8. EmperorIn The Nightside Eclipse
Do you feel like the fact that [Emperor’s drummer] Faust is a murderer has any effect on this album?
It can be tough with black metal. I definitely draw the line at Burzum. It’s a tough call. I feel like message in music is important, but I don’t like this album for any message. I just think it’s really cool symphonic black metal. I almost don’t even give a shit about Faust. He can do all that stuff on the drums, but so can a lot of drummers. There’s recordings of Emperor playing all that stuff live with a different drummer and it sounds even better, you know?
Back when my friends were getting into black metal, I kind of hated it. I didn’t think it was cool, I didn’t like the way it sounded, I didn’t think that blast beats were that cool, there was something dragging about it that I didn’t get. Faust killed a dude he perceived to be trying to come on to him, right? It’s obviously completely fucked. With Burzum it was like, "This guy’s a Nazi", and I was done with that. Church burning I don’t personally have quite such a problem with. The reason that I picked this record, though, is for the songs on it. ‘Inno A Satana’, ‘Cosmic Keys To My Creations & Times’, ‘I Am The Black Wizards’, I really like those songs! I go back to it a lot. I don’t have much to say about it, I just love this record. The orchestration, the arrangement, the shredding – it scratches an itch.
