it was founded in 1993 by tiziana stupia, originally solely to release an album by burzum. the background to the founding of the company was that after varg vikernes was arrested in august 1993 for the murder of mayhem guitarist øystein aarseth, no record company wanted anything to do with him. he tried to release burzum's next album himself, but found that running a worldwide distribution from a prison cell was very difficult. stupia, a fan of burzum, was upset when she heard this. she contacted several record companies in an attempt to persuade them to release the album, but to no avail. as a result, one of the companies she wrote to replied to her, stating, "if it is so important to you to have these burzum albums released, why don't you do it yourself?". stupia then decided to do just that, and started misanthropy records.