Enter Sandbergman

Swedish bassist Victor Brandt is a veteran of Scandinavian metal—so it’s about time he got his own suitably heavyweight signature axe. We meet the metal maestro

If you’ve missed out on the pleasures of Scandinavian extreme metal, you might be surprised to learn just how important a presence this music has in the world of unsociably loud music. Just as the terms ‘West Coast psychedelia’ or ‘British modern jazz’ refer to a particular era and flavor of sounds, and purists would be horrified if you applied them incorrectly, the subgenres of Norwegian black metal and Swedish death metal have their own specific connotations.

If you’re oblivious to these distinctions and would rather just read about bass, that’s fine and dandy, and leads us to the subject of Victor Brandt, a highly affable Swedish gentleman to whom the preceding paragraph is particularly relevant. His career has covered spells in major acts from both the black and death metal worlds, a surprisingly infrequent crossover considering the similar DNA of both sounds. Brandt is currently a member of Dimmu Borgir, superstars of Norwegian BM, and recalls how simple it was to switch genres and countries, both musically and linguistically.

“I’ve been in Dimmu Borgir for around three years, and before that I was in Entombed AD, the Swedish band,” he explains. “Switching from a Swedish to a Norwegian band was easy. In fact, I’ve done it before—I was in Satyricon for two years and lived in Norway at the time. The languages are quite similar, maybe 75 percent identical, so they ask me a question in Norwegian and I’ll reply in Swedish.”