Originally published in Issue #4 of “Lucifer” Zine

Selim Lemouchi is dead. He killed himself in 2014. He was private and enigmatic in life, and what survives of his story is less biography than legend. I think that’s probably what he would have wanted.

Half Robert Johnson, half Kurt Cobain, this Dutch guitarist and songwriter founded occult rock group The Devil’s Blood and released three albums (and a couple EPs) of blisteringly beautiful Satanic songs before taking his leave from this plane. I was captivated by his music from the moment I first heard it, and as I learned about him, I became almost equally obsessed with his myth.

Selim seems to have been clinically depressed since birth. The other constant in his life was his love of music. His sister Farida, a talented singer, shared this love. In an interview, his mother recalls the exuberance with which the young Selim forced her to listen to his favorite bands while he did his chores.

Selim grew up to be a hard-working musician, playing guitar in several bands and even touring with the black metal group Watain. But the rock n’ roll lifestyle did not relieve his pain. Instead, it provided him with easy access to a smorgasbord of unhealthy coping mechanisms. He developed problems with addiction that only compounded his depression.

Eventually Selim was admitted to a mental institution. A year later he emerged changed. He claimed he had made a deal with the Devil. From then on, Selim was a devout Satanist.

We can only speculate on the nature of this deal. The contract was private, as pacts with Satan often are, and Selim never spelled it out publicly. But whatever the details, I think it’s safe to assume that creating devotional music was part of it, and that’s what Selim promptly started to do. He recruited his sister Farida as the vocalist for his band, titling her “The Mouth of Satan.” Farida’s powerhouse voice more than lived up to this moniker. With her, he formed The Devil’s Blood.

The band quickly gained attention for their sound, their energy, and their habit of appearing onstage drenched in actual blood. (It generally came from a pig, but I think it’s safe to assume some of Selim’s own plasma made it into the mix. Offerings of his own blood were a vital part of his practice.) It was more than a gimmick, but it certainly worked like one. That aside, The Devil’s Blood were talented and arresting performers. They stood out as a blatantly Satanic band that eschewed the black metal sound, instead harkening back to the psychedelia of 60’s occult rockers like Coven.  Farida truly sings like a fallen angel, and the music is powerfully uplifting, full of radiant chords and gorgeously melodic riffs. There is an undeniable sense of wild joy and spiritual ecstasy in the music, but the lyrics tell a darker story.

Selim was an anti-cosmic Satanist. Anti-cosmic Satanism gets a bad rep from its connection to Nazi groups like the Order of Nine Angles, but it isn’t innately fascist. Anti-cosmic Satanism is simply a strain of Satanism that rejects the material universe, and longs to return to the realm of chaos and fire. No philosophy could have been more natural to Selim. He didn’t just despise life—he had an outright enthusiasm for death which doesn’t necessarily follow from suicidal depression. In fact, such zeal for anything seems antithetical to depression! His thirst for death, his yearning, is obvious in video interviews. His eyes light up when he talks about dying. He makes it plain that he intends to choose the time and manner of his own passing, and to do so sooner rather than later.

“For me it’s not about the loss of people when they die, but about the admiration I have for them,” he says in one video. “They are in a place I also want to go to, and will go to, hopefully by my own hand. It should be one’s own decision when it’s their time to go.”

In another interview he says: “I don’t fear so much as expect that at some point my energies will be spent, and I hope to be able to have the self-reflection at that point to understand that ‘you have done all these things, you have been tremendously successful… and it’s time to stop now, and it’s time to go on and to see where next to conquer.’ The concept of death is only scary if one believes that eternity is darkness; and if one believes that eternity is fire, then there are possibilities.”

Selim’s romance with death is even more vividly expressed in his songs. In “The Thousandfold Epicentre” he has Farida sing,

“Blessed be!

From the branches of death’s tree

The fruit is finally falling down,

And the harvester is free.”

The lyrics go on to praise Satan as the “Great and pristine provider of nothingness and death.”

But this is merely one example. His devotion to the Devil as a god of death suffuses every song, usually quite obviously. In “I’ll Be Your Ghost” he begs for his demise in terms almost erotic:

“Lay me on your bed of nails,

Tie me to your whipping post,

I’ll let you kill me

And I’ll be your ghost.”

And in “Wings of Gloria” he entreats:

“So make your wings to shine

And make your eyes to beam

Make your dark as fire so bright

Burn my eyes with its light

So I may never see the light again!”

It is not in my constitution to glorify suicide, but in Selim’s case I respect it. This is a man who lived towards the goal of death. According to his mother and sister, they “always” knew Selim would take his own life. They had discussed this frankly with him, asking only that he say goodbye first, so that they wouldn’t be shocked to find him in a ditch somewhere. According to Farida, he upheld his end of that agreement “quite well.”

In 2014, Selim went home to the flames, leaving behind a catalog of brilliant devotional songs. His contract was fulfilled, and it was time for his promised reward: to be taken into the Devil’s arms, and enfolded in his dark wings at last.

His headstone reads:

“I fall into

The spaceless space

The timeless time

The endless end

Neither here nor there

Above or below

Into the night I go.”

Burn in hell, Selim Lemouchi. As one Satanist to another, I mean that in the nicest possible way.

P.S. The Ghost song “He Is” was written as a tribute to Selim. Tobias Forge was friends with him. As if you needed another reason to cry every time you listen to that fucking song!