Trivia / Deathspell Omega

• Creator Breakdown: In one of their rare published interviews, the band imply that Si monumentum nearly drove them to one of these.
  You wouldn't imagine how painful it was for us to give birth to the abomination this album is. If the listener didn't get to feel any of the anguish we went through - and to remain totally focused for such a long time is not usual nor easy these days anymore - the album would be a failure.
• Cut Song: "Year ∞" was originally intended to appear on The Furnaces of Palingenesia, but was cut for an entirely mundane reason: pressing more than twenty-three minutes on an LP side reduces the sound quality. The lyrics still appear in the album liner notes, however, because they are "an integral part of the whole" and the song itself seemed to have become part of "Absolutist Regeneration".
• Doing It for the Art: The cornerstone of their philosophy. They make it clear in the 2019 interview that they're uncompromising perfectionists to the extreme. This also applies to their willingness to work with "irreconcilable political foes" (often interpreted as a reference to Mikko Aspa) since to them, what matters mostly is the music, views be damned; if anything, they consider such conflicts to improve their artistic output. More broadly, they express an appreciation for artistic craft in and of itself, regardless of whether they approve of the messages it is used to propagate, as they explain in the 2020 Cult Never Dies interview:

  "Craftsmanship, talent and hard-earned skills are admirable, regardless of context. There is always something to learn and to apply to your own vision, thereby enhancing it. Humans are just a channel for something infinitely greater than their persons, anyway. And there is a strategic dimension to that approach: there is a lot to learn from opposites, conflict, disharmony and radical alterity."

  • In the same interview, they also suggest that if the core band members aren't unanimously satisfied with a work, they don't release it; in fact, they mention having "just buried eight months worth of work".
• Follow the Leader: After Deathspell Omega's breakout, many other bands appeared playing a similar style of dense, dissonant black metal with esoteric lyrical themes, including Aosoth from France (and their sister band Antaeus to a lesser extent), Svartidauði and Misþyrming from Iceland, Dodecahedron from the Netherlands, and Akhlys and Imperial Triumphant from the US. Even established bands like Leviathan and Gorguts have incorporated influence from DSO into their sound, while bands like Ulcerate reframed their musical tropes in a death metal context. However, all the bands listed here have put their own unique spins on the formula laid out by Deathspell Omega to great acclaim of their own—DSO's sound is just that difficult to successfully ape.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: They released limited edition vinyl box sets of their 1999-2002 material (on five LPs) and their 2004-2012 material (on seven LPs). They were actually priced pretty reasonably given the amount of material on them; the seven-LP box was $111.
• Missing Episode: Manifestations 2002 would have qualified as this before its release in 2008, but it's unlikely anyone outside the band even knew it existed. It gives a good indication of how they evolved from the Three Chords and the Truth style of their first two LPs to the genuinely avant-garde sound of Si monumentum.
• Reclusive Artist: The band don't list credits for their members (although the vocalist is commonly thought to be Mikko Aspa of Clandestine Blaze, and Franck Hueso of Carpenter Brut has been named as a collaborator), never perform live, and didn't give an interview between 2004—entirely by email—and 2019. Throughout the band's whole career, speculation has raged as to the possible identities of the band members, with no definitive answers appearing. In the Information Age, this is an impressive achievement. Until 2023, the only aspect that had at best been confirmed was Christian Bouché (aka Hasjarl) being listed as the lyricist behind The Long Defeat, which most fans had already suspected for years. (Two additional band members' identities were apparently confirmed in 2023 when Apple Music began crediting several albums' songwriting to "Christian Bouché, Deathspell Omega, Stéphane Bouché, Sylvain Ranger".)
• Referenced by...: For its forthcoming 1.3 release (starting in preview 3, found here), the Marathon Game Mod Eternal has renamed one of its levels to "Enantiodromia", inspired in part by Deathspell Omega's song of the same name (the codirector remarks in a YouTube video description that, while Heraclitus is the primary reference, Nietzsche and DsO are "bonus secondary references"). Enantiodromia is a major theme of both Eternal and The Long Defeat, among other parallels (e.g., Eternal's "Law and Chaos Are Both Jerks" stance is its setting's equivalent of DsO's God and Satan Are Both Jerks stance; The Long Defeat and Eternal both condemn hierarchies, their perpetuation through force, and humanity's myopic and self-destructive nature). Eternal was first released in 2004, so this is mostly a result of its creators and DsO sharing philosophical influences (obviously including Heraclitus and Nietzsche), but as the codirector of 1.2.1 and 1.3 has expressed admiration of DsO's music and writing (and apparently created this remix/remaster of Fas), its recent story revisions may be more directly influenced by them.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: As mentioned above, despite being recorded in 2002, Manifestations 2002 wasn't released until 2008.
• Similarly Named Works: The song "III" (from Kénôse) shares its title with ETHS' third studio album.
• Word of Saint Paul: Since they rarely give interviews and don't have a website, the closest thing to official information from the band usually comes from their label, Norma Evangelium Diaboli. (To be fair, their [presumed] guitarist and [presumed] main songwriter is commonly thought to co-own the label. They also set up an official Bandcamp site in 2015; while it's only a digital storefront for their music, they've also announced new releases through it, and its album descriptions can most likely be considered Word of God. It's the closest thing they have to an official website.)
  • They did, however, address the "drummer is a drum machine" theory in a rare Word of God: They confirm that the only time they used a drum machine was on the first four songs of Infernal Battles, confirming that they do in fact have a drummer. The band even snarked with "Isn't that obvious?".
  • The songwriting credits from various streaming services could also be considered a variation of this.
• What Could Have Been: The material on Manifestations 2002 was originally recorded for the Crushing the Holy Trinity compilation and a planned split with Cantus Bestiae.
  • According to the Bardo Methodology interview, they considered performing The Furnaces of Palingenesia before live audiences, but some of the contributors' schedules prohibited it (and if one believes the Aspa contribution, arguably cause problems for them). Can you imagine what Deathspell Omega's live show would be like? They haven't ruled out the possibility of shows in the future, either, though they've suggested that the material before Furnaces would be unsuited to live performance.