Letters From The Dead Pelle

Letters From The Dead Pelle – Or anyone who has seen the documentary “Until The Light Takes Us”, which by the way is streaming on Amazon Prime

), legendary Mayhem frontman Per Yngve Ohlin (aka Dead) was obsessed with death — the man who may have been the first black metal musician to wear corpse paint would reportedly bury his clothes underground before shows to get them to smell like a grave, sniff a dead crow before performances, throw pig heads into the audience at performances and often cut himself – and ultimately took his own life in 1991, slitting his wrists and throat before he shot himself in the head with a shotgun. As legend has it, his roommate and bandmate at the time, Euronymous – who has been accused by friends and bandmates of encouraging the Dead’s suicide – discovered the body, which he took pictures of before calling the police. One of these images appeared as the cover of the “semi-official” 1995 live album Dawn of the Black Hearts. It has also been claimed that he sent necklaces with pieces of Dead’s skull to friends, and Euronymous claimed – probably falsely – that Dead killed him because he was upset that the stage was now full of posers. His behavior after the Dead’s death caused bassist Necrobutcher to leave Mayhem (he returned in 1995, two years after Euronymous was murdered by short-lived Mayhem member and Burzum leader Varg Vikernes, who is already out of prison for that crime and arson of churches).

Letters From The Dead Pelle

As MetalSucks pointed out, a piece of the Dead’s skull that Euronymous allegedly gave to someone just surfaced and was listed for sale on Serial Killers Ink, “a true crime collectibles and memorabilia company.” The skull fragment was accompanied by a typed letter that Euronymous had written five days after Dead’s suicide and then sent to Tamas Vamosi (who managed Tormentor and was the Hungarian rep for Euronymous’ label, Deathlike Silence). As the listing on Serial Killers Ink points out, “Letter contents begin by discussing business, but then center entirely on Dead’s suicide in graphic detail. Euronymous included a piece of Dead’s skull with the letter—this is also noted in the letter itself by Aarseth as in a separate accompanying certificate of authenticity from Vamosi. The skull fragment is taped to the letter.” The item sold quickly when word got out – it cost $3,500.

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It’s an image of the fragment above next to a penny (Serial Killers Ink notes that the penny is “for size comparison only. Penny not included”). ‘Letters from the Dead’ offers insight into the real dead – a homesick Swedish kid obsessed with vampires and best known for his morbid role as the first Norwegian black metal casualty.

For fans of extreme metal, the name Per “Pelle” Yngve Ohlin – and his stage name, Dead – will surely ring a bell. Born in 1969 in Stockholm, Ohlin moved to Norway in his teens to join the seminal black metal band Mayhem, becoming their frontman and lyricist until his untimely departure on April 8, 1991. The young Swede was barely 22, when he decided to blow his head off. with a rifle and leaves behind a legacy full of notorious contributions to the music scene, but also a wealth of writings that were not quite as well known.

Black metal fans know how passionate Dead was about music, so it comes as no surprise that he was equally fond of writing letters. The early 90s was the golden age of tape trading, a time when metalheads worldwide began to interact with each other through their letters and dubbed copies of coveted metal albums. Ohlin was quite a prolific writer, but until now many of his letters had never been published. Over the years, some have tried to bring his writings to light—efforts that never amounted to anything more than scattered scans and images on Blogspot. Towards the end of 2016, one of Dead’s former pen pals, Old Nick, collected the dusty pile of letters he had received from the cold Scandinavian shores and decided to publish them. Not only that, he also wrote them down and printed them in chronological order, in the self-produced and aptly named purple booklet Letters from the Dead, strictly limited to 666 copies. Old Nick is from southern Italy and first came into contact with Mayhem in 1990 when he was running a fanzine. All these years he collected his letters from the Dead almost religiously. But one day he realized that in the event of his death, no one else would be able to read them, which he thought would be a shame. “I know I can die at any moment and I didn’t want that to happen without giving old school fans a chance to read Dead’s words,” he recalls.

After publishing them, Nick attracted the interest of collectors, who contacted him to inquire about the originals—approaches he says he rejected, explaining that he wasn’t ready to part with those letters just yet. Letters from the Dead contains all the letters Nick received between March 1990 and January 1991, except for a small satanist pamphlet that Ohlin himself asked him never to reveal. “I left out those few pages to honor Dead’s wishes,” he explains. “Though I think he never imagined I’d make a book out of his letters. But the rest is in there.” “The rest” is a flurry of words from which we can gain insight, however limited it may be, into who Per Yngve Ohlin really was. “He’s always tried to join a certain type of circle – satanic, to be precise – although I doubt he’s ever managed to do it,” comments Nick. Dead cared deeply about his band and his music, something that was as well known as his penchant for the occult. But, as Nick suggests, “These letters convey a certain coherence, an organic structure” that goes beyond his morbid Mayhem frontman persona and his self-inflicted stage antics. It’s clear that Dead mostly wrote about music – like the bands he was in contact with, or the setbacks and mishaps that affected tours. This in itself was already interesting enough, given how legendary Mayhem’s early 90s tours are to this day, but the most fascinating details from these letters are those that show Ohlin’s experiences as a shy, pale young man who emigrates to Norway.

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“Everybody knows his history with the band,” says Old Nick. “But what really stood out to me were the details of his time with the other band members in a cabin or the many dark corners of his everyday life.” For example, Ohlin was completely on edge with technology. “He hated PCs. He would never have even considered typing his letters with a keyboard, and technology generally made him uncomfortable. He just rejected it completely and took refuge in a world made of woods and forests. Most importantly, he it could not tolerate the people or Norway itself, a nation he claimed had nothing to offer, was not in the least stimulating, and kept regurgitating sleazy musicians.” (One wonders what he would think of today’s Norwegian black metal scene.) “He even dreamed of leaving the country,” old Nick says. “Or even better, to flee Scandinavia altogether and then find shelter in Transylvania, Greenland or Iceland,” – oddly enough, a full 25 years before Icelanders did it. In short, what Dead wanted was to settle in a place where people were rarely seen, even less so than in Norway. Also, he wanted to travel and wrote that he wanted to visit Italy and many other places and that he wanted to become a cartoonist. In other words, he made plans. Soon after, he would commit suicide. “He didn’t seem like someone who wanted to kill himself, although a near-death experience at the age of 10 certainly changed his life and his perception of it,” adds Old Nick. “Ever since that day, he has constantly tried to relive the experience. I imagine this was the main catalyst that led him to self-harm. The more blood he shed, the closer he felt to this… state, and I think even on the day of his death, he was trying to do something before he completely lost control. It was a kind of magical chaos, if you will. I think the Romans would have called him Larvarum Plenus – ‘full of ghosts.’

To some extent, Ohlin’s behavior was “completely consistent with him being extreme” — and of a man who truly believed what he said and did. Old Nick believes that Ohlin was “frankly fascinated by porphyria, the pathology traditionally associated with the birth of vampire mythology. And guess what country has the highest number of people affected by it? Sweden.” Moreover, Dead expressed in no uncertain terms his desire to “found a community of porphyries in Transylvania, to settle there and donate his own blood as if it were a leper colony,” as much.