I watched a 35-minute documentary about Silencer last night and I am still thinking about it. The video tries to piece together who these two men actually were, and it ends with more questions than answers. Which is entirely appropriate. Silencer was built on fog and rumour from day one.
Swedish depressive suicidal black metal started as an accident between two teenagers who met over the phone in the late 1990s. One of them would disappear from music entirely. The other may not exist at all.
Leere
Andreas Casado, known as Leere, was born in 1978 in Stockholm. Isolated upbringing. Got into death metal through MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball. Became a Paradise Lost fan but hated the harsh vocals, which is a detail that explains a lot about what he would later write. He taught himself guitar and drums and started a band called Dethroned with his friend Robert Ayddan. During that period he also met Niklas Kvarforth, the future frontman of Shining, and the two of them traded ideas about what Scandinavian black metal could sound like if you stripped out the aggression and left the despair.
Then Burzum and Bethlehem and Strid landed on his radar. The path was set.
The Phone Call
Nattramn contacted Leere by phone. That is how this band started. A cold call about music. At the time Nattramn was running a solo industrial ambient project called Sinneskross and sent tapes to Leere. Dethroned got shelved. The two of them started working on something new, separately, passing instrumentals and vocal ideas back and forth.
What came out of that process was not black metal in any normal sense. Leere wrote melodic, almost classical-leaning guitar parts with Jonas Mattson on drums for the 1998 demo. Nattramn did something else entirely on top. High-pitched screeches. Wet crying. Actual sobbing on tape. At points on the album he sounds like he is dying. Not performing death. Experiencing it. I cannot think of another vocal performance in the genre that operates at that register.
Death - Pierce Me came out in 2001 with a cover by Olaf Eckhardt. Leere hated the final mix. It received almost no marketing. He and Nattramn stopped speaking. The band was done before anyone outside Scandinavia had even heard it.
The Aftermath
Leere joined Shining as a guitarist briefly, then quit music altogether by 2006. He lives a private life and refuses to discuss Silencer. That is his right. I hope he is okay.
Nattramn disappeared harder. One interview, cut short due to a “mental health emergency.” A book called Grishjärta. An ambient project called Diagnose: Lebensgefahr. And then nothing.
The rumours filled the vacuum. That he never existed and Silencer is a solo Leere project with a marketing stunt on top. That he is actually a fine artist named Mikael Nilsson. That he self-harmed during recording and eventually cut off his own hands, replacing them with pig feet. That one was conclusively debunked as medically impossible, but the internet still prefers the myth. The wildest rumour, that he escaped from a mental institution and attacked two young girls with an axe, turns out to be a true story involving Patrik Nilsson, who some theorise is Mikael’s brother. None of it has ever been confirmed.
Why It Matters
Without Silencer, there is no Shining in its current form. No Lifelover. No Happy Days. No entire scene of bedroom-recorded DSBM pouring out of Sweden, Norway, and Finland through the 2000s and 2010s. One album that most people first heard through a LiveJournal download spawned a whole subgenre.
That is how European metal works. A small band in a small country makes something too intense to be commercial, walks away, and twenty years later you can still trace everything back to it.
Put Death - Pierce Me on headphones. Not speakers. Not in the background. Then tell me the mystery is not half the point.
