Gaahl

Biography

In 2007 the photographer Peter Beste made a documentary about Gaahl, “True Norwegian Black Metal”, which was shown in parts on the website of Vice magazine. Its subject leads the film crew around his house in the Espedal valley and the hills nearby, and for many viewers the film was their first introduction to him.

He was born on 7 August 1975 in Sunnfjord, in the county of Sogn og Fjordane, and grew up in the sparsely populated Espedal valley in the municipality of Fjaler. His real name is Kristian Eivind Espedal; Gaahl is a stage name. In the early 1990s, still a teenager, he founded the black metal band Trelldom: sources differ on whether this was 1992 or 1993. The first demo came out in 1994, the album “Til Evighet…” in 1995, and the second, “Til et Annet…”, in 1998.

In 1998 he became the vocalist of Gorgoroth. On the album “Destroyer” he sang only the title track, but from “Incipit Satan” (2000) he was the main vocalist and one of the lyricists. “Twilight of the Idols” (2003) and “Ad Majorem Sathanas Gloriam” (2006) followed, and work on the former was interrupted while the musician was in prison. Among the events of these years was the concert in Kraków in February 2004, which led to a police investigation and the band’s break with its label. Meanwhile, in 1998–2000, Gaahl recorded the projects Gaahlskagg and Sigfader with the guitarist Skagg (Stian Lægreid), and in the second also with Einar Selvik (Kvitrafn).

From the autumn of 2007 a dispute over the right to the name Gorgoroth was under way. Gaahl and the bassist King ov Hell tried to remove the band’s founder, Infernus, but in March 2009 the Oslo court recognised Infernus as the owner of the name. Gaahl and King called their band God Seed. In the summer of 2009 it played two festivals, and in August Gaahl announced that he was leaving metal.

The break proved short. In January 2010 the Den Nationale Scene theatre in Bergen invited him to play the god Heimdall in the production “Svartediket”, which was called the world’s first black metal musical. The invitation caused a public controversy, and the premiere took place on 26 May 2010 at the Bergen International Festival. In 2012 he played the archer Grim in Roar Uthaug’s Norwegian historical action thriller “Escape” (Flukt). In 2008 he had taken part in creating the women’s clothing collection Wynjo with the designer Sonja Wu and the modelling agent Dan De Vero. The collection was shown in Bergen.

From 2003 to 2015 Gaahl sang in Wardruna, Selvik’s band, and took part in recording the first two albums of the “Runaljóð” cycle. In 2012 he returned to God Seed, which recorded its only album, “I Begin” (released on 30 October on Indie Recordings). A Pitchfork reviewer judged it to lie outside traditional Norwegian black metal. In September 2015 God Seed gave their last concert, and in the same month Gaahl announced a new band, Gaahls Wyrd. Its first performance took place on 13 November 2015 at the Blekkmetal festival. The debut album, “GastiR – Ghosts Invited” (2019), won the Spellemannprisen, the Norwegian music award, in the metal category. He made the cover and the stage backdrop for it together with the photographic artist Raina Vlaskovska.

Trelldom has not been abandoned. The third album, “Til Minne…”, came out in 2007 with the hardanger fiddle player Egil Furenes, and “…by the shadows…” (2024) was recorded with the jazz musicians Kjetil Møster and Kenneth Kapstad and nominated for the Spellemannprisen. In 2024 Gaahl joined Whispering Void, a group that combines folk, ambient and progressive rock.

Visual art stands alongside music in his biography, though it is talked about less often. He calls his work “introverted expressionism” and describes the pictures as growing in silence. They have been compared with Munch and Astrup, and he himself has spoken of an interest in Eastern European art. In 2018 he opened Galleri Fjalar in Bergen, on the Bryggen waterfront, where he shows both his own work and that of others. It seems to me that less has been said about Gaahl’s paintings than there should have been, but this is hard to check against catalogues and reviews: there are, as far as I can tell, almost none.