Video Premiere: Ceremonial Castings – “Midnight Deathcult Phenomena”

It can be easy to overestimate the six years that Ceremonial Castings spent inactive because a) six years in the age of blink-and-it’s-over social media fads is equal to several eternities, and b) they largely evaded wider consideration through their whole existence, choosing to release music through their own Dark Forest Productions in very small CD runs. In fact, less than two years separate their final record, 2014’s Cthulu, and Devoid of Light, the first lunar devotional by Uada, which includes one of CC’s powerhouse brothers, Jake Superchi. Alongside his brother, Nick Superchi, Jake celebrated metal’s darkness (shot through with symphonic keyboard light) in Ceremonial Castings for more than 15 years, resulting in one of the Pacific Northwest’s prolific and potent black metal secrets.

About a year ago, the pair signal-boosted the project by re-recording one of their records, Salem 1692, in full and releasing it through the Eisenwald record label. Now, to commemorate 25 years since the formation of Ceremonial Castings, the Superchis have re-recorded 18 songs that span their extraordinary discography, all of which will be released with a pair of new instrumental tracks as a 2-CD set called Our Journey Through Forever.

You can hear one of those songs, “Midnight Deathcult Phenomena,” and share in the band’s aesthetic vision with today’s video premiere. Collectively, Ceremonial Castings have the following to say about the what they have created here:

“Coming off of the original release of the 2002 demo Into the Black Forest of Witchery, Ceremonial Castings quickly followed up with another full-length demo in January of 2003 by the name of Midnight Deathcult Phenomena. This song was not only the title track but also the opening of the album. Now, Ceremonial Castings has bred new life into the symbolic opus of death, fire and rebirth. ‘We are the makers of our own.’”

Below the video, stick around to read Jake Superchi’s responses to our short interview about the song and its video. Arise, Ceremonial Castings! Welcome back!

Is the imagery and visual style of the video something that’s specific to the song, or does it relate more generally to the band’s overall aesthetic?
Both really. Ceremonial Castings has always had this cloaked aesthetic which can be seen on all of our album covers, within the band’s logo and in a magnitude of our old photos. The veil has always been a great symbol for practitioners of the craft and those who involve themselves with and/or study occult philosophies. For a lot of us, I believe it also represents a feeling and a lifestyle in which we have either chosen or have been forced to live in. The song itself was written from the perspective of a cult leader who directs others into the fire to burn away and become something more or greater than their own selves. I think it is a powerful message in that we all need to walk through the fire in order to ascend. If we are to stand still at the first sign of pain we will simply be burned alive. So, although there are some particular themes that do tie to the song itself, the message is always a correlation between art and real life. I believe there is no greater inspiration than the trials we live through.

Can you talk about when this song was written, which album it was on and how you approached re-recording it any differently from the original version?
The original song was written in 2002 and released on the 2003 demo which was named after this song itself: “Midnight Deathcult Phenomena.” I believe it was January of ’03 the demo came out. Back then we didn’t really have much experience in the world of mixing or mastering. We were young and more interested in the songwriting and pushing out the material as quickly as it was coming in. This full length demo was one of two full lengths that came out this year, and we had released a full length the previous year as well. We were always just trying to keep up with ourselves and I believe that caused us to rush a lot of things out prematurely in those days. We took a different approach with this one of course. Since the songs have existed and we are not already focused on the next new full length, the most important thing for us was to finally get the songs mixed in the way we always wanted them to sound. We were always after a balance between raw and produced. I like both styles of sound and for a band like Ceremonial Castings; I think it is a median that fits us well. After all these years we have hit that mark on self producing something that represents our sound in the way we always intended it to and that is just as important of a milestone as celebrating 25 years.

When and where was the video created? Was that experience particularly different than the way you’ve done things before?
Although I personally have some experience making and directing music videos, this was a first for Ceremonial Castings and something that we wanted to achieve for a very long time. We had planned to achieve this goal for a song on our re-recorded Salem 1692 release but due to COVID-19 cases and restrictions we had to cancel the shoot multiple times. Eventually we decided to put this on hold and save that video script for something else in the future.

Moving forward and focusing on the next step, we decided to shoot this video in late August in a lava tube by the name of Skylight Cave, which is located in the Deschutes National Forest in central Oregon. The entire music video was shot in an entire day, which is definitely not ideal or something I have done before. Until now, two days have been the least amount of days I’ve used to finalize a video before but we were limited on time due to other obligations.

We had set out early that day and drove a few hours south to find the location. Once there, we carried all the equipment down into the earth and across the rock bed flooring. We spent 13 hours total in the cave and fittingly finished on the stroke of the witching hour as we know it, 3:00 a.m. Of course this was not planned by any means, but I can’t help but notice the symbology in numbers when they line up so perfectly. It seems to happen quite often. Most likely coincidences, but the level of synchronicities that I see surrounding myself and my artist projects are a bit fascinating. In fact, I had another location that was planned for the opening of the video, but due to this taking a bit more time than expected and us having to get back home for another video shoot the next day (one that would ultimately end being canceled and moved to a later date) we were unable to reach that destination. It all goes the way it is supposed to though and we can’t really avoid what the universe has planned for us. Better to follow the flow and understand it as such.

During the last few scenes, we had heard a bit of commotion from above. At the height of the cave there are three major openings to the ground level above. From those open voids we could hear the howling of the wild seeping through. Since there are only about 176 recorded wolves in the state of Oregon, we assume these were coyotes wailing in the moonlight. It took us about an hour to get everything out of the cave and back up to the surface. At that point we filmed the vocal/cauldron scenes in a location we felt was distant enough from any dry trees or grass that could catch a stray ember. This was in the middle of a burn ban and if you’ve seen what the Pacific Northwest has been dealing with the last handful of years you know it is for good reason. Even though we felt it would have been more visually pleasing to have some greater flames for these scenes we remained responsible and had a handful of people with water and sand to act if needed. So, we contained the fire to a small flame inside the cauldron before finishing up and heading back home. Luckily, the shots came out even better than expected and seeing them instantly took our minds back to the cave, the openings in the forest, the moonlight shining down and the howls that were not so far off in the distance. Hopefully the magick we felt in those moments will transfer to the viewers when witnessing our offering.

Eisenwald will release Our Journey Through Forever on February 25. Pre-order it here.