Practice Space Enslaved

  • 17 years ago
Go to www.vbs.tv for more on this series

As they'll quickly have you know, Enslaved do not consider themselves Black Metal, but rather Extreme Metal, a subset of Viking Metal taking its cues from Bathory's clarion call of sweeping, thunderous Valyrie-rock as well as Thrash's blistering speed. We know all these subgenres and subsubgenres make Scandinavian metal seem like that "Judean People's Front" scene from Life of Brian in corpse paint, but we swear there are actually distinctions in the styles that matter very deeply to a select breed of nerd.
After it had seen 72 days of nonstop rain we arrived in Bergen. It seemed a perfect backdrop for our meeting with a bunch of Black Metal maniacs, so we went straight from the plane to Enslaved’s practice space in the basement of the venue for Hole in the Sky (the most hard core Black Metal festival in Norway, and probably the world).They’re a great bunch of guys, but they’re not Black Metal. They’re Extreme Metal, because they weren’t into Satanism like most of the bands we’d be meeting in the following ten days. Also it turned out we weren't supposed to have beers in their practice space. Uh, this is supposed to be the extremest music on earth and you're going to kowtow to some rental-space owner's beer rules? Right. So anyway, we snuck some in (Extreme!).