by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind (Feral House, USA,1998)

Venom, Slayer, King Diamond. And then there were Mayhem, Darkthrone and those church-burning metal-nazis from Norway. I heard about them for the first time, when Peaceville Records sent out their famous press release around 1994. The label agreed to produce "Transilvanian hunger" by Darkthrone, but they refused to promote it or advertise the record. By then it was obvious that some metalheads had started their own cult, interpreting Anton LaVeys "Satanic Bible" and Aleister Crowleys "magic spells" in their own way. After the legendary cover-story in "Kerrang Magazine" No. 436 (1993), the media jumped at it. They made Varg Vikernes from Norway, who killed his friend Euronymous, a hero for nazis like Hendrik Möbius from East-Germany who killed Sandro Beyer in 1993. There is a german book called "Satanskinder" by Liane v. Billerbeck and Frank Nordhausen, which is looking at this one case without really understanding the background. "Lords of Chaos" looks at the big picture and features tons of interviews with members of the various "satanic bands", cops, priests, journalists and a handful of armchair-satanists. The book looks at the origin of Black Metal and tries to conect this extreme form of music with a legacy of murder, suicide and more than 100 churches torched. Not a bad cultural study, but "Lords of Chaos" fails to follow the trail of real neo-nazis. It concentrates on norwegian folklore and the theatrical poses of Heavy Metal in general which have been around since the early days of Kiss and Alice Cooper. Not bad and definetely worth reading for everyone who ever tried corpsepaint for Halloween.

Michael Moynihan, who also plays in Blood Axis, is a strange figure. "Ask some people, and they'll tell you Michael Moynihan is a gentleman and a scholar. Ask others, and they'll tell you he's a clear and present danger to modern America, a crypto-Nazi spreading an insidious agenda through the music of Blood Axis and several other music project, and his underground-hit book Lords of Chaos. Moynihan, who wrote Lords of Chaos to document the violent black metal scene in Scandinavia in the early '90s, just seems to attract the most virulent kind of criticism. Anti-racist watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center have claimed that Lords of Chaos furthered a white supremacist agenda, and the dark, archaic imagery of Blood Axis has likewise been a magnet for controversy."

Read 'The Notorious Michael Moynihan' by Zach Dundas at mumblage.com