On Niklas Kvarforth’s Re-Opening Old Wounds
By Zeynep Çolakoğlu
“But if I hammer a word in like a
nail, I want it to fester within the sentence like a wound pierced with a
hundred holes.”
Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society2
I close my eyes. In my glass is a
Thracian Cabernet Sauvignon staring into suffering3. Scenes unfold
one after another, and I cannot open my eyes again.
I read Niklas Kvarforth’s Re-Opening Old Wounds while listening to Shining’s discography. This is not merely a
biography recounting the band’s past. It tells of Shining’s birth, its
transformations and the agonising journey towards Halmstad, from within the mind that created it.
This work occupies a place apart
from other autobiographical books that focus on the wasted efforts, suffering,
deprivation and processes of value creation hidden behind success. For there is
real darkness here: one that flays the skin from words and tears apart the body
of memory. In Kvarforth’s world, self-destruction and suicide become a dark
aesthetic; death is the only truth.
It is only a book, I tell myself.
At most, it should smell of the vanillin released by the breakdown of lignin.
But no, it does not. Sulphur settles over its pages, and Pandemonium’s smoke
rises. I should have known from the sharpening of its words. Each page makes a
separate cut, opens another wound.
You wander through Kvarforth’s
cells. The book consumes you the way an ancient vampire drains your blood. The
strains of Shining, never absent from your ears, become part of the experience.
Once you open the cover, you find yourself face to face with truth in its
ugliest form. Until you close the final page, you have to bear witness to this
darkness collapsing over you.
It is worth it.
Opening the Cover, Opening the Wound
Re-Opening Old Wounds is not a book for everyone. For
readers who do not want to face Kvarforth’s merciless ideas about human nature,
his hatred of society and the destruction he turns upon himself, stepping back
may be an understandable choice.
The human soul is not always a kind of Purgatory in which good and evil change places according to
circumstance. There are also misanthropic
souls living in absolute solitude, feeling no bond with humanity. This book
leads the reader into such a mind, or offers a familiar universe to those
already there.
If you dare, you can meet his world by opening the wound.
By the wound, I mean the pages of the book.
The book’s most important value lies in providing direct access to
Shining’s inner history. In the media, the band has often become visible not
through its musical structure and artistic transformation, but through
Kvarforth’s behaviour, stage performances and rhetoric of violence, blood and
suicide. Sensationalism eclipsed the music. Re-Opening
Old Wounds moves beyond this superficial narrative by revealing the
creative process behind the songs and albums.
Readers who were able to access When Prozac No Longer Helps in English
or through translations into their own languages will have discovered the depth
of Shining’s lyrics. Yet Re-Opening Old
Wounds reveals the deeper meanings of those lyrics by recounting the
conditions in which the words were born, what happened and the transformation
the music underwent.
As one of the translators who
carried Kvarforth’s voice into Turkish through song lyrics, what struck me most
about him was his sincerity and the reality behind his words. Unlike people who
move through life in masks, chasing spectacle or seeking the approval of the
Big Other, Kvarforth rejects social norms, curses humanity and has bound
himself, with blood and passion, to the art he has created from the beginning.
There is a dark conviction within him: No matter what happens, you will
create.
The Geography Where Darkness Was Born
In the book, the Swedish black
metal scene becomes part of the story alongside musicians, producers and
organisers. Reading it feels like a journey into Scandinavia’s past, where
black metal took shape around hatred, pain and misanthropic thought. There is a
formation spreading slowly underground like couch grass. Inspired by the music,
people begin to gather in bars, rehearsal rooms, studios and at concerts. We
see all of this through Kvarforth’s eyes, looking beyond the movement’s dusty
and sulphurous atmosphere.
The veins that feed black metal
have never run in only one direction. Although death, misanthropy and
melancholy are important parts of this darkness, literature, philosophy,
mythology and occultism have also seeped into the genre’s atmosphere. Indeed, while
translating musicians’ works, I sensed that the smell of books had always
permeated black metal. Some will recognise traces of Stig Dagerman in Shining’s
lyrics. Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf
also inhabits this literary darkness. These are disquieting works that rain
desolation and isolation down upon the reader from different angles.
Re-Opening Old Wounds shows how the Shining sound was
born from dark abysses, while also making us reconsider the power of music. It
is not easy to understand how it passes from one soul to another, how it
affects the listener, how, in musicians’ lives, it can turn into an assault and
how it can slowly dissolve certain lives.
The Heartbeats of a Place
Have you ever heard the existential agony of a place or the heartbeat of
its walls?
In the universe of horror, a place absorbs the life that touches it.
When you learn about the setting in which Within
Deep Dark Chambers was created, you witness how the soul of that place took
on the form of melodies.
Learning the ominous stories behind the songs and reading them in
parallel with the lyrics gave me a pleasure close to jouissance. A pleasure born from discomfort, offering no comfort.
The stories of how the songs were
born should be read while listening to the albums. The darkness that Claws of Perdition casts across two
separate albums is a good example4. Because Claws of Perdition is not merely a song; it has become a vessel for
loss, repetition and destruction in Shining’s history.
Towards Halmstad
The movement and excitement at the beginning of the book slow as the
narrative approaches the Halmstad
era. Reading the rush of the early chapters was as thrilling as moving through
a suspense story. Towards the end, as more people and details enter the
narrative, this momentum fades somewhat.
Yet the tragicomic part was that
my entire effort as a reader had already been directed towards reaching this
point. I wanted to see how Kvarforth’s path crossed with Peter Huss and how Halmstad was created. By the end of the
book, you realise that you have witnessed how this album was constructed from
the very beginning.
Halmstad is the album that made Shining Shining. It is not a
work that can be heard in fragments. It is a whole that falls like a hammer
and, once begun, must be heard to the end.
In the book, Shining’s blood-soaked concerts, violence, outbursts of
rage and tours filled with madness become a dizzying birth story. Line by line,
we read the price of dedicating oneself to a work and overturning one’s life
for its sake.
As people’s names lose their meaning over time, the tracks gain more
meaning. The acoustic guitars in Besvikelsens
Dystra Monotoni, the progressive structure that moves beyond the rules in
order to reach the essence of black metal, the rage grinning through the vocals
on The Eerie Cold and that black
sound reaching maturity on Halmstad
acquire their own stories within the book.
We expect to read where those
absurd words at the beginning of The
Eerie Cold came from, how the Halmstad
line-up was formed so unexpectedly, and about the constant problems with record
labels, only to learn of a production ordeal worse than any of them.
These take Shining’s history beyond a list of albums and dates and turn
it into an agonising process of creation.
The Body Severed from the Shadow
Shining is, in fact, Kvarforth’s
shadow-being. What breathes life into it again and again is his mind-piercing
music, which leaves its trace everywhere.
By the end of the book, you feel Shining break away from Kvarforth’s
shadow-self and acquire an independent existence. It lives, breathes, hates, and
curses. It has a language that will make your skin crawl wherever you hear it.
This shudder is not always pleasant. It is the kind that could tear
apart anyone without an inclination towards melancholy.
But is that not the point?
To make one more cut directly over the wounds!
Black metal’s historical relationship with death, misanthropy and
melancholy takes on a more personal and psychological form in Shining’s music.
What matters here is not only the genre’s dark heritage, but how Kvarforth
reshapes it through his own shadow-self.
Violence, self-destruction, madness, blood, stitch marks and what
happened in the darkness of the north pile up on the book’s pages. Yet beneath
all this, the urge to create remains. Shining suffers, presses hard against
human loneliness, materialises its struggles and keeps moving forward with the
dark fantasy in its mind.
I read the book breathlessly,
constantly thinking of the next page. It was striking to witness what kind of
body Shining evolved into after the journeys of suffering that ran through its
stormy career.
Guided by Kvarforth’s voice, I felt myself moving step by step through
the albums, watching their births and hearing their labour pains. The imagery
formed in my mind probably came from the sincerity and emotional inflection of
his narration.
This is a story of Shining told through venomous language and an ironic
gaze, yet strangely full of life. It carries on as far as Halmstad; clearly, there is more to come.
What you hold in your hands is
the history of Shining, damned beneath a sulphurous sky.
A gift bestowed upon Nietzsche’s
grandchildren to shatter morality.
In short, a one-way ticket to hell.
Nothing could darken your life further.
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| Niklas Kvarfoth. Photo credit: Claudio Marino. |
Notes:
1 Niklas Kvarforth, Re-Opening Old Wounds: The Official Shining
Biography, Book One (The Sinister Print, 2026).
Re-Opening Old Wounds: Book One, Official Page
2 Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,
trans. Atakan Karaduman, Istanbul: 6:45 Yayın, 2026, p. 10.
3 Chamlija Django 2019, a
Thracian Cabernet Sauvignon.
4 The completed version of “Claws
of Perdition” appeared on Shining’s IV /
The Eerie Cold, while the raw mix salvaged from the deleted recordings
appeared on the compilation Through Years
of Oppression. The lyrics were written by Nattefrost at Kvarforth’s
request. Nattefrost later forgot that he had written these words for Shining
and used the lyrics in another track on his second solo album, Terrorist.
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