The answer lies within those tapes. The way people found out about underground extreme metal music in the 80s and 90s was via Zines and tape trading.

Zines were amateur produced publications that ranged from poorly rendered pamphlets to almost professional standard magazines. These contained reviews, ads, and interviews for music/musicians in the burgeoning black and death metal scenes. One of the most important Zines was called “Slayer” and was produced by Jon ‘Metalion’ Kristiansen in Norway. For many in the late 80s and 90s, this was the gospel for extreme music.

That’s how people found out about the music. The way they listened to it was via tape trading. Many smaller, more underground bands didn’t have the resources to produce records or CDs, so they recorded demos on cassette tape and these were copied and traded all over the world. Tomas Lindberg (who sadly does this week - RIP), singer of Swedish DM bands Grotesque and At The Gates, among others, was a prolific tape trader and was in correspondence with heavy music fans as far afield as the US, East Asia, and Australia.

Tapes were mailed via international post, sold from the boot of cars in the car park outside gigs, and simply circulated among friendship groups.

The final method was underground record shops, of which there were many more than there are today, where kids would go to the metal section and buy anything new that looked dark, evil, and loud. That’s how the bigger bands; Celtic Frost, Morbid Angel, Bathory etc, became well known.

The book ‘Swedish Death Metal’ by Daniel Ekeroth (who has been involved in several bands and was present in the scene at the relevant time) contains a lot of detail about all of the above, with plenty of photographic evidence of zines, flyers, and band promos etc.

Also, Metalion himself has written a memoir called ‘The Slayer Mag Diaries’ which, full disclosure, I have not yet read but would be an excellent primary source for the above.

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God is perfect. Man is not. What you know as the Bible is a lose collection of stories put together by imperfect men . Mistranslations and selective readings motivated by good and bad intentions of an imperfect system. Plagues and dark ages have further distorted these accounts. Your faith is in God, and you are allowed to question the intent of man, to try and separate these inconsistencies. And when you meet your maker he will see that you made this effort and tried to do right by him despite the crooked path you had to navigate.

You have to feel for the guy. I'd exile myself from the local corner shop for seven years if I happened to fart there.

He wasn’t arrested yet and I don’t believe he had even started his murder spree. At this time, he was just some guy who was involved with the Jaycees.

Honestly, the internet was not unknown or inaccessible in the 90's.

It required more know-how, a dial-up internet connection, and (ideally) a separate phone line - but music, images, videos, games, etc. were definitely there for the sharing. We used BBSes (bulletin board services) to find and share things. Dial-up modems were all we had (Google them if you don't know) and you had to be "in the know" to know what numbers to dial up / connect with to find the stuff that you wanted. Speeds were SLOW, but fidelity and file sizes were smaller too. (No lie, it took FIVE DAYS for me to download a certain PC game when I was pirating stuff in high school. If anyone had picked up the second phone line at any point I'd have been screwed.)

So, 90's? Be a nerd, or make friends with a nerd - everything was (mostly) accessible. We'd just burn CDs / DVDs with music / files on them, or install / save directly on our PCs.