Stories from
the Underground

Back to the Beginning

It’s the late nineties. Maybe the early two-thousands. The exact year doesn’t matter, because the way I remember it, time moved at the speed of a dial-up handshake. I’m sitting at my PC, listening to it connect, hunting for more metal.

There had been mild exposure already. My parents kept a library of new wave and prog rock, and somewhere in those tapes was the first hint that music could be stranger and louder than everybody else listened to. I’d brushed up against some extreme metal too by then. But nothing prepared me for what was about to come through.

I land, somehow, on the Black Mark website. I download a single MP3. It’s called The Rite of Darkness. Bathory.

Everything changes.