High Times In Oslo

INTERVIEW BY BLAZE BAREZOOTS, PHOTO BY HASSE MOEN

When my buddy Sindre Solem told me that his band, Obliteration, were playing Oslo’s Øya festival, I knew a trip to Norway was mandatory.

I hate travelling abroad without my own weed, so I made sure I had a nice couple of grams for my three-day stay. I used to always tape it to the inside of my boxers, but since my trip to Amsterdam earlier this year, I’ve just been putting it in the paper of the spare pair of shoes in my luggage.

Because they only care about liquids or metal stuff with electrical cords at the security gates these days, it’s become a lot easier to smuggle weed into Scandinavia, which is one of the many upsides of the post-9/11 universe.

Then I caught the bus out to their place in Kolbotn, a small town just south of Oslo, which is where Mayhem and Darkthrone made some of their first records.

It was pretty late, so I was itching to smoke my weed to make me relax from smuggling it into the country. Sindre told me not to get Arild, their guitarist, too high as they had their big show the next afternoon. At about 2 AM we broke out the pipe and

Darkness Descends

by Dark Angel. Then we started listening to Oslo’s own Diskord, and their first

Doosmcapes

LP, which is psychedelic, prog-death metal with almost jazzy undertones. They’re playing in London in November for the Life Evil festival, so we decided to interview them.

Vice: Hey Espen T. Hangård. Were you ever into Dag Nasty, because there is an article about them only a page away from this and your band is named after their label, even though it has a gay, metal “k” in it.

Espen T. Hangård (guitarist):

I was more into Minor Threat and Fugazi, actually. I admire Dischord immensely, but I don’t think the Diskord guys had even heard of them when they started the band.

Oslo has a rich punk and metal history, right?

I got into hardcore around 1990, when the Blitz squat in Oslo was making headlines doing demos against Thatcher. They had great bands playing there like Life But How To Live It and Stengte Dører. Napalm Death even played there in ’88, but I found out the next day.

So there was a big scene in Oslo before black metal overtook?

For hardcore there was a scene, yeah. The Blitz bands toured all over Europe. Touring German and Spanish squats is still called the “Blitz Route” here in Norway. But for metal, there wasn’t really a scene before the black metal thing blew up

Was there any conflict between the two scenes at all?

The Blitz activists had a fight going with the skinheads. I remember someone wrote an article about how they had seen black metal guys mingling with skinheads, so it was pretty chaotic, ha ha. But some skins were buddies with the Blitz people. I’m not too sure about the motivation for the nationalist imagery in black metal, I thought it was extremely corny and hillbillyish myself.

Diskord’s second album is due out next year. diskord.net The Live Evil festival takes place at the Underworld, Camden, London on October 23 & 24. liveevilfestival.com