Black metal musicians are more infamous for wreaking havoc than they are for making music. That legacy includes arson attacks on historic churches, murders, suicides and a police investigation into a Norwegian band called Gorgoroth who staged a Satanic black mass in Poland in 2004, complete with dozens of severed sheep heads on stakes, 80 litres of sheep blood and four nude models tied to crosses.
BLACK METAL: The Satanic symbol of the band Surrender of Divinity. PHOTO: WASSAYOS NGAMKHAM
Thailand’s small enclave devoted to this extreme form of rock was catapulted into the global spotlight in early January this year when the lead vocalist and bassist from Surrender of Divinity (SoD) was stabbed to death in his home.
Samong “Avaejee” Traisattha was 36. The musician’s wife claimed that the killer is Prakarn “Sant” Harnphanbusakorn, 26, a fan of the group who had come to the home to have a drink with him on the night he died.
Police believe that this is the same man who had a Facebook page under the name Maleficent Meditation. In a bizarre series of rants on the social media website he took credit for the killing, claiming that he stabbed the musician 30 times while he begged for mercy.
“I have intended to end my life since I was 25. Because I’ll die eventually, I want to drag down with me those who tarnish Satanism. I got a message from Satan, who agreed with me. I could contact Satan who agreed with me. I could contact Satan as I practice meditation every day,” he wrote, adding, “If I did not kill him, I’m sure he would be murdered by someone else later. I initially wanted to kill 20-30 people, but the situation was not possible. Police set up many road checkpoints.”
BANGKOK’S METALWORKERS
Even before the murder, SoD were Thailand’s most high-profile exponents of black metal, playing shows in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Japan, as well as appearing at metal festivals in Germany and the US.
After forming in 1996, the group released two full-length albums, Oriental Hell Rhythmics (2000) and Manifest Blasphemy: The Abortion of the Immaculate Conception (2006), as well as a number of EPs and split albums with other bands.
NIGHT SHADOWS: Above, Samong Traisattha, alias ‘Avaejee’, the lead singer of SoD. Right, Prakarn Harnphanbusakorn, accused of stabbing Samong, at the Metropolitan Police Bureau.
With song titles such as Satan’s Malicious Fire, Blasphemous Beast Rising, and 666 on their first album, SoD borrowed the diabolical obsessions of their musical brethren in the West. Their menacing stage appearance — black leather outfits studded with spikes and faces slathered with cadaver-white make-up — is also a staple of the genre.
The band from Bangkok may not have forged any new alloys in the genre, but they are dedicated metalworkers who have mastered its schizoid dynamics, veering from the funereal dirges that were Black Sabbath staples to the sort of speed metal melded with hardcore punk that England’s Venom laid down on the trailblazing 1982 album Black Metal, from which the genre was named.
Gary Davidson, an English teacher in Bangkok and long-time metal fan who saw the group three times, said, “To be honest, I don’t think Surrender of Divinity would be a first-rank band in the West, but they were the best extreme metal band in Thailand. Avaejee was a wicked bass player and a really good performer, who loved head-banging and putting his boot up on the monitor like all the heavy metal bassists do. His death is a big blow to the local music scene.”
SoD’s founder and sole original member goes by the stage name Whatayakorn. After the singer’s murderer turned himself in to the police on Feb 18, Whatayakorn came out of hiding. Because of his fear of copycat killers, the 39-year-old guitarist has turned down interview requests from the local press. He has also shunned TV appearances.
Agreeing to his terms that the interview be conducted by email, that his real name not appear and that only photos of him on stage wearing make-up will be published, this exclusive marks the first time he has gone on the record since the murder of his old friend and bandmate. He said that this is also the last time he wants to talk about it.
How did he get interested in metal?
“When I was 15 or 16, I found some hard rock cassette tapes in a trunk in my house — probably it belonged to my father; bands like Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden — and they totally blew me away. I adored the dark, mysterious feeling and fast playing style of their songs, until I discovered some more extreme styles such as thrash/speed/death/black metal bands from the early ’80s like Venom, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Bathory, Possessed, Slayer and all those Scandinavian black metal bands from the early ’90s like Mayhem, Darkthrone, Marduk, Beherit, Archgoat and many more.
“I was a huge fan of this kind of music for a decade before I just wanted to form my own band to satisfy my passion and desire.”
Does he believe in Satanism and the supernatural?
“I definitely believe in the power of evilness and the dark side of the mind. I believe religions are man-made but evil is not. In fact, Satan for me can be considered a symbol of the evilness which has long existed. I’m not talking about a demon with long horns and goat hooves waving his long tail here.”
Evil, he says, comes in many human forms, too, like Avaejee’s alleged killer, Prakarn “Sant” Harnphanbusakorn, who was on the run for a month after the singer’s death. At the police press conference, Sant claimed the killing was done in self-defence, to which the singer’s wife yelled, “Liar!” Avaejee’s relatives tried to mob Sant, a law student at Ramkhamhaeng University who supported his parents with money he made on the stockmarket.
Whatayakorn does not believe that the slayer is a real Satanist. “This guy said he killed him because he tarnished Satan and I have no idea about that. We’re a band who supported the beliefs of Satanism and the Satanic ideology since the first day until now and our attitude has never changed. I think he was only eight years old when we released our first demo in 1997. If he says we’re tarnishing Satan then I think he must kill all the black metal bands in the world.”
THE DEVIL’S MUSIC
SoD’s guitarist is fond of quoting Aleister Crowley’s saying, described as the first commandment of many freedom-loving Satanists who feel cloistered by the rules, laws and morals of Christianity: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
Crowley, the occultist and self-proclaimed “sex magician”, became a touchstone for hard rockers such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, who also dabbled in diabolism — to the point where Led Zeppelin’s guitarist Jimmy Page bought Crowley’s old house on the shores of Loch Ness, even though he never lived there because he told Rolling Stone magazine he believed it was haunted.
ANTI-CHRIST TRENDING: Above, an album cover for Gorgoroth’s ‘Black Mass’. Below, Mick Jagger cast himself as Lucifer in the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
The late ’60s and ’70s saw the spread of Satanism in rock with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones casting himself as Lucifer in Sympathy for the Devil and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols announcing in the first line of the group’s first single, Anarchy in the UK, that “I am an Anti-Christ.”
Even then it was nothing new. In the mid-’50s — Elvis Presley’s heyday — rock ’n’ roll was dubbed the “devil’s music” by American puritans and preachers who organised public burnings of Presley’s albums.
Like so many other aspects of rock, the macho swagger and misogyny set to 4/4 rhythms and jagged guitar riffs, the devilry also dates back to the Mississippi Delta bluesmen such as Robert Johnson. The cornerstone of all rock legends is the tale of Johnson going down to the crossroads at midnight to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for musical talent.
Johnson turned out to be his own best myth-maker, penning such songs as Me and the Devil Blues and Hellhound on My Trail before dying under mysterious circumstances at the age of 27 in 1938, making him the first member of the “27 Club” which would later include Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and, more recently, Amy Winehouse.
The rise of black metal in the ’80s and ’90s turned up the voltage of shock rock and reinstalled Lucifer as the music’s main muse. Some of the Norwegian bands Whatayakorn mentioned, such as Mayhem, took the genre to a new extreme of sonic torture.
Offstage, too, Mayhem musicians lived up to their name. One of their first singers, nicknamed “Dead” — who performed wearing “corpse paint” and would bury his clothes and then dig them up before a gig so he could feel closer to the grave — slashed his wrists and throat before shooting himself in the head in 1991.
The band’s guitarist Euronymous found the body and ran out to buy a disposable camera to shoot photos of the corpse. One of the photos was later used on the cover of a Mayhem bootleg called Dawn of the Black Hearts. Euronymous also made necklaces out of bone fragments from Dead’s skull.
Not long after the suicide, Mayhem’s bassist, Count Grishnackh, stabbed the guitarist to death. The Count, real name Varg Vikernes, took his pseudonym from a wicked orc in JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison for the killing and multiple arson attacks on historic churches in Norway, many of which were razed to the ground.
When the judge read out his sentence, Vikernes grinned.
DEATH KNELL FOR LOCAL METAL?
The extreme metal scene in Bangkok has a small yet devoted following, with a handful of local acts performing at sporadic shows and a smattering of foreign bands stopping over during Southeast Asian tours.
The man behind many of the local productions goes by the pseudonym Tidboy. “I started to organise shows around 2005 through a small company named Bloodline Productions and I represent the Nuclear Blast label as well. The first event was Disgorge from the US. Since then I’ve put on shows for Beheaded, Exodus, Warbringer, Desecration and coming up in April is Skeleton Witch. On average the shows draw around 150 to 200 people,” he wrote in an email.
For local bands, the crowds can be even smaller. It’s not money or glory that motivates musicians such as Surrender of Divinity’s guitarist and main tunesmith, Whatayakorn. “I don’t think we could be able to call it a ‘scene’ for black metal here in Thailand,” he said. “There are only a few bands keeping it going. I just wish we had some female groupies, but we only get men coming to our gigs.”
Mr Davidson, the English teacher in Bangkok, said the black metal scene here paled in comparison to his native London. “You don’t see big crowds or the amount of violence, of fights, of stage-diving and crowd-surfing that you would in the West. That’s why everyone was well shocked by the murder and all the talk of Satanism. Nothing like that has ever happened here before.”
While the murder of their singer and bassist has given the band a more international profile and a dose of notoriety, SoD’s founder is still reeling from the death of a man he calls his “blood brother” and he’s not ready to find a replacement yet.
When he arrived at the temple for Avaejee’s cremation ceremony, Whatayakorn was stunned to see that a guitar, amplifier and drum kit had been set up near the coffin. The singer’s wife had arranged for the gear to be brought there. She wanted them to play one last time for her husband’s spirit.
In what has to be the first and only black metal performance to ever rock the foundations of a Buddhist temple, the guitarist and drummer played a special requiem of Blasphemous Beast Rising while the monks and mourners looked on with astonishment and Whatayakorn worried that “they might lose their hearing from the barbaric bestiality of our music”.
The song was chosen because it had been written by the late singer, who was born and raised in the tough border town of Sungai Kolok, where he grew up speaking both Thai and Malay.
The band’s long-time fans at the funeral, Wathayakorn noted, “got the feeling that Avaejee was playing with us on bass and vocals, probably because they have watched us as a three-piece for many years”. The guitarist sees no diabolical glory, nor any heavy metal credibility, in this case of murder. All he sees is loss.
“Avaejee’s wife has lost her precious husband and the leader of the family. His two kids have lost their beloved father. And the murderer is still young, but now he may be sentenced to death or spend the rest of his life in jail, which I don’t think is worthwhile for anyone.”
Does his bandmate of 12 years think that the singer’s spirit has risen to heaven or descended into hell?
“I’m not sure,” he said, “but if he’s got a chance to choose, I bet he’d prefer to dwell in the underworld.” n
As an underground rock musician and music critic for many years, Jim Algie has written about the local black metal scene in his latest collection of short stories, The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand (Tuttle, 2014). More bytes and pixels at www.jimalgie.com.
KNIVES AND FIRE: Metal frontman Varg Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years for murder and arson.
