Ondskapt - Dödens Evangelium

Ondskapt, close-up magazine article. This article was a part of an "issue" called 25 BM records,done by Lars Martinsson.

When "Dödens Evangelium" was recorded, guitarist and vocalist Axel "Acerbus" Johnson Axelsson lived his life on the utmost limits of the extreme. - We wanted to explore life's flipside and really went into doing as macabre things as we could. Nabemih didn't change his clothes for a year, for example. He reeked. But we just didn't care about anything that had anything to do with reasonable and ordinary humanity. Acerbus and Nabemih hung out pretty much daily during this time - around 2003 - and not seldomly with notorious trouble magnet Niklas Kvarforth (Shining) that had released the band's debut "Draco sit mihi dux" on his label Selbstmord. - We sought out the sick and really made an effort to experience as odd as possible moments. Few would even believe many of the things we saw if we told them. Among many things we would go home to a pedophile to "pre-party" before we went out on the town to fight. - If we had continued on that path we would have died young. But one matures and realizes that it is indeed more interesting to live and develop.

Finally, Acerbus started having recurring nightmares and experienced three months of sleeplessness. - I dreamed the same thing again and again, about a red crystal. It does sound very strange when you talk about it, in retrospect. Maybe it was my psyche lashing out against me after all the extreme oddities I subjected myself to. On "Dödens Evangelium" an echo of this lifestyle can be heard, and which reached a sort of climax during the recording. - The goal was to make sure the album had a pressing and uneasy atmosphere. We could sit around for days working on the music, to the point where the hair on your neck would stand up and a sort of cold came over you all the way into the bone. We wanted to bring out a fucking horrible atmosphere that was still honest and unique of it's kind in the genre. Acerbus wasn't alone in experiencing psychological repercussions. - Our guitarist Fredric Gråby (ex-Shining) didn't feel very well during the recording. One day he was just gone from the studio. When he came back, he told us that he had gotten lost in the woods around the Necromorbus studio. Neither we or his parents understood what he had been doing out there. And then he recorded the vocals for "Djävulens ande", that turned out fantastic. -I wish I would have been in the studio when Fredric recorded the vocals. Sadly, I can't tell you which vocal effect was used to get that certain "swing". Ondskapt never rehearsed. Instead, Acerbus and Nabemih wrote half of the material each and then engaged in a process of trial-and-error in the studio. - When we wrote "Dödens Evangelium" we avoided listening to other music as to not colour our perception too much. But a couple of black metal records that have stuck on my mind and that I know was involved somewhere in the picture were Burzum's "Filosofem", Mayhem's "De mysteries dom Sathanas", Emperor's "In the nightside eclipse" and Malign and Ofermod's seven inches.