Doomsday Metal

Photos from the Vomit/Mayhem rehearsal space.

n our Food Issue we recommended the re-release of the 1986 demo Rot in Hell, by Vomit. Copies of the original tape are being sold for hundreds of dollars and it’s mandatory listening for anyone craving truly old skool, stunningly unsophisticated, beautiful, evil noise made by 13-year-olds. We said we’d get back to Vomit, and the time has come for Lars Sørbekk to give us an update on where the band is today. We started playing together when Torben, Kittil and I were 13, around 1982 or ’83. We split up in 1988 or ’89, because I was on my way to becoming a drug addict. I would smoke 10 grams of hash a day and I did morphine pills. I was a junkie when I turned 20, and I was a heroin addict up until about four years ago, when I began a methadone treatment. Since then I haven’t touched any heavy narcotics. I’ll smoke some weed every now and then but that’s it. Quitting heroin after all those years is something I’m really proud of. When Neseblod Records re-released Rot in Hell in 2006 I didn’t even have that tape myself anymore! I had to get a copy from them in order to hear it. Tommy drew the original logo and the artwork is great, but the sound is so bad I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to listen to it. All the same, I’ve talked to poeple who have told me they’ve listened to that demo every single day for years. Man, we just recorded that in our rehearsal space, you know!? Back then we shared our rehearsal space with Mayhem and we played a lot together. Mayhem used to borrow our drummer, we had tons of “project bands,” and we (mainly Øystein Aarseth and me) made a lot of music together. Lots of death and black, but also a lot of music that didn’t have anything to do with metal. We’d use lots of keyboards and samples and synthesizers like the Roland 303, stuff like that. We had so many projects going on we would stay in the rehearsal space for days on end. We’d only leave to go to the store and buy more food if we got hungry. Those were good times. It was a great, great loss for the music world when Øystein was killed, and an even greater loss for me personally because we were such good friends. And what a way to die! Getting stabbed 30 times by a fucking Nazi moron. The fact was that if Øystein said that a band was bad they would be labelled as such, and if he said that they were good, like he did with Vomit, that would mean massive PR for the band, right from the start. Enough about that though, all I know about Varg Vikernes is that he was the idiot who killed my friend. Right now, none of the members of Vomit are playing in bands. I used to play with a good buddy of mine until a while ago. He died from an overdose, so now I’m just playing alone. I’m hoping I’ll be playing in a great band again now that I’m sober—I’ll just have to work on my contacts, and then we’ll see. Torben is actually singing with the national Norwegian opera in Oslo, and he’s just got his helicopter license. Tommy Berg, who played all the guitar solos and sings on Rot in Hell, became a junkie too, but he hasn’t quit his heroin and amphetamine habits, so you can go see him any day down Karl Johan’s Street, walking up and down and bumming people for change. If he had kept playing guitar he would have been one of the greatest in the world by now, no doubt. He was such a huge talent, but it all went to waste because of drugs. When I go to talk to him he doesn’t want to give up heroin, so right now he’s living in a hostel in Oslo, you know, the kind of place where it’s OK to buy and sell and use hard drugs. It’s like a tiny city within the city, where the city of Oslo places all of its junkies. Once you’re there the only real way out is in a coffin. Kittil has become religious, and has joined some sort of cult in Fredrikstad. They live strictly by the Old Testament, you know, they want the woman to submit to the man and shit like that. He has become a real prick. When it comes to listening to music, one of my favourite bands right now is KMFDM, but I’m also listening a lot to stuff like Tulus, Darkthrone, Anaal Nathrakh, Slayer, and 1349, and even bands like Juno Reactor, and Orbital. LARS SØRBEKK
Still Rotting, a compilation of even more rehearsal material and demos taken from five different tapes, is out now on Lyderhorn Records.