“At first, Euronymous wanted to play more like the style of Napalm Death. He thought that was cool. Me and Dead, we wanted to play something darker, not necessarily that fast and brutal. It was then when we were starting to write the songs on De Mysteriis…that it became some kind of hybrid style between something very fast but also dark and technical. I think that it was the best of both worlds, and we had a great collaboration and worked very well together.”

“The thing was that Euronymous started to change very rapidly. I think he actually lost his mind. He seemed kind of obsessed with unrealistic things, he wanted to take things to such extremes that it was impossible. And he was very good at getting people with him, but I think that he clearly lost his mind. He would say things like we aren’t actually humans, but gods. He wanted to be spoken to in a certain way, and he suddenly abandoned his Marxist/Leninist political views into fascism. He was going totally nuts, really.”

“When we hung around, he was always happy. Like a normal person. He had a black sense of humor, same as me, and we both shared the love for splatter movies, silly cartoons and comic books. I remember him as a happy and very nice, very polite, person. But to strangers he was antisocial, so when other people met him, they thought he was strange because he didn’t look or talk to them at all. And when they talked to him sometimes, if he didn’t want to talk to them, he was just looking down at the floor. We had a lot of good times and we were laughing a lot.”

“There’s a lot of speculation around that. I don’t believe that Øystein was actually doing anything conscious about making this happen, but of course I don’t think he helped prevent it from happening. Living the life they did at that moment, with no money, living a long way from everything, just living there and just going around yourself thinking about black metal, the band, making music and lyrics and going deeper and deeper into this state of mind, it doesn’t help if you’re already depressed, right? So I think it’s a mix of everything. Actually, I would like to think that it was like that anyways. I don’t know what Øystein was thinking, of course. I don’t know what Øystein and Pelle talked about before he came out to my place. What I do know is that Øystein and I had a normal Saturday evening and we were drinking whisky and talking about life, the universe and everything, and music, of course. There was nothing in our conversation that was about Pelle taking his life.”

A question about STORM. Fenriz once said that the idea was good, but the outcome was less than you hoped for.