“In 1991, there was a lot of pioneering work, lots of exciting things happening. The rawness, the sound, the riffs. Black metal has many expressions, often complex riffs, even though much is buried in poor sound quality. With Thorns, I wanted clear lines in the music; each song had to have a strong distinctive character instead of being a dark soup [...] The music has to be challenging for people to get a sense of mastery. There is a lot of extreme sport in black metal, especially in the drumming. We played as fast as we could, pushing the tempo to the limit. You get tendonitis, and the listener struggles to keep up with what’s going on.”

Saw shooting stars for the first time in my life yesterday.

“I only knew Pelle for a year, but so much happened that year, and I felt I had a special connection with him. Once when we met at Bootleg in Oslo, he was completely distraught. He thought Jan Axel was a glam rock drummer and asked if I would consider playing drums in Mayhem. Just being asked was one of the greatest things I had ever experienced.”

Things I wish people would say (and mean) more often:

“In 1991-92, Cadaver started making money. We never imagined that would happen. […] I remember a concert at the rock club in Holmestrand, on the other side of the Oslo fjord. There were 280 paying customers, people who went berserk in the streets, a real rock rebellion. In the middle of it all stood Øystein. He stood there with corpse paint and a cape, selling merchandise. All kinds of people came up to him to buy stuff. He thought that was negative. Øystein was poor, but when things started selling, he tried to make it less attractive to the masses. Black metal was supposed to be for the few.”