Introducing the writer of the book
Vincent Meelhuysen, also host of this website

I was born in the first half of the 1970s and grew up in the Dutch city Rotterdam. There my fascination with metal started, most likely after seeing the four painted faces of Kiss on television in the late 1970s and early 1980s (I never really remembered any of its music though). I also listened to the hardrock of Status Quo (Whatever You Want), Queen (Live Killers), Meat Loaf (Bat out of Hell), and Deep Purple (In Rock), which were in my childhood vinyl collection. It was in 1986, that my nephew got me hooked on real metal, having warmed things up with occasional tracks from Iron Maiden and Motörhead, kickstarted with Venom's Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Slayer's Reign in Blood, followed by albums from Carnivore, Kreator, and Onslaught. Later on, I actually got to appreciate a section of the heavy metal he had, like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, which I had merely browsed through at that point. I am deliberately ignoring his Quiet Riot, Wasp, and Thin Lizzy albums. From the few really fine thrash metal albums, my attraction to extreme music grew rapidly. It was boosted with the discovery of death metal on the debuts of Death, Obituary, Autopsy, Pestilence, Morbid Angel, and Sepultura's Bestial Devastation and Morbid Visions, Panic's Rotten Church, and the musical extremes of early Napalm Death and Carcass. Still, they were a relatively long step away from black metal...

Ever since legendary albums such as Samael's Worship Him, Blasphemy's Fallen Angel of Doom, Beherit's The Oath of Black Blood, Deicide's Deicide (yes, that one deserves to be here!), and Darkthrone's A Blaze in the Northern Sky were released around 1991, the new wave of black metal caught my main interest, and I started investigating the music, ideology, and history of that particular segment. This lead to a renewed exploration in metal releases of the past, where I discovered musical gems such as Sarcófago's Inri, Possessed's Seven Churches, Mayhem's Deathcrush, and The Great Kat's Worship Me or Die!, and that of a Dutch underground, with dark acts like Funeral Winds, Apator, Countess, and Bestial Summoning. Black metal became an ever-present element in my life. In 1995, after experimenting with several metal subgenres for about three years, my fascination led to joining the Dutch band Liar Of Golgotha, in which I played guitar for almost four years and served as its main lyricist. From there on, I moved to more extreme and obscure things with four years of old school black metal in Funeral Winds, adapting my V Xul alias, four years of more contemporary black metal in Israthoum, and finally participating in Coldeemstorft (since 2004), Veghe (since 2008, a rough guess), Lanz (since 2012), and Perfide (since 2018).

Because of my continuous musical involvement in black metal, I communicated with a lot of persons active in the scene. Early on I became aware that Dutch black metal was slowly rearing its ugly head. Before that time only a few bands seemed to be part of, what could be descibed as a Dutch black metal scene. This awareness grew in my inquisitive mind into what turned out to become The Encyclopedia of Dutch Black Metal in 2004. With skills I had picked up in the section Cultural Sciences of the Rotterdam University, where I had graduated early 2003, I began exploring the internet, interviewing people around me, purposefully expanding my social network, and combining heaps of research material, with the hopes of creating the ultimate book for all those interested in the face of Dutch black metal. This took about five years of work, before I took a chance and walked into a printing factory. Even though I can tell you tons of things I would do differently now, it turned out quite satisfying, though of course never really finished. That's why I am still running this website, although I don't have enough time to update it on a regular basis...

My musical journey

I have contributed to a lot of projects and bands. I have designed covers, contributed lyrics, and recorded music of others and of myself at my primitive home "studio" (today mainly a PC with very basic equipment, but in the past just a cleverly linked double tape deck stereo and a few cheap microphones). I will list all of the releases I have collaborated here. Some do not appear by name because of an understanding of secrecy among the musicians. To be 100% clear: I have not been part of the line-up of all bands below, just of some of them...