DØDHEIMSGARD Premiere Music Video For New Track ‘Det Tomme Kalde Mørke’
April 12th, 2023
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Norwegian avant-garde metal band Dødheimsgard have released an animated music video for the track ‘Det Tomme Kalde Mørke’. Created by frontman Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez, the clip can be viewed below.
“This lyric feels oddly deterministic,” Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez commented. “Where will represented through self-image and your destiny doesn’t match up. The currents will hold your hand downstream. It is your story for better or worse. The sense of defeat, not necessarily all negative, but rather an intrinsic path toward self-honesty. Willingly giving into destiny, and thus, in a sense free? Do I have moral liberty, or is my freedom of will rather restrained to whether I choose to be honest about what I am? I acknowledge will, whether it is free or not. Maybe this is my key to my false dilemma? The compatibilist notion that my world has to be deterministic for there to even exist a will. This cold empty darkness, where you find yourself, void of your special pleading. My greatest failure and triumph, acknowledging who I am.”
Dødheimsgard issue sixth full-length studio album Black Medium Current on April 14th, 2023 through Peaceville Records.
Black Medium Current was recorded during the end of 2021 and beginnings of 2022, with production duties being handled by frontman Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez. The album was engineered and mixed by Matias Aaveren at Top Room Studios. Mastering, meanwhile, was handled by Charis at Feedback Studios with additional help from Pavlos.
Outside of traditional bass guitar duties, member Lars Emil Måløy lent his talents on piano, cella and theremind on ‘Requiem Aeturnum’ as well as flute by STTNG on ‘Et Smelter’.
Thematically, Black Medium Current deals with the idea of authenticity, the battle of free will versus determinism and what this implies for our moral responsibilities. In Black Medium Current, Dødheimsgard also aim to question the notion of ‘responsibility’ as a concept.
Through Black Medium Current, Dødheimsgard explore ideas in which trying to free oneself from a state of existential despair and confusion we in turn relinquish our own freedom. Suggesting that confusion and despair, however hard they may be to endure, are in a philosophical sense necessary told to question one’s own intellectual honesty.
“There is a certain amount of facticity to moods, in turn moods are conditions of thinking and ultimately solicit a variety of responses,” frontman Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez commented. “The contradictory notions of angst and if angst is tied to free will or rather solely a deterministic human feature. If an agent is invested in being a particular thing and when the state of being is compromised, one would normally find oneself in a state of existentialist despair and confusion. Are we in perpetual despair because our identity depends on qualifiers that can crumble at any moment? Yet trying to solely avoid these states of confusion and discomfort through structuring all notions of an all-encompassing rationality in order to interact with the objective world, is perhaps in part to relinquish personal freedom and the potential of growth? With this album I am trying to create moods in which this angst and confusion is prevalent, and through my experiential notions pose questions, (primarily to myself), that perhaps extends to facilitating the development of inner resources, overcoming self-deception and promoting freedom through art and creative exercise.”
Cover artwork was designed by Łukasz Jaszak.
“To dream (abstract reality) is purpose, matter (physical reality) is the fabric in which to research and fulfil the purpose,” Parvez said. “The front cover shows empty space and the building blocks of reality in the sense of what is and the potential of what can be. It is easy to view this cover through the lenses of philosophical realism, and it has contingency towards that indeed. But the cover itself, just by existing, also conveys an abstraction towards something that came into existence from an idea. Is an idea contingent on the physical realm to be expressed? Or is the physical realm itself an idea from self-servitude? Brought forth from a mind in order to study itself, interact and further the understanding of its existence. A sort of platonic universalis through an artistic lens. Idea, not as mental but as abstract, existing independently of both the mental activity itself and sensible particulars.”
The track listing is as follows:
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01. ‘Et Smelter’
02. ‘Tankespinnerens Smerte’
03. ‘Interstellar Nexus’
04. ‘It Does Not Follow’
05. ‘Voyager’
06. ‘Halow’
07. ‘Det Tomme Kalde Mørke’
08. ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’
09. ‘Requiem Aeternum’
Dødheimsgard’s line-up is as follows:
Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez (vocals, Dødheimsgard / Strid / Ved Buens Ende)
Tommy “Tommy Guns” Thurnberg (guitars)
Lars-Emil “E. Måløy” Måløy (bass, ex-Dødheimsgard)
Øyvind Myrvoll (drums, Dødheimsgard / Nidingr)
Created by Costin Chioreanu, an animated music video was released for the track ‘Abyss Perihelion Transit’.
“The whole album revolves subjectively around perception, experience, psychology, objective/subjective reality vs external pressure, tropes, taboos, the laws of motion / causality which influences one’s life,” Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez said. “The subjective perception of reality vs the objective causal effects of reality and how they are bound interact. Epistemological dualism.”
“I guess mental health, or rather instead of health, let’s call it mental condition is a big topic on this record. Not as in a complaining way, or as a good or bad notion, but rather a subject’s study of his own psychology (en)during everything.
“Like the ambiguity of being. What is being? Is it a meta-physical stratum of subjective emotionally fuelled notions or is Being just explaining a physical object that is, therefore being. Epistemologically I guess these lyrics dwell a lot on naïve realism vs representational realism. Cognitivism vs behaviourism, and then bringing it all to an artist context obviously. So, it is experiential renditioning, not solution driven.”
The clip can also be viewed below.
Fifth studio record A Umbra Omega was released in March 2015 via Peaceville.
Promotional photograph by Ole Martin Halvorsen & Pudder Agency.
