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Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites spent the last year and a half interviewing convicted murderers, neo-Nazis, and arsonists for a documentary called Until the Light Takes Us. The filmmakers weren't located in the bowels of some Texas prison, though; they were living in Norway, one of the richest, cleanest, and most socially conscious countries in the world. And these subjects weren't your run-of-the-mill menaces -- they were "black metal" musicians.For the record, Ewell and Aites are not metalheads. During an interview at a Lower Haight cafe, both locals profess their allegiance to experimental indie rock. (Aites even records his own noisy tunes under the name Iran.) But back in 1999, their friend Andee Connors -- drummer for P.E.E., A Minor Forest, and Lumen -- kept hounding them to listen to these heavy Norwegian acts. "I didn't realize there'd be ... a lot of common ground with the music I like and the music I make," Aites says. "It really took us both by surprise." After buying a couple of discs, Ewell says, "We liked Burzum more than we liked Ulver, and I thought, "That's weird, because that guy's a murderer and a church burner, and so now we're getting into murderer metal.'" Black metal, it turns out, isn't the wussy, flounce-around-in-spandex kind of metal. Black metal is dead serious -- so serious that in 1992 the drummer for influential act Emperor stabbed a Norwegian Olympic skier to death; two days later, he and other members of the black metal scene burned Oslo's Holmenkollen Chapel to the ground. In the next year, a dozen more churches would go up in flames, and Burzum's leader, Varg Vikernes, would slay his rival Euronymous. The media grabbed hold of the story and ran sensational reports, depicting the musicians as a Satanist cult that kidnapped and sacrificed young virgins. The truth was far different, of course -- the artists believed they were protesting Christianity and its coddling of the weak -- but as the black metal scene grew, it spawned copycat bands that were more interested in using the genre's scare tactics and harsh sound for commercial purposes. Vikernes and many of the original musicians were eventually thrown in jail, while their disciples torched the occasional church and shouted at the devil.