by Niklas Göransson

As Deathspell Omega turned inward for Paracletus, Timo Ketola once again joined them in shaping the work. Complexity gave way to a different form of discipline, as familiar signs receded and the sacred assumed a less recognisable guise.

 

CHRISTIAN BOUCHÉ: Erik and I lost contact in the years following “Lawless Darkness”. WATAIN focused on their closest associates, and we did much the same. By then, the early impulse was fading, as one might expect of any artistic movement approaching its tenth anniversary.

Back in 2003, Christian had founded Norma Evangelium Diaboli with the express intention of shaping the future rather than preserving history. Even so, by the late 2000s, much of the label’s catalogue was devoted to what one might call album archaeology: reissues of formative KATHARSIS and FUNERAL MIST releases, the first three WATAIN albums as picture discs, and the DEATHSPELL OMEGA retrospectives.

CHRISTIAN: Every band on NoEvDia had a past, obviously. While my preference was always to look forward and meet new challenges rather than glance backwards, I am not oblivious to the importance of one’s roots. They have intrinsic worth, but also serve to shed light on the path ahead.

Reissuing older work by artists already in NoEvDia’s fold was one thing; exhuming a band from an earlier generation, quite another. The “Förbannade år 1993–2001” box set gathered every note SORHIN ever recorded – including four previously unreleased tracks – across two LPs, a double ten-inch, and a seven-inch.

CHRISTIAN: SORHIN had a very peculiar personality, especially in the riffing: bleak melodies, sometimes with folky undertones, played at a frantic pace. Being a guitarist myself, I haven’t heard many bands one could trace back to that particular lineage, which remains unique to this day.

What did you see in SORHIN that made them a matter for NoEvDia rather than End All Life?

CHRISTIAN: Well, regarding the conceptual aspect, I consulted with a few Swedish comrades who naturally had a better understanding of the lyrics than I did. We also took into account that Svartvintras was part of the overall picture.

The design is credited to Svartvintras Productions – the very label from which Christian acquired FUNERAL MIST’s “Salvation” in 2003. As someone who considers SORHIN one of the best Swedish black metal bands of the era, I treasured this release. Timo, by contrast, was unconvinced.

TIMO KETOLA: NoEvDia’s SORHIN box? Honestly, I emailed Christian as soon as I saw the announcement: ‘Seriously? Come on now.’ Not a bad band per se, but they stuck out like a sore thumb. I mean, really – KATHARSIS, DEATHSPELL OMEGA, TEITANBLOOD, FUNERAL MIST… and SORHIN? Please.

CHRISTIAN: I have no memory of the specific exchange. But let me say this: over the years, some of my closest associates disagreed with decisions I made. When talking to Timo, honesty came first – and whenever he felt it necessary, he never minced his words. I considered that candour a precious quality in our friendship.

It bears mentioning that although Timo gave SORHIN’s debut a favourable review in Dauthus #2, he had grown disillusioned with Swedish black metal by the time the band came into its own. Christian and I, who are a few years younger, first encountered them at a more impressionable age.

CHRISTIAN: Timo was less of a black metal person than I am. Despite my broad musical interests, if I had to name one genre to define my life, it would be black metal – and everything those two words encompass for someone of my generation, who grew up in that particular extremist corner of the scene. Not merely an easily categorised sound or aesthetic, but a current of a different nature; basically, something closer to a religious vocation in the commitment it demands.

Were there other occasions when Timo objected to something you released?

CHRISTIAN: Not as far as I can remember, but who knows? After all, between NoEvDia and End All Life, we released something like a hundred titles during the years Timo and I were close, and I doubt he liked every single one! We certainly had many interests in common, but our musical tastes and perspectives could also be quite opposed. I often struggled to share his enthusiasm for what I considered rather mundane death metal.

TIMO: It’s actually striking how many of my favourite recordings are death metal made by young kids. Whether from middle-class neighbourhoods or impoverished countries, the common denominator seems to be their inexperience as musicians. I think every band possesses something precious at the demo stage: they may be limited in musicianship, but they’re also unlimited by it!

I recently revisited MUTILATED, an old French death metal band Timo adored enough to plan a reissue of their demos through Dauthus 1899. Without the same formative context, I remain as perplexed by his enthusiasm for those recordings as he was by my infatuation with various late-’90s black metal acts.

CHRISTIAN: I know he had plans to release MUTILATED at some point, but I’ve forgotten the details. Timo liked them a lot, obviously, and it’s probably fair to say his enthusiasm prompted me to revisit the tapes. They were ‘cult’ in the right sense of the word – a bit like a French NECROVORE, though not quite at the same level of eeriness.

Timo counted NECROVORE among his favourite bands – a Texan outfit whose reputation rests on just four songs recorded in 1987. In the mid-2000s, he corresponded with their principal songwriter, Jon DePlachett, later publishing excerpts in the Dauthus Appendix.

TIMO: Jon told me the energies around NECROVORE became so intense that they had to step back, which also meant dissolving the band. Their self-hypnotic music – just think of the obsessive riffing, still unparalleled to this day – opened something up. That’s why the demo sounds so absolutely unbelievable; it’s not about ‘cult’ or ‘great’. It’s about coincidences. Inspiration. Irrationality.

Much of the correspondence explored what Timo called the bestial side of early death metal: a youthful fire often lost to technical refinement, leaving behind, as he put it, ‘a flat carpet of notes’. He cited DEATH’s Chuck Schuldiner as an example of a musician who had followed ‘human rationality’ rather than the raw, irrational energies of his adolescence.

TIMO: To me, musicians are like artisans: they work with their hands and minds, turning ideas into objects… be it bookshelves, coffee tables, live albums, or seven-inches. They envision the result, make drawings or rehearse, then nail down the final product in the workshop or studio. Sometimes, though, there are accidents, and things don’t turn out quite as intended – and that’s what I call death metal!

Timo recognised a similar mechanism in his own creative process. Having spent years mastering the craft of layout, he increasingly found himself working against everything he’d learned. Sometimes, he had to look at a perfectly sound composition and conclude: ‘Yes, that looks good. Let’s not do it.’

TIMO: The more experience a musician gains, the more critical he becomes. All too often, he ends up cutting away the irrational and anything he considers ‘bad taste’. Everything becomes clearer: not just the production, but the art itself. And when music – like any art – is too clear, it becomes flat. It closes the gates and strangles subconscious inspiration.

He observed much the same in his early magical practice: intellectual doubts often stood between him and the experiences he was trying to access. Whether working with music, visual art, or ritual, the challenge lay in knowing when to surrender conscious control.

TIMO: Once you connect to the current, it can enhance a performance just as readily as lead it ‘astray’. Whether the playing is tight or not becomes completely uninteresting. It just is. Especially in metal, a musician preoccupied with tightness will usually choke the flow. Even in classical music, rigidity is rightly considered every bit as unmusical as sloppy instrumentation.

 

TIMO: It’d be equally wrong to say you need an untalented musician to create incredible stuff – that’s just as limiting as claiming the opposite. Rather, it’s about going with the flow. Strange alchemy takes hold when Satan melts the metals in his great orange-red furnace far above us.

DEATHSPELL OMEGA provided an important counterexample; in his correspondence, Timo described them as ‘the only modern technical band I really enjoy’. What he objected to was music so completely articulated that nothing remained hidden.

Years earlier, he had voiced this concern regarding WATAIN’s “Casus Luciferi”: ‘I can count all its tentacles and understand everything about them.’ The album’s clarity compounded the problem: ‘So much is audible as to leave little for the subconscious.’ Reflecting on remixes that brought previously obscured details into focus, he similarly called it ‘the triumph of reason over black magic’.

TIMO: Studios are better now. Musicians have been fed extreme music with their mother’s milk; they can play arpeggiated riffs while masturbating to a YouTube video. Everything’s better. Except it’s empty. There’s no spirit in the box. You can draw the perfect bookshelf, but there are no books on it. Or it’s full of books, but they’re nothing more than covers, with blank pages inside. Or perhaps there’s writing on those pages, but it tells you things you already knew. Or things you didn’t know but could figure out. However – death metal can never be figured out! It does not make sense!

CHRISTIAN: Timo placed a great deal of emphasis on sound – whereas I regarded it as crucial, certainly, but ultimately secondary to the nature of songwriting and the intention behind it.

TIMO: Sometimes I wonder whether I take my obsession with production too far, but… actually, no. It was the wall of sound that made me choose DEATH over thrash or heavy metal in the first place. For me, sound comes before everything – riffing, arrangements, vocals, lyrics, what have you. Clean death metal is an oxymoron. A fundamental misunderstanding.

CHRISTIAN: Downtuned single-note riffing and predictable sequences of power chords form the basis of a lot of second-class death metal. No matter how huge and nasty the wall of distortion applied to them might sound, it doesn’t make the underlying songwriting any more interesting. I can’t help but hear through the veil and, more often than not, remain unimpressed by what lies beneath. Empirically, though, I’ll admit that it sometimes works for reasons beyond reason.

Can you name an example?

CHRISTIAN: Top-tier death metal often uses many of the same quantifiable ingredients, yet summons this incredible aura, sinister magic, and uncanny violence. There, it’s not so much music as the manifestation of forces from beyond. MORBID ANGEL, IMMOLATION, AUTOPSY’s “Mental Funeral”, the aforementioned NECROVORE… or PESTILENCE. Timo revered their first two records, whereas my appreciation extends to the fourth; the production on “Spheres” is as debatable as it is intriguing, and its riffing was visionary for a 1993 release.

Both guitarists on “Spheres” used guitar synthesisers – convincingly enough that the sleeve carried a disclaimer: ‘There are no keyboards on this album.’ Stripped of low end, the guitars leave the bottom of the mix to Jeroen Paul Thesseling’s fretless bass, giving them a thin, cold sound at odds with the downtuned heaviness of early-90s death metal.

CHRISTIAN: And if we extend the discussion beyond the strict confines of death metal, I’d cite “Unsilent Death” by NAILS. There’s probably not a single unexpected riff on the record – arguably, surprise is beside the point – yet the sheer energy of the playing and supremely hostile sound make it a remarkably powerful experience. Give such an album a weak production and much of its impact disappears; on this, I ultimately agree with Timo.

Where “Spheres” thinned out its guitars, “Unsilent Death” runs them through the Sunlight tone of early-90s Swedish death metal and plays at hardcore speed: ten songs in under fourteen minutes. It was recorded at GodCity Studio by CONVERGE’s Kurt Ballou – whose handling of bass and drums had so impressed DEATHSPELL OMEGA producer Franck Hueso.

CHRISTIAN: Timo was also very fond of S.V.E.S.T.’s “Urfaust” – and, you guessed it, largely for its extremist sound. The record becomes almost impressionistic through sheer texture: your mind builds on the buzzing distortion, imagining additional voices around the harmonies and melodies actually being played. It fires up the imagination. You can never finish counting its tentacles, not least because the production continually suggests more than is literally there.

 

CHRISTIAN: “Chaining the Katechon” was a piece apart, with its own purpose and identity within our discography. You see, we learn by doing. There is theory, and there is practice – and as a songwriter, I’ve hit the wall between them numerous times. Many ideas simply do not survive the test of rehearsal.

By then, the instrumental trio formed ahead of “Si Monvmentvm Reqvires, Circvmspice” – as DEATHSPELL OMEGA entered its second era – had been playing together for seven years. Their musical framework expanded considerably over that time: the relatively straightforward, riff-based structures of “S.M.R,C.” gave way to the intricately composed “Fas – Ite, Maledicti, In Ignem Aeternum”, whose apparent chaos concealed arrangements worked out through obsessive rehearsal.

CHRISTIAN: I’d bring in material composed on guitar, plus ideas for the bass and drum parts, but the songs only truly came to life as we developed them together – sometimes taking unexpected turns, other times emerging exactly as I’d imagined. When you’re fortunate enough to work with such gifted musicians, it’d be sheer idiocy not to let that talent express itself fully and, on occasion, even take precedence over my own intentions.

Having completed “Fas…”, Christian understood the formula behind the album but couldn’t see how to develop it further using the same instrumentation. Earlier in the conversation, he compared the band’s subsequent trajectory to Krzysztof Penderecki’s turn towards tonality after years at the forefront of the avant-garde. Yet whereas the Polish composer could reopen a historical musical tradition, DEATHSPELL OMEGA faced the challenge of finding a new direction without simply recombining the devices that had defined their recent work. Christian’s starting point was subtraction.

CHRISTIAN: Quite simply, I banned certain chords from the riffing. We’d used them so extensively on the previous album that they had come to define its atmosphere and what I call its musical colour.

How did that change the way you approached songwriting?

CHRISTIAN: Well, it’s both analytical and organic. Your mind knows certain harmonies will lead you back to familiar ground, so you begin excluding them while imagining novel possibilities. Other riffs may be perfectly good, but simply don’t fit the emerging canvas, and you set those aside too. Your hands quickly adapt to this reality, as if your body were absorbing the new paradigm all the way from the brain down to the fingertips.

 

CHRISTIAN: The idea behind “Paracletus” – specifically, how we wanted the album to sound – had been taking shape for a few years. We wrote it very much by looking inward. Sometimes, you want to open up, both creatively and as a person; at other times, you need to close yourself off. This was one of the latter.

“Fas…” had been one of the former. Believing that fresh perspectives could broaden their work, DEATHSPELL OMEGA brought in ABIGOR’s T.T. and ELEND’s Iskandar. The inward turn Christian describes extended beyond songwriting: it also changed who was invited into the creative process.

CHRISTIAN: Neither “Chaining…” nor “Paracletus” featured any instrumental guests. By then, I felt we’d nailed the vision for those recordings: we had all we needed, and outside voices would only have distracted from something already complete. Collaboration always entails a degree of interference: it can magnify a work, but invariably comes at a cost.

Such as?

CHRISTIAN: Musicians and composers as accomplished as those two gentlemen tend, predictably, to have very strong opinions about every aspect of an album. That makes such undertakings extremely taxing: you must welcome their contributions and energy while simultaneously pushing back to avoid losing sight of your original intention. In my experience, it was always a collision.

In hindsight, were there occasions when you felt one of them had been right to push back?

CHRISTIAN: It is not a question of who is right or wrong; one could argue that every opinion raised during the process was valid and competent. But ultimately, what the spirit of the album demands is something only we can know. We worked together again on later recordings, though, and artistically – in terms of the audible result – it has always been worth the effort.

By the time of “Fas…”, Christian was using Cubase for samples, electronics, and effects. The groundwork had been laid on “Mass Grave Aesthetics” and “Diabolus Absconditus”, where the band’s producer, Franck Hueso, helped shape the processed textures. Ultimately, sound manipulation provided the missing means of realising those compositions.

CHRISTIAN: In electronic music, technology has driven creativity for decades. Entire albums became possible thanks to the arrival of particular synthesisers. Records by bands like FRONT 242 and SKINNY PUPPY were quite literally shaped by these developments, especially the emergence of samplers.

Working on “Paracletus”, had the software become something you could manipulate as intuitively as the guitar, without interrupting the flow of an idea?

CHRISTIAN: More so now than then: Franck handled most of the software work, based on my instructions. But once you familiarise yourself with such tools, they become an extension of your brain, just as a guitar can be. A few years ago, I sent you a couple of songs – or rather, experiments – stylistically somewhere between ambient and industrial. I made them in moments of absolute focus, as ideas flowed freely and translated directly into technical settings.