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Black mass or innocent games with Devil

February 2004. Norwegian black metal group GORGOROTH makes a material for its first DVD in Krzemionki TV studio in Krakow. The concert setting, which is to be the main idea of this release, consists of wire entanglements, rams’ heads scattered around the stage and crosses in the background with naked fake-blood-smudged people hanging on them. Few days later public prosecutor's office in Krakow receives an application to prosecute the band and organizer of the concert for the offence to religious sensibilities. Satanist hunt in Poland begins.

June 2007. The sentence in the case is pronounced. Thomas D. – the head of Metal Mind Productions is found guilty organizing the obscene concert. The court fines him with 10,000 PLN and 2,000 PLN covering the costs of the trial. The sentence is justified with the offence to religious sensibilities, using “satanic features”, synthetic blood, remains of animals and naked people hanging on the crosses in the concert’s setting. The injured party was 3 TVP’s Krakow employers and court expert in the case was a theologian of the Papal Theology Academy. None of the 600 people taking part in the event was stated to have psychical injuries caused by the show of GORGOROTH. According to the judicial decision film reels with recorded concert would be placed in the audiovisual archives of the Jagiellonian Library.

March 2008. Mass media inform that infamous GORGOROTH concert in Krakow would be released on DVD. Of course de jure. Metal Mind announces the “Black Mass Krakow 2004” to be released in the beginning of June.

We’ve decided to talk about the case with the main concerned. According to our assumptions the head of Metal Mind didn’t want to tell the whole story behind the affair because as he stated: “it’s too early for making certain facts public.” Nevertheless, not everything seems to be like it’s shown in the media. Apropos media, when it occurred that the controversial DVD is to be released soon, in front of Dziubinski’s office there appeared a long queue of journalists thirsty for sensation. We’re the only magazine which MMP’s commander agreed to talk with. Here’s the reason why…

„If I’d like to correct those all not always true information in the media, I’d have to write a large book…” – admits just at the beginning of our conversation Thomas Dziubinski asked about various sensational, often much contradictory speculations. “All in all, the media did GORGOROTH a big favour cause in just 10 days they gave as many interviews worldwide as they’ve never gave during their whole career. Since then GORGOROTH started to be perceived in a completely different way. It is objective to say that scandal which arouse around the concert contributed to their fame. The interest in their activity sharply increased, also in Poland. In all that case the wisest behaviour was that of the Church which didn’t take any stance, almost ignoring the whole situation. The others organized one big show.”


POLITICAL GAMES
It occurred that the whole case has its second meaning. And as long as in 2004 the media only commented on what happened on Feb.1 in TVP Studio in Krakow, no one made any effort to study the context in which it was made public. And it’s, undoubtedly, equally interesting: “A few months before the concert Mr. Andrzej Jeziorek became the new director of the TVP in Krakow. He was trying to fight the absurdity of trade unions, which I fully approve of. Let’s imagine a firm hiring 100 employers organized in 15 trade unions. According to the former regulations none of them could be fired because everyone was protected. The director wanted to reduce the working staff to 20 people as the others simply didn’t do anything. As a result, there started conflict between the director and trade unions. It kept going on and on until the day of our concert… 2 days after this event the trade unions having had the general meeting delivered the director an ultimatum that either he’ll notify the public prosecutor's office about the probability of committing the crime or the trade unions will inform the prosecutor that the director of the public TVP department agreed on such a affair…”

Are you wondering what happened next? “The director rushed with the reels to the public prosecutor's office to check out what’s actually going on. It can be said that we were just involved in the conflict and our concert was a good excuse. The whole case wasn’t set-up, these were just favourable conditions to provoke an affair. As you may remember, in that period there appeared fragments of that concert in a few (not only public) TV stations. How come? We didn’t even have reels and TV had a deal with us. The answer is simple – somebody, probably from trade unions, made illegal copy and passed it to other TV stations simply to make the director Jeziorek redundant. Besides, as it tends to be in Poland, a politician Zbigniew Z. and other people decided to make profit on the affair, to fight but for completely different cause and against something else. This is the basis to the whole story…”

Only after 40 days suddenly there appeared 3 TVP employers who claimed to be deeply insulted by the concert. “It’s strange that only after almost 6 weeks those people turned up in the public prosecutor’s office claiming that they were forced to work on such a concert and that they felt bad with it. If I don’t like something I just say about it here, right away! No one from the operating crew had grudge against us. It’s called professionalism. One day you make a program for kids or a football match, the other day you make blood-dripping thriller for private business. That’s the work…”