Well, it's a small town about of about 50,000 inhabitants. I was raised on a farm which is about three minutes from where I live now. It's a small town two hours west of the capital of Norway which is Oslo. Notodden is situated in the county of Telemark which is on the south side of Norway. The county of Telemark they say is Norway in miniature. The county stretches over all the different metro aspects of Norway so it has the seashore part and it has parts of mountains of ice type of things. It reaches all over the place. Weather wise it’s one of the safest places to live I think.

Damn, that sounds beautiful.

It is very beautiful around here.

I was reading your biography and it said you started playing piano at seven and guitar at 10 and recording songs right after that. Did you start out recording black metal stuff or did you experiment with other stuff before you got into black metal?

Well, I started out with my passion for straightforward heavy metal music like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. As soon as I got a Fostex four track recorder with these tapes, I started quite early on recording my own stuff but also some cover songs but for the most part I did my own songs. I didn’t have a drummer or anything but we had one of those electric organs, like living room organs where you had different rhythm patterns and drum patterns that you can play along to. I realized if I put on the disco rhythm and turned the speed knob to full, I would get this kind of hardcore, Slayerlike tempo and I tried to do my thrash riffs on top of that. And it also would play a very, very fast bass part because it had bass pedals so I could always jam along with it. I would pump the bass with my foot.

You were definitely very experimental. Every time I read about you on the Internet, everybody always states that you’re best known as the vocalist for Emperor. I imagine you’d like to get past that but a lot of people say that Emperor made a really huge mark on black metal.

Of course I’m quite honored that people feel like that. I suppose in retrospect over the years, Emperor has lain dead for five years now. We started in 1991 and when we started out, we had absolutely no idea or any hope of it ever reaching this far. When you start playing a genre of music that no one has heard about which was the case in 1991, there were no black metal scenes. When you’re from a very, very small place in Norway and you’re 16 years old, you don’t think that it will be Norway’s biggest cultural export 10 years after. I think that it was a full scene but I think that maybe Emperor started out musically very early on with bringing in the keyboard parts that have an epic style. I think maybe all the black metal bands that came out of Norway at that age and at that time, I guess we were one of the first to actually take it further too. We didn’t stop our musical development. I’m not getting all self-indulgent now, I just try to see things in a perspective from many years back. Of course there are different bands that really played their roles. For me personally it was Bathory from the early ’80s. A Swedish band, Bathory, that made all the difference when it came to black metal. I think that we’ve been lucky to be part of something that has influenced other people to explore this type of artistic expression I would say.

Taking part in it, I think you guys basically helped create it.

I guess you could say that in some respects because as I said especially when we recorded our first album, In The Nightside Eclipse, we had no guidelines to follow but our 110 percent dedication. There was really nothing to try and copy. We weren’t really good musicians. I was 17 at the time when we recorded it. I think that what makes that album still stand out, because for many it still does, I think it’s that youthful energy and that youthful courage. That we went 110 percent head on not having that kind of over ego that tries to put you down. It was just with full conviction and I think that the whole atmosphere of the album vibrates that in a way. When you get older you get more self-critical and more specific which is also good but I think especially the first Emperor album really has that quality. That’s probably why it also appeals to a lot of young people.

You were saying that Emperor laid dead for five years. I think your fans really kept it alive during that period. You guys are involved in some farewell shows. How’s that going?

Ever since we decided to stop in 2001, we’ve had quite a lot of offers to do one off shows and we know, at least for the last three years we’ve been on the priority list for a headliner at the Wacken Open Air. Some of the bigger arrangements have been quite keen on getting Emperor to play as well as for the exclusivity of it all. It has been a reoccurring theme but until recently it was really out of the question. At some point we just thought okay, if we are ever going to do any new shows or do a couple of reunion shows for fans since we didn’t really get to play any shows after our last album, we thought it better to do it now five years after than say 10 years after. There are some really good reunions and then there are some permanent very sad reunions so we wanted to be on the good side of that I think. We took it all very slowly. We just met up in a rehearsal room to play two or three of the old songs just to see how it felt and we didn’t decide anything beforehand. We just took it one step at a time. If it felt good playing the old songs together, we sat down and talked okay if we’re doing this, let’s do it at the tempo and at the level where we’re comfortable. Not too much promotional pressure for doing more and more and more and more. Just by the offers we’ve been getting in or got in the first month after we announced that we would do live shows again, I guess we could have toured the U.S. by now but that was never the intention. We just wanted to revisit the old days and do some few exclusive shows and then go our separate ways again. Our intention has never been anything else.

It’s interesting to see some of the stuff that some of the members of Emperor have done on the side like the stuff that Mortiis does and the stuff that you do now. It definitely in some ways seems a lot different from what you guys did when you were together.

Yeah, Emperor was very much the compromise of who was involved and I guess much of the reason why we ended too was because the differences we had, especially between me and Samoth who has been the core of the band since the start. Our differences have always worked very creatively and constructively but at some point, as is quite natural I suppose that the first band I started playing with Samoth in I was 13 and with Emperor I was 16. We kept going until again for 10 years and in that time from your mid teens until your mid 20’s, of course everybody will hopefully change a lot. Especially musically when you learn more and you stake out a new direction. You want different things and Emperor has always been about a non-compromising act. At that point we felt that this was as far as we could go musically without compromising the integrity of the band. That it was better to leave it and just go our separate ways and if you listen to my solo album now and the new Zyklon album with Samoth and Trym, musically the differences are so obvious.

Well, I did listen to your solo album and I really liked it because on one level it sounds kind of eerie and a little bit creepy and then on another level it sounds very extreme and heavy. Then on another level it’s beautiful.

Thank you very much. I guess since there’s no compromise really between people this time, as Emperor was a compromise where the material had to be within the borders of what Emperor could stand for. It gives it somewhat limited depth. Even though I wrote all the material for the last Emperor album, of course it was within the limits of Emperor and the history of the band. Whereas now I can indulge in everything that I personally want to get across. In that respect I suppose it carries more personal than what Emperor did. I wanted to try and do things at different emotional levels. From the feedback I’ve been getting, people seem to like that and to enjoy that. Things have more layers.

It packs one hell of a punch. You basically played every instrument except the drums where you had somebody else do that. One of my friends actually thought the album was kind of sexy.

It’s all up to interpretation but I can assure you that has never been my intention. As I’ve said many times before, if you want tits and beer metal then you have to go somewhere else.

I read some interviews that you had done in the past where people had asked you why black metal bands don’t sing about love. It seems to me there are certain types of music that are really good outlets for certain emotions. I think black metal is more of an outlet for in some cases social commentary or in some cases a little bit of anger or you want to express your dark side.

Especially black metal. It’s a very dark expression and it isn’t capable of expressing love. At least not in a traditional romantic sense. However I think it is capable of that and I have written songs and lyrics that are definitely inspired by great love and dedication but it’s harder to bring in heart and roses symbols. If you get that kind of thought. There are different means and different areas. For my sake that emotional side is not something that I have a great necessity to share. Whereas my music is for the most part much more critical and harsh.

When my friend said that she thought it was sexy, I don’t think she really meant it in a tits and ass kind of way. When we were listening to it we had been talking about vampire movies and she was commenting on how a lot of black metal would be an awesome soundtrack to go along with movies like that. Love has its dark side too. It’ s not all wine and roses and all that shit. That’s what she was kind of going for. That brings me to another question. Has anyone ever approached you about taking some of your songs and contributing them to movies?

We’ve had some discussions with some people who wanted to use some Emperor songs for soundtracks but I don’t ever think that happened. I’m not totally sure because I wasn’t so much involved. We didn’t think that the concept at all fitted with Emperor’s music or something like that. On a different note, I’ve been very much influenced by soundtracks myself for years. They have this very big epic thing to it. Orchestral music in general be it classical or soundtrack music is something I take a great interest in and I really like. With Mnemosyne Productions which is the production company of myself and Ihriel, we really hope to maybe in the future get into that area of music too. At least as an option because we both would like to work with that kind of music as well just as an experiment.

I’m a little bit older than I guess the majority of black metal fans but one of the things that I love about black metal is for one thing, it’s really heavy metal music which is something I’ve always enjoyed but it’s also really fucking huge. It’s really fucking huge music. It goes beyond the boundaries of traditional heavy metal stuff.

Especially black metal I think whereas I think death metal is much more close to it. It’s more down to earth and aggressive whereas black metal has always been much more mythical and had a much deeper religious feel to it. It has a much more spiritual kind of atmosphere to it.

I would definitely say more spiritual than religious.

Yeah, bad choice of words. I think that it being very big and epic like that, I think it would appeal more to the more spiritual sense or more philosophical and even perhaps meditational experience rather than your average beer drinking metal headbanging. It all depends. It’s all the individual but in broader terms I think that at least we get to say that black metal at least has more spirituality than many other forms of metal.

On Friday Paula and I had nailed down the interview time and yesterday I get off work and get into my car. People always put fliers and shit on your windshield out in the parking lot. Yesterday I get this flier and it’s one of these religious tracts and it’s talking about how I need to repent because I’m this evil person that’s been following Satan and I need to recite this prayer and I need to apologize for being murderous and malicious and evil and engaging in earthly pleasures and dancing. All this really out of the way shit and I’m thinking about this and I was like “oh someone found out I was going to be walking on the dark side tomorrow. Those bastards!” On one level it was really humorous to me but on another level it was also rather offensive. To me Christianity has to be one of the most rude, arrogant, obnoxious religions under the sun.

Well, I guess you could say many of the same things for many of the major religions. It’s such a big gap between how it is written down and how it is practiced. You could say for example Jesus Christ and if you look away from the more religious side of it but if you read the philosophy he had, he hung out mostly with outcasts. He hung out with prostitutes and I think he used a whip to drive people out of the temples where they did their gambling and their commercial marketing so to speak. He was really one of the first radicals if you look at it from that perspective. If it was like that, I don’t think Jesus Christ would have been very proud to be the idol of someone who constantly quotes “God bless America” say like George Bush. Do you think he would be very proud? There’s such a big gap there and of course Norway being a Christian country as well, that’s of course the religion that I’m most familiar with. I’m sure that from what I’ve understood, many of the other big world religions also concentrate in principle on some rules to preserve human dignity and human life. It all turns out to be abuse of power in the end. This is another debate.

A lot of times I can understand where people who were born and raised in that religion might want to break away and go into Wicca or paganism or walk on the dark side. Were you raised as a Christian?

No, not at all.

What got you interested in Satanism? I find that totally fascinating.

It all came with the music. I suppose as a person I’m very easily exposed because of imagery and the whole atmosphere of it. I suppose I’m easily exposed to stuff like that and the depth it brings. Again a very long discussion but I’m glad though. I’m very happy I got into that road. I see things very, very differently from when I first started out but it has definitely been a very successful road for me. Not as successful in all the usual sense of the word but for me as a human being most definitely. For my personal success in my view of myself.

It seems to be a little more free form than most belief systems I guess.

It’s very interesting too. For the kind of role you get in society especially being a representative of one of the most extreme music scenes ever and especially the most extreme musical scene that Norway has seen. Being in that position makes you see society from a very special angle. When you see people’s reactions, when you see so-called good, righteous people and how they react to young people as we were and from all the stories that I’ve heard where these good, righteous people will spit at anyone with long hair, you could have a whole different moral debate. We’ll save that for another time I think.

How long did it take you to do your record and how do you feel that your solo debut differs from the other stuff you’ve done?

It took a long time for me to actually get the right frame of things before I could actually start writing. As soon as I did that, it came rather quickly at least for me. I wrote the basics of the songs from January through March last year and then I just kept on working on it until it was finished. I mixed the album in January. It took me about a year. I guess it differs as it’s been very liberating to work all on my own but again at the same time of course it’s very challenging taking it all on alone because it’s very hard to keep objectivity when you’re supposed to make decisions and impulses. All in all I’m very happy with the album and people seem to like it too which is a great plus. It’s been a very pleasurable experience and I’m looking forward to writing the next one.

On some records, the songs either sound the same or have the same groove. Your record holds the listener’s interest because every song is different and there are different tempo changes and grooves within the same song.

Well, thank you very much. I just wanted to do different songs but not for the sake of them being different. I just wanted to explore these different subgenres within the big genre of metal a bit but still at least I feel that all the songs fit well together on the album. It’s not like they sound like they’re written in different times or different stages. I think there’s kind of a cohesion between all the songs but hopefully without being boring. I’m not intending on being overly technical and overly on guard. Just wanted to really explore a more traditional rock song form. Instead of just bringing in new material and new material, in every song I tried to explore fewer motives in each song.

Well, I think you definitely succeeded in that.

Thank you.

Out of curiosity the drummer you used on that record, why did you select him to help you with that?

Asgeir Mickelson? Basically because he actually contacted me when he heard I was doing a solo album. I had him in mind from before because I knew he’s worked with Borknagar so I knew he could do extreme metal drums. I also knew his work from Spiral Architect which is really, really progressive so I knew he could do the progressive parts and I knew from speaking to him that we both shared a favorite drummer. That is Mikkey Dee from his King Diamond days. He runs the same software as we do in our studio and he’s very easy to work with. He can interpret and do a very nice job with what I preprogrammed. We worked very much on the Internet.

Isn’t it cool how the Internet makes it easy for people to do shit that may have been difficult before?

Yeah, it was very nice. I couldn’t really have had a better drummer for this album.

Are you planning any kind of touring for the record?

Not at this point I’m afraid. We’re doing all the Emperor shows now and we just have one album to pick from and having to hire a full session lineup. I’d rather wait and re-evaluate that part of it after a second album.

Yeah, besides you seem to be involved in a lot of shit. Just a lot of projects.

Yeah, and I only have so much time so it’s really a matter of priorities as well.

It was a real pleasure to talk to you and I hope we get to do this again. Any other thoughts or comments?