“If you light a candle in the darkness, you tend to attract a lot of strange people. The Helvete audience was a mixed group of people who wanted to be something - the typical wannabes - and people who really had something to offer, who had good projects and were making really good music. Øystein was building this thing around himself: he established the shop, went on with the label, signed on bands on the label trying to make some progress on things. There were of course people around that didn’t look at Øystein as the main figure in the genre, but most people did. I never looked at him in that way because we were friends since we were young, and he never was Euronymous when we met. We had some conversations around it; on why he was taking the role so seriously, but that’s what he decided to do…”

“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.”