Gorgoroth Guitarist Writes Half of New Album in Jail

Nothing can stop black metal pioneers Gorgoroth -- not an ugly lawsuit with the band's former vocalist and bassist, not the mocking Norwegian press and especially not a prison sentence.

In 2005, a young woman in Norway accused guitarist Roger Tiegs (a.k.a. Infernus) for taking part in a gang rape. While Tiegs maintained that the sex was consensual, a Norwegian court charged him the next year with "gross negligent rape," lessening the sentence since, allegedly, he was inebriated and unaware of his actions.

For his misdeeds, Infernus served a few months in prison, but insists his time behind bars had no impact on the ferocious tone of Gorgoroth's eighth album 'Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt.'

"It was not influenced by anything like my time in jail," Infernus tells Noisecreep. "Norwegian low security jail is really not bad. It's like a youth hostel in which you have access to guitars, books, Internet, telephones. So it wasn't a big thing."

Not that we'd recommend it, but being in jail was even constructive for Infernus. It eliminated the kinds of outside distractions that often thwart creativity and allowed him to focus single-mindedly on songwriting. During his four-month sentence, he penned about half of the songs for Gorgoroth's new record.

"I basically just spent four months playing guitar and writing," he says. "It's nothing I want to comment upon. But I suppose in that sense, it was productive."