Norwegian avant-garde maestros Dødheimsgard have announced details of their sixth studio album Black Medium Current, set for release on April 14, via Peaceville Records.
While the black metal influences run deep, the pioneering Nordic troupe have always operated very much as their own entity, and this new release successfully builds on their outstanding 2015 album, A Umbra Omega.
Vocalist Vicotnik (below) offers a little glimpse into the many mind games at work on Black Medium Current:
“There is a certain amount of facticity to moods, in turn moods are conditions of thinking and ultimately solicit a variety of responses. 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.”
The album sees regular bass player Lars Emil Måløy lend his talents on piano, cella and theremind on the song ‘Requiem Aeturnum’ as well as flute by STTNG on impressive opening track ‘Et Smelter’. Album artwork is by graphic designer Łukasz Jaszak, who previously worked with DHG on the Dold Vorde Ens Navn album.
Vicotnik adds: “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.”
Black Medium Current can be preordered here, available in Digipak, Gatefold LP and digital formats.
Tracklisting
1 – Et Smelter
2 – Tankespinnerens Smerte
3 – Interstellar Nexus
4 – It Does Not Follow
5 – Voyager
6 – Halow
7 – Det Tomme Kalde Morke
8 – Abyss Perihelion Transit
9 – Requiem Aeternum
