Until The Light Takes Us is finally coming out

We told you about Until The Light Takes Us, the new documentary about Norwegian black metal from American directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell about six months ago and now, it’s finally coming out. Making the film, Aites and Ewell immersed themselves in the scene, living in Norway for two years, mixing with the scenes legends, including, of course, Varg (and if you know nothing about him, watch this). What emerges from their 350+ hours of footage is a lean, lo-fi hour and a half. We grabbed them for a catch-up.

Vice: In your film, Norwegian black metal comes across as a bit of a mess, with loads of contrasting characters with varying ethics, all out for different things.
Aaron: Yeah. The scene was actually conceptualised in a way that most other music scenes weren’t, as in the key players sat down and talked about aesthetics and conceptual ideas before they started making these records, so it seems as though it should be more organised than it is. Most other music scenes didn’t start off like that, the Seattle scene didn’t start off with Mudhoney sitting down and saying “We should make riffs like this”, and the Nirvana people went, “Yeah, that sounds good.”

Did it seem to you that prison had changed Varg?
Audrey: Well, yes and no. I personally think that he does not show remorse, so in that way he emerges unchanged. However I do think there’s a difference in the Varg from 1993 and the Varg from today, in that he’s become more savvy, in how to work with media, and in controlling his image and message. When all that stuff was going on the whole scene had an anti-societal, anti-everything stance, advocating drug use and supporting fascist leaders, just throwing everything out there that would be unacceptable to society; I don’t think they had any consideration at that point of what people could take from that. They didn’t have any sense of the effects of putting all this stuff out there, and I think that Varg is now much more aware that things happen when he says things.
Aaron: And he’s gone through a lot of ideological changes in prison, he’s gone from black metaller to neo-Nazi to skinhead to Pagan.
Audrey: He has a fluid conception of his own identity and he tries on different ideological and theological hats, he’s genuinely looking for some sort of answer in the world. He’s gone through some pretty regrettable phases. But it’s part of what makes him such an interesting character.
Aaron: I do think he’s damaged from it all, I think he’s had a hard time in prison, and I don’t think he would have gone through these ideological phases had he not been in prison.

Contrastingly, Gylve comes off as immensely sad, an almost tragic, lost figure.
Audrey: Yes. He has a sort of purity, he’s a musician, he’s a purist, he was never interested in the other stuff, he was never part of the criminal activity, he just really wanted to make music that belonged to him. He turned his back on a successful death metal career for it.
Aaron: This sort of gets into the post-modern thing that we’re trying to elucidate with the film. When the majority of people believe something, even if it’s not true, it in effect is true, it becomes reality. A simulacrum of what black metal turned into, and I think it had a damaging effect on Gylve, who was really trying to do something that he believed in.
Audrey: Yeah, that’s the other thing, his identity is so changed by the overall general perception of black metal that he doesn’t really have much of a chance to be who he is. He hides when they have these metal festivals because he’s not interested in being that person that people expect him to be.

Yeah, he seems burdened by this scene that spiraled out of his control.
Audrey: Something that really interested us about this story is that it has all these parallel ideas and post-modernism concerning the creation and recreation of history. The idea of simulation and simulacra. The story of black metal is sort of a perfect example of this theory of what happens in modern culture where a group of peoples start something, and then it is misinterpreted as something else but that misinterpretation proves stronger than the actual thing.

How does Norway view Varg now? Has that Manson image stuck?
Audrey: They hate him. They completely despise him. They really do. At one point after we’d shot a lot of footage we were editing together an early reel and we got a grant and had a Norwegian editor. We were trying to put it together to raise money to continue the film and she was sort of assigned to us. She was in her 20s, in Oslo, and every time Varg would come on the screen she would mutter under her breath and swear at him.
Aaron: While editing, he’d come on the screen and she’d say, “Fuck off, you asshole.”
Audrey: It was an impossible situation. We couldn’t work with that.

Until The Light Takes Us was released in Cardiff last week, and will be showing at selected British cities during March And April. Details are here.

And if you can’t wait, just watch this again instead.

ALEX GODFREY