Dødheimsgard
A Umbra Omega

I'll be honest: I only recently approached the fantastic and bizarre world of avant-garde/post black metal, starting with the main route, La Masquerade Infernale by the pioneers of the genre, the Arcturus. The complex, twisted, and often completely out of this world sound patterns immediately captivated me. And after getting to know the aforementioned Arcturus, I couldn't help but seek satisfaction for my thirst for knowledge in the avant-garde field. So, one day, I happened to come across an album with a Latin title by a group from Norway (a land extremely fertile for black and all its derivatives): A Umbra Omega by Dødheimsgard.

What to say about this album? Pardon, this isn't an album; this is a journey without destination, a musical exploration in search of anti-music. Dødheimsgard deconstruct the traditional song form, even more than the avant-garde godfathers, Arcturus, did. A Umbra Omega contains only six songs, all, except for the opening "The Love Divine" (which is anything but a demonstration of divine love), lasting more than 10 minutes: the shortest of the other five is "The Unlocking" (11 minutes and 21) while the longest is "Aphelion Void" (15 minutes and 13).

In each of these monumental songs, or, rather, "non-songs," different musical genres coexist, from pure black to jazz to ambient, connected only by the screamed (not a true scream) and distressing voice of Aldrahn and the difficult-to-decipher lyrics. But perhaps this is the beauty of it, what makes A Umbra Omega an almost unique case in the history of music: it doesn't want to be deciphered. It's a journey to be undertaken with closed eyes, letting oneself be taken by the totally disharmonic harmonies (pardon the oxymoron) that weave through all six songs. Listening to this album is like climbing stairs in the dark, never knowing when you'll reach the last step: in both cases, there's an extremely unpleasant, distressing sensation. But this latest effort by Dødheimsgard is great for this reason as well: the listener feels the need for that unpleasant and painful sensation. As Schopenhauer maintained, pain makes us aware of our physicality, of our being a phenomenon. And this is the effect A Umbra Omega has: it confronts us with ourselves, makes us realize we are alive and that we want to live, it makes apparent our Wille Zum Leben (to use the words of the German philosopher). Perhaps all these thoughts are completely unfounded and nonsensical... like any opinion one can give about such an abstruse and out-of-the-box art piece. In this sense, in my opinion, A Umbra Omega is very close to David Lynch's first feature film, Eraserhead: the same sense of discomfort and anguish, the same cryptic essence, the same openness to any thought and interpretation. Indeed, I could see Eraserhead very well with A Umbra Omega as its soundtrack...