One important backdrop for our Goatlord album (title of course taken from the Las Vegas band with the same name) was that we were dismayed with the route death metal had largely taken; plastic sound brutality was not for us. Here portrayed in our song BLASPHEMER where we included the Children of the Corn theme. Why did we do this? We had not seen Children of the Corn. However, in 1987 I was tape trading with Nicke Andersson (NIHILIST) and thus I discovered DEVASTATION (Illinois – important). And in circa 1989 when tape trading brought me their unreleased album, the track Genetic Poisoning had a fantastic intro with notes that were the very essence of death metal the way I see/hear it. Later we would learn it was the Children Of The Corn movie – many many years later. This was important to us, it was death metal to us, like Season Of The Dead album by Necrophagia or that fantastic Massacre demo riff of From Beyond. So when we included that as a riff, it was an homage to Devastation from Illinois as well as our vision of death metal. Sure we liked the MUSIC of Altars Of Madness, the 1989 release by Morbid Angel but the soundscape we were into was more their Thy Kingdom Come demo. So in 1990 there were practically NO death metal releases we were into, except for Autopsy and The Eponym demo by Dr Shrinker. While others were into “the new” death metal, we were still hung up on the 2nd Nocturnus demo and their 1990 album was a big let down for us. This is also a backdrop for our Soulside Journey album but as tragic fate had it, we could not afford to go to our local Creative Studios and had to have help from our friends in Nihilist/Entombed to live at their homes while recording our first album in September 1990 in Stockholm with the exact soundscape we did NOT care for. We were promised a 150% increase in budget for our next album so we started to work on that in October 1990, even playing two new songs live in November 1990 which can be found in the recent box release of old Darkthrone demos and what have you. The process for the album was that every time we put together a new song we rehearsed it and then recorded it on the other side of the rehearsal tape for Soulside Journey. Why? So I could make copies of the fresh material for the other members so they could listen and rehearse at home. We repeated this up until March 1990 when all the songs were done. The style we opted for on this album was both darker AND with more bell bottom sway, being inspired by Autopsy and Black Sabbath more and more – as a drummer I had re-discovered both Vinnie Appice and Bill Ward during the course of 1990, hehe! So as 1990 gave us very few exciting new albums to listen to we were naturally digging out a lot of our old albums and discovering back catalogues of albums we had missed out on by for instance Black Sabbath, Bathory, Motorhead. We had tons of music that we were digging from the 80s and we saw the future in the past, so to speak. Goatlord was supposed to be recorded in august 1991 but what we listened to the most was so different from the material we had made, we kind of felt alienated to it in early 1991 and all the songs were done and there was plenty of time until the studio booking so we decided to BLACK UP and simplify some of the material to more rock/black metal oriented style and furthermore try to make some total retro black metal songs too and in august 1991 we instead recorded this under the name of a blaze in the northern sky. Goatlord was peak perfomance Darkthrone but sloppy of course as the recordings were meant for training ourselves while listening to it. And I believe that the same ghettoblaster was used that also recorded our SNOWFALL track (a new dimension promo demo 1988) albeit in a different rehearsal space.
