The split DEAFHEAVEN and BOSSE-DE-NAGE released in 2012 is out again today, digitally, through The Flenser — newly remixed and remastered, with vinyl and cassette to follow and new cover art by photographer Dylan Hausthor. It is the first time the record has existed as a physical object in fourteen years.
The two bands met before either was what it became. BOSSE-DE-NAGE, who formed in 2006, caught one of DEAFHEAVEN's earliest shows at a now-defunct art gallery in San Francisco's Mission District, at the point where the younger band's demo was starting to circulate online. "Their performance was amazing; it was clear right away that they were a force to be reckoned with," BOSSE-DE-NAGE recall. Blackgaze and post-black metal had not yet hardened into labels anyone was using, and the two acts recognised something in each other well before there was a word for it. They have been friends since.
Nobody can remember whose idea the split was. It arrived just over a year after DEAFHEAVEN's 2011 debut "Roads to Judah" and a year before "Sunbather" changed the scale of everything for them — a narrow window in which they were still a Bay Area band playing to rooms rather than a name people argued about.
DEAFHEAVEN's contribution was a cover of MOGWAI's "Punk Rock / Cody". BOSSE-DE-NAGE brought an original, "A Mimesis of Purpose", which turned out to matter beyond the release itself: it was their first work with Astrid J. Smith, who arranged and performed the strings.
Rather than simply repress it, both bands went back into the recordings. Jack Shirley of Atomic Garden, a long-running DEAFHEAVEN collaborator, remixed "Punk Rock / Cody". Richard Chowenhill of AGRICULTURE remixed "A Mimesis of Purpose". The stated aim was clarity and dimension rather than reinvention — the same performances, pulled into focus.
BOSSE-DE-NAGE, for their part, returned in March after eight years away with "Hidden Fires Burn Hottest". Fourteen years on, the split reads as a document of two bands meeting at a formative moment and recognising something in one another before either knew where it was going.
Physical copies can be pre-ordered through The Flenser.