After a great 45 minute bus ride I step off the bus almost at the last station and I see Gylve wearing regular Gylve clothes, which means a leather jacket and hiking pants, but also gloves, as he is picking up garbage from the road.
– You gotta get a mortgage, Raymond. I didn’t understand the economy until I got one, he says.
It’s a Norwegian or Scandinavian thing, isn’t it? «You have to own you home!» In France, for instance, I’ve heard they all just rent.
– Yes, but after all we live here, so we should take part in the Norwegian system.
The weather is beyond great and we walk through a neighborhood filled with the sound of children playing, we meet adults who smile and greets us politely. I hope to live in a place like this once. Gylve, the local patriot that he is, has the logo of the local sports team Kolbotn Idrettslag hanging by the side of his front door.
– Take a look at the garden. They’re not few, the hours I’ve spent on that lawn, says Gylve.
His band Darkthrone is almost ready with their gazillionth record, named with permission after the Norwegian band Arctic Thunder. He shows me a nicely lined row of stones along one of the sides of the house.
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– Those stones have a direct connotation, if you can say that, to the beginning of the new album. It was a week long prosject to walk with a wheelbarrow to a creek bed in Grønliåsen, our local forest. It was a pretty hard job because we had to find that exact creek bed and even though you use gloves you still get wet and incredibly dirty through the gloves. At the time we had decided to start working on the new album and when the riffs came it was straight to the guitar. This might have been funny if I played in the band Hellbillies and we were talking about the Pela stein album [gathering stones].
I go downstairs to the bathroom and I see a kind of cat litter that I’ve NEVER seen before. It turns out to be «pellets» that Marthe (Gylves wife) has bought near Oslo Spektrum.
How does that work? The kind I have turns into lumps so it’s easy to pick up the lumps of pee.
– Yes, this kind dissolves and turns to sawdust. But the cat mostly pees outside.
For the occasion I’ve bought a beer that is new (to me), the Vienna lager from the brewery Hansa.
– That beer has the lowest score on me and Marthe’s beer test. We do it old school and gather the results in a binder instead of using that app. The one we liked the most is the one with the ugliest design, the white IPA. It looks like Liberace in his underwear. Not with the diamonds, but Liberace stripped down, you might say.
You like the accordion, right?
– There’s a lot of thrash in gammeldans [traditional, nordic folk dancing], but thrashers don’t want to see it. Except for Sverre Dæhli, who plays in one of Norways most reputable thrash orchestras, namely Audiopain. Not to be confused with Audioslave, it’s Audiopain. They make strict and complex thrash. A kind of opposition thrash, but with very good and thorough riffs. He likes the accordion just like me. Or maybe they just have the accordion is an outro at their concerts because the contrast is fun. I suppose it’s both. Both the liking and the little fun.
It’s an excellent instrument.
– But it’s especially Skrapparkar (Steffen from Lobotomized), who has written in Pondus and has his own magazine…
Yes, White Trash-mag.
– Yes, White Trash Magazine, who had a poster with Tyskeberget…
It was me and a friend who put the clip of Wilhelm Tyskeberget up on YouTube in 2006.
– You were the first?
Yes, or, we took it from a website, but we were first on YouTube, yeah.
– He embraced that clip and it became a great classic. I think he and I have the most similar personality and looks of anyone I’ve ever met.
That clip means a lot to a lot of people. You look a lot like Alex from Gerilja too.
– Yeah, a lot of people have said that, but do you know who my real doppelgänger is? Henriette Lien [Norwegian actress]. If you take a photo of Henriette Lien and draws a mustache and beard on her, you get me. You can do this at home and it’s safe and everyone speaks Norwegian! Hahahaha!
Gylve has a complete DJ setup in the living room and puts on the Masquerade album The Sound of Masquerade.
– I don’t think it’s interesting how much music people have gone through, but it’s interesting what people chooses to listen to, based on everything they’ve listened to before. Also in a setting like this. You’re visiting me at home just like a friend. I didn’t like it when I grew up in an apartment block on the other side of the road from here. It was like «Gylveee, you have a visitor!» And then I rushed to the door to my room and held it shut, because you needed a fucking good reason for me to let you in. But I’ve let you in. And now I kind of have to show you my toys. It’s mostly music, though. I think this is kind of Eurohope [a musical genre introduced by Raymond in 2015], but you know best.
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This is very nice. This is the song you started with when you played at my club Den Gyldne Sprekk at Jaeger i February. Do you want to talk about the new album? I’ve heard it 12-13 times and I have to say I like the tempo. Ted (Skjellum, the other half of Darkthone) is singing on all the songs?
– That happened because of the cover photo that was taken at a camping trip three or four years ago. It’s rare that you take a photo of a fucking camp fire, but it was so good. It was at Spålberget (in Nordmarka near Oslo). And then the title Arctic Thunder from those guys from Red Harvest’s previous band just popped up in my head and I asked them if I could use the title and it was okay. So now I have THAT album cover and THAT title, and that means I can’t confuse people with having one half with my vocals and the rest having Ted’s vocals, because the album cover is BEGGING for a overall feeling. And that overall feeling comes when I say «Ted, you’re singing on all the songs». Ted’s language has gotten rougher and he has a good voice for what we’re doing.
You’re going to keep doing your own thing in the future?
– We’re not going to do anything that’s not associated with metal. For the last 15 years Darkthrone has covered all of my needs. I’m happy with the way it is. Ted is doing a lot of other things. I’m releasing a single now, but it’s all old songs with Isengard. I’m not looking to do anything new.
How did it used to be?
– In ‘98 I got depressed and in ‘96 I was burned out, after making 11-12 records since ‘93. I can recite them all: Two Neptune Towers, two Isengard, one Storm, one Dødheimsgaard, two or three Darkthrone, two Valhall. That’s ten. Maybe I’m missing two? Anyways, burned out and depressed. So in ‘96 it became important for me to establish in my head that I’m going to stop draining my head for music, and rather listen more to other people’s music. I became a music provider. That’s when I came up with the idea that there should be DJs at metal shows instead of the sound guy just playing Slayer between the sets. In those 45 minutes there’s room for so much fucking more than the sound guy’s Slayer record.
Were you trying to act tough or extreme or just kidding around when you guys wrote «Norwegian aryan black metal» on the Trasilvanian Hunger cover?
– I don’t think so. That’s the same as saying «I was kidding when I got arrested after demonstrating against the South-African consulate in 1989». I’ve had different phases. I’ve had phases of my life where I’ve explored different mindsets. And also 1994 was a shitty year for me. My marriage went to hell and my father died around the same time. That resulted in a not exactly healthy lifestyle. I felt demonized and what happens then is that you become the asshole. You’re assholing back. I 1989 I was arrested for demonstrating against apartheid. Was I anti-demonized back then? Götz Kühnemund boycotted us and made it so that we didn’t get distributed, but he took us back in 2005 when he realized I wasn’t like that.
How?
– That I wasn’t like that. 1994 should have been deleted. When there’s one year where you party too much and everything is fucked up. Your lifestyle is unhealthy and you don’t have a choice. You can tell yourself calm down but you can’t, because everything is fucked up. And you manage to fuck everything up for yourself and in so many fucking ways and that’s not the time to confront that. You do that later, but for me it was all in public. And you have to deal with that for the rest of your life. It’s public. It never dies. Like, do you think I look forward to doing interviews?
Because people want to talk about…
– Because I have to talk about the time I was a jerk. There’s not that many people who have to talk publicly about the time they were a jerk over and over again.
Right. Let’s hear about something from Elm!
– A year or two after I fucked up in ‘94, a just as weird guy came to me at Elm Street and said right to my face «you’re a freak, you’ll like this». I still have the tape, I’m not sure exactly where it is but I saved a song from that tape. We can talk about that now.
Nice, man.
– It’s very nice. «Jeg røyker bønner og det skal du drite i. Jeg tror jeg må ta det en gang til. Jeg røyker bønner og det skal du drite i» («I smoke joints and that’s none of your business. I gotta do it one more time. I smoke joints and that’s none of your business»).
Dr. Erik!
– Himself! This was before the «Jeg vil bare ha det fett»-thing. This was ‘95 or ‘96. Come here, I’ll show you something that still exists.
He brings me downstairs to the “locker room”. Gylve is showing me his perfectly organized band t-shirt collection, which hangs in alphabetical order.
– Here’s the Turbojugend Follo jacket I got from Thomas Seltzer. But I can’t use it, you know, because of 1994…
What the hell…
– I’m not completely serious, though. I have to be able to laugh about it, otherwise I would just have to kill myself. In 1995 already! Do you wanna play with car cards?
I don’t like games. Do you have any snacks in this cabinet?
– October 10 1988 I got a job at the postal service and went from my mother’s kitchen to the postal service’s kitchen. That’s why I can’t just offer you something quickly, and why I don’t focus on food. I never did. I would starve to death in a well stocked kitchen, as they say, but one may go to restaurants and such, since one started to get some money a good many years ago.
Do you often go to restaurants?
– No, but I could.
No excesses?
– I actually got a bit nauseous during a episode of the radio show Radioresepsjonen, when the hosts were talking about much they would spend on a full evening. They were hovering from 1600 to 2500 kroner. If that’s an evening, I’ve never had one my whole life. You can be a national star and live like it, like Bjørn Eidsvåg, but you can also be an international figure, or at least a cult figure, and have to save money. My goal is to not have to stop using public transportation. I’m sure Steinar Sagen from Radioresepsjonen originally didn’t plan on getting his driver’s licence, but when he got as famous as he did, he had to, because it became unbearable to use public transportation.
Well, I just saw Øyvind Blunck [famous Norwegian actor and comedian] taking the tram unbothered all the way from Hoff to Aker Brygge this summer. I was starstrucked, but I kept my mouth shut.
– My biggest celebrity experience was when I met Knut Nærum [Norwegian comedian] in a Sparks t-shirt.
Nice, man.
– Fuck it, one of the coolest music experiences of my life came out of nowhere in a film with Cincent Gallo at the arthouse cinema. The closing scene uses an old Yes song to accompany a violent scene at a night club or something like that. It was magical.
What film was it?
– You can google it. I don’t fucking remember. I’m one of those geeks who saved all the Arthouse cinema tickets, but I’m not sure where it is right now. But I know I’ve saved it.
How did you get into films? Tommy Lørdahl?
– No, I think it was NRK [The national broadcasting system]. It was an anti thing. I didn’t like what all the guys in my class was running around talking about. In like 1984, ‘85, ‘86. Who was big back then? Rambo and that kind of thing. But I liked big movies from back then too. I still like “Back to the Future”. But it wasn’t until I was drunk on tequila i ‘91 or something like that, when I woke up and had my first real hangover and woke up with dirty clothes and didn’t understand why. I had probably run around the woods at Vinterbro, but I woke up and had one of my first major hangovers and woke up and NRK is offering a matiné, I’m pretty sure it was a film from the Czech Republic, it was pretty pallid and grey. And I’ve googled for hours trying to find out what film it was, but I can’t fucking find it. But that’s when I realized that film is something entirely different than entertainment.
Entirely different?
– Yes, something that pulls your soul right out of you. And it can hang your own soul up right in front of you at the same time you’re watching the fucking film. I’ve seen a lot of those films at the arthouse cinema. But I’m talking about the films that grabs and holds onto life itself. The last one I watched, it’s not that long ago, was “The Lunchbox”, an Indian film. A film about what it means to just be alive is “Me And You And Everyone We Know”, I’m sure I’m saying the title wrong. I’ve never been interested in horror film. Ever since the 90s I’ve gotten a lot out of watching films about life.
Do you still go for walks?
– I’ve gone hiking about 200 times from 2003 to 2013. But after I moved out here I lost the need for excursion. I’ve been to 120 places and rated them all in a binder based on for example how many red ants there are per square meter. And the ant assembly on small camp sites, because it can be a bad sign if there are only red and no black ants, or carpenter ants. The most common is the ones that are most bad ass. You can’t exactly say that about the music scene.
– Throughout the 90s NATT&DAG had an award for the person that went out the most that year. I was never even close to that list.
Who was on the list?
– I have no idea. Not me, at least. But I promise you that the person who actually did go out the most in ‘91, ‘92, ‘93, ‘94, ‘95, ‘96, ‘97, ‘98, ‘99 and 2000 probably WAS me. I had a lot of money throughout that whole decade. But then the tax collector showed up in 2001 and discovered I had an extra income. Really broke, Raymond. I couldn’t go out anymore! I could party, but I had to arrange house parties and invite enough people so that the empty bottles gave me a lot of money. That was in 2001 and 2002. But that got straightened out.
Do you ever think about getting kids?
– No, I haven’t thought about it. I got my record collection and a cat. Do you?
Difficult question.
– I’ve never had a problem getting the things I want. I have different periods. I go from extreme camping to no camping for example, and now to extreme activity with my radio program. I’m very good at starting things up, and I close them down quickly. I don’t think having that type of psyche is the safest and best conditions for having a child. I’m working as hard as I can to make sure Nugatti (the cat) is safe. That cat has its own intrinsic value as an individual.
Where is the cat right now? Is it still sleeping?
– No, the cat is outside. The cat likes people that are calm. Like me, not you. When Ted is here …
Gylve bangs his fingers to the table.
– The cat likes Ted better than me…
Darkthrones new album Arctic Thunder is out October 14.
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