A former drummer of the black metal band Gorgoroth delves into the history of Norse music and discovers surprising similarities to modern folk and metal genres.
For most music fans, the distance between heavy metal and folk is so vast you’d get a laugh – or possibly into a fight – for even suggesting a link. The former drummer in infamous Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth – known for staging mock crucifixions and impaling sheep heads on stage – spent years pumping out some of the most high-energy rock on the planet, becoming a leader in a genre that happily admits it’s an outlier even in the metal world.
But at the same time Selvik had always wondered how the rhythms and sounds of his Nordic past had evolved next to what he was playing. So he decided to find out. “During the early 2000s I started doing a lot of research into the type of instruments that used to be, and what we know, or what we think we know, about the music that was played on them,” Selvik, 44, says. “I found it’s quite a fragmented jigsaw, we only have bits and pieces of information.” What he could find, through years of detective work and talking with experts and academics, showed there was a definite link to the present, and that a lot of musical genres have common roots – even folk and black metal. “That’s the thing!” Selvik says. “When you go far enough back in time, you see that the similarities are more prominent than the differences. “The tonality, the rhythmic patterns, even the instruments … it’s almost like some of these things are in our DNA in a way, and I think that’s why a lot of people do connect to it. It’s just very familiar.” The next step was to bring that music back to life, so after seven years of research, making some extinct instruments from scratch (which led to some “very crappy” failures, Selvik says with a laugh), the result was a new band, Wardrun
MUSIC FOLK MUSIC BLACK METAL HISTORY NORWAY
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