing and an attempted late-night cash withdrawal using an ATM card. The wrong card had been left behind, and the withdrawal could not be made. These reported preparations form part of the court-related account, while Vikernes’s later explanation of the meeting remained his own.

After Aarseth was killed, suspicion within the scene quickly turned toward Vikernes for some observers who knew of the feud. Ihsahn recalled hearing Aarseth’s name on the evening news and immediately suspecting Vikernes; he then called Samoth, who initially doubted that possibility. Others were confused or first suspected people from the Swedish scene, reflecting the existing cross-border animosity. On August 19, 1993, police arrested Vikernes in Bergen, after four days of investigative work following an interview with Ilsa Raluce Anghel. As the investigation developed, charges against him extended beyond the killing.

Samoth later described Aarseth’s death as the point at which the wider scene collapsed into investigation, arrests, and imprisonment. He had heard the men speak badly of each other but had not wanted to take sides; in retrospect, he said the murder set a much larger process in motion. The feud’s significance therefore exceeded the private hostility between two musicians. It exposed how intertwined the scene’s relationships, finances, rivalries, and criminal investigations had become, and how the death of one of its central figures altered the lives of those around both men.