Duc aux enfers, grand et terrible

Jacques Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal (1863)

I’ve always had a thing for BEHERIT. It was one of those bands that shaped my early, swampy, miasmic idea of Finland I had when I was a kid and was fully into this music. For me Finland was this sort of misty, mossy, otherworldly place. I remember talking about them a lot with my friend Marco, who passed away way too early at 38. We both were kind of fascinated with the figure Holocausto and his works, for some reason we also thought he was way younger than he actually was. We imagined him fully sleeve-tattooed at 14 or something, which wasn’t even far from the truth—he was maybe 17 or 18 in those old zine photos, which already felt like some kind of extreme statement in any case. In any case, never in my life I hoped to have the chance to see these guys live one day. Things like this have a special inner meaning, you know. I FEEL these shows, deeply.

Of course I am now talking about that 1990–1991 era, what people always lump into the “Blasphemy phase”, but honestly that label always felt too tight for what they were doing. Sure, the aesthetics lined up, the irregular facepaint and all, but Beherit were doing Black Metal in a way that wasn’t about screeches and raw riffs post “Black Mark”. It was more like… Tapping into some kind of ancestral rot. A psychic tunnel into the wrong kind of transcendence. That terrifying feeling you get when you stare into a mirror just a second too long.

For me Beherit was always Metal of Death, as their song goes, a Death that defies the “color” black. Black Metal not as absence of light, but as the color beyond space. They’ve always dragged me into this liminal zone half Aramaic sorcery, half pre-human dread. A place where natural forces aren’t gentle or harmonious, but feral and menacing. Go there check on their whole discography and find a common thread and you’ll get what I mean. It’s somehow ironic but totally fitting that “beherit” is a term that comes from syriac, an aramaic language adopted by early christians. Syriac for Satan, generally speaking, but what if we interpret Satan not as an entity but as a passage to somewhere else? This is what for me Beherit delivers.

Strip away the dogma, and a deeper, older archetype begins to surface. Beherit can be reinterpreted through a mythopoetic framework: not as an embodiment of evil, but as the threshold guardian, the necessary resistance that marks the boundary between the known and the unknown. Within a gnostic vision, this opposition becomes sacred — a gate, not a wall. Beherit does not destroy; he transforms. He is the keeper of the liminal space, the one who confronts the seeker with his own fear and desire. To face Beherit is to undergo a spiritual ordeal, a confrontation with the shadow self that leads not to damnation but to revelation. In this sense, Beherit is not a figure to be feared, but a symbol of initiatic passage, the dark mirror through which one must pass to awaken.

The show last night felt exactly like I hoped. I didn’t expect a precise setlist or a brutal chaotic black metal performance. I wanted that fog, those distorted signals behind the veil, the oniric, whispered flutes and diagonal distortions with exotic scents of middle east. Add to that the haze of time, it’s been 35 years, man, and I’m suddenly back in my parents’ basement, reading xeroxed fanzines listening to worn demo tapes until 3 a.m., showing up half-dead to school the next day .

Because, you know, back then, all these bands spoke to us only through their songs, poorly translated lyrics, occasional interviews in weird typewritten fonts. You rarely knew what anyone even looked like. With Beherit it was even more mysterious. Those bad photocopies with the fucked-up facepaint, this sense of being part of a bigger dance. We were Devil, we spoke all the languages of the world under one conscience.

That’s the thing. Whether it’s Engram or Electric Doom Synthesis or the new live tracks there’s always been a thread. You tune into it or you don’t. Beherit speaks many languages, but all of them bring to the other side. A gray, decaying, ritualistic realm filled with cracked terracotta statues sunburnt into oblivion and skeletal men with blind eyes that point at you in your dreams.

It’s like those shepherd dogs in the Caucasus, nobody gives a shit what color they are, or the shape of their snout. It’s all about temperament and how well they do the job. That’s how Holocausto operates. He speaks whatever language is needed to keep the gate of nanna alive. A gate that has never been about a specific language. Maybe I am kinda overreading it you never know, but I kinda feel his work has always been a bit misunderstood. This guy also disappeared completely from the “scene” for years, sprouting all kinds of rumors. Yesterday somehow all fitted into place and it was a satisfying feeling.

The Show

Anyway, yeah other bands played too. Crowd was packed. A bunch of people I’d only ever known online, and even more I hadn’t seen in 20+ years. Which makes sense. We’re all prostate check generation now.

Devoid of Thought probably stood out most for me—everything Caligari touches has at least something intriguing. Extirpation were visually cool, like a mix between Nifelheim and Ultra Silvam, and the music was solid, intricate even. But holy fuck, that voice. Just this high-pitched flat line, like a screech owl that nested in my haybarn these days. After two songs I had to leave the room. It hit me like nails on a chalkboard. Sorry dude, if I want shrieking noise I’ll throw on Yamatsuka Eye. Gorrch were better than I expected. Honest stuff. Still can’t get into Italian lyrics in this genre, but whatever. It worked.

All in all, a great day. Another check on the list of bands I thought I’d never see. And yeah, maybe the place was overstuffed, maybe half the crowd didn’t even know what they were witnessing. But even that made sense. The packed crowd, the way the band was barely visible through the blue smoke, silhouettes like Pazuzu in The Exorcist… it felt like spending an hour in the underworld, surrounded by drifting, disfigured souls. People will talk but I will treasure the experience.