This Morn’ Omina interview: Vestiges is not a ‘best-off’, it is ‘part off’

Thirty years is more than enough time for an archive to become a mausoleum. This Morn’ Omina have little interest in building one. Vestiges – 30 Years of Ritual Sound (1996-2026) looks backward, certainly, but it does so according to the same logic that has always driven the project: material remains alive only as long as it can still move, change shape, enter a live set differently or find itself placed beside another piece from a completely different moment in the band’s history.

That is why Vestiges does not behave like a conventional retrospective. Its selection moves through the Hegira and Nyan periods, older EP and vinyl material, pieces that have survived through changing live incarnations, and two previously unreleased versions that longtime concertgoers may already recognize. Mika describes it very precisely during our conversation: Vestiges is not a “best-of,” but a “part-of.” The distinction matters. This is less an attempt to establish an official history of This Morn’ Omina than to show which fragments of that history still carry current through the body of the project.

And the timing sharpens that retrospective gaze. This Morn’ Omina are hardly standing still to admire their own past: Insha has opened another phase, Triptych and Rivers Of The Sea remain ahead, and the latter is intended to complete the Kundalini trilogy. After seeing the band at Castle Party this summer, where rhythm, bodies, light and concentrated physical energy seemed to occupy the same space, I wanted to talk to Mika about what thirty years actually look like from inside the project: memory, ritual, changing technology, old compositions that refuse to become fixed objects, and why the future still matters more than commemoration.

This Morn’ Omina interview

Karo: “Vestiges” is an interesting word for an anniversary release because a vestige is neither the past itself nor a complete record of it; it is what remains after time, change and disappearance have done their work. When you looked back over thirty years of This Morn’ Omina, what made something feel like a genuine vestige of the project rather than an important or successful track? Were you selecting music according to historical significance, personal memory, or according to what still feels alive to you now?

Mika: Selecting these “traces” was based on the importance they have in the context of the past releases. Pierre St. Pierre was instrumental in the first draft of the list, as he listened for which ones might still prick up ears, and then the final list was created from a conceptual point of view so it would make sense on multiple levels.

Karo: The selection does not behave like a conventional career retrospective. It refuses chronology and moves freely between different periods, while a substantial part of the core program comes from the Hegira and Nyan-era material rather than attempting to represent every phase equally. Was the intention less to document what happened over thirty years than to identify certain ideas, rhythms and states of consciousness that have persisted underneath everything else?

Mika: There is also a moral, ethical part at play. The Kundalini trilogy is still available as a physical medium and has not been finished yet. It would be dishonest toward the listener or buyer to try and sell the same tracks twice.

So the focus went toward Hegira/Nyan, but also toward tracks from vinyls or EPs that are no longer available, while plenty of them are still, in rotating ways, part of the live sets.

Karo: This Morn’ Omina has often organized music through cycles and larger conceptual structures, including the Hegira, Nyan and Kundalini sequences. A compilation necessarily removes individual compositions from those original systems and places them beside music that once belonged to another context. What happens to a ritual object when it is removed from the ritual for which it was created? Do these tracks retain their original meaning for you, or does Vestiges inevitably create a new mythology from fragments of the older ones?

Mika: They retain their original meaning, although it could be argued that their closer links to the surrounding tracks on the original releases are missing. But now they are part of Vestiges, which is not a new mythology, just a compendium of different stories.

Karo: There is an unusual tension between preservation and transformation here. Vestiges ostensibly looks backward, yet it opens with a previously unreleased version of “The Nameless Grey” and closes its 12-track core with the previously unreleased “One Eyed-Man (liber III).” Why open an archive with versions the audience did not know from that history? Is there something important to you in refusing the idea that the past can ever be retrieved in one definitive form?

Mika: These versions were always part of our live sets. We made them available for those people who have not been able to see TMO live yet, and for those who have and were asking where they could find these versions.

Karo: That becomes interesting with “One Eyed-Man,” because it is one of those compositions that acquired a life far beyond the circumstances of its creation and became an important point of recognition for This Morn’ Omina. The new “liber III” version means that thirty years are not concluded by preserving the familiar object in glass, but by opening it again. What can you hear in a composition after living with it for decades that its original author could not possibly have heard when writing it?

Mika: “One Eyed-Man,” and other tracks as well, had many iterations because we like to keep the live situation interesting for us and for the returning live audience. They live a sonic life of their own and evolve according to our taste.

Karo: The track titles themselves carry markings such as [ccf], [lcf], “liber II,” “liber III” and “FL.” On Vestiges, those designations become especially conspicuous because different systems and periods suddenly coexist on one tracklist. Rather than asking simply what the abbreviations stand for, I am interested in why classification has remained part of the language of This Morn’ Omina. Are these codes practical version markers, or do they also express the idea that a composition can exist in several states without one becoming the final, authoritative version?

Mika: [CCF] is a term coined by a friend of mine, Paul Willeme, in 2000, when he noticed that the versions played live were shorter than those on the physical releases. He dubbed them “compressed commercial format,” and [LCF] “live commercial format.” These tags stuck throughout TMO history, as they clearly denote what to expect from that musical embodiment of that particular concept when released.

“Liber…” can be seen as different “books,” self-sustaining entities.

Karo: Rhythm presents another fascinating problem when looking back over thirty years. Electronic production technology has changed enormously since the earliest material, but the human body has not changed at anything like the same speed. This Morn’ Omina has always used repetition, percussion and pulse to produce states that are bodily before they become intellectual. When you revisit older pieces now, do you hear production methods that belong unmistakably to their time, or are you more struck by how little the fundamental mechanics of trance actually need technological progress?

Mika: The writing process evolved over the decades, of course. But at its basis always lies the goal of inducing saccadic movement and attaining spiritual transcendence. Access to knowledge of new methods, or simply experimenting with different instruments or gear, old and new, makes rooting new concepts a pleasurable process as well.

Karo: Your work has repeatedly brought archaic or pre-modern symbolic systems into contact with electronic machinery, from “Enuma Elish” and “The World Tree” to “Nuraghi,” while the music itself has moved through tribal percussion, industrial force, EBM and techno-derived repetition. After thirty years, do you still see an opposition between the archaic and the technological? Or has the project gradually demonstrated that both ritual and electronic sequencing rely on something very similar: repetition, pattern, anticipation and the transformation of consciousness through time?

Mika: There has never been an opposition between archaic and technological in our worldview. All sounds work together to make the concept or the story of a piece intelligible and transmutable.

Karo: There is a danger in the language surrounding “ritual industrial” that ritual becomes an aesthetic adjective: drums, symbols, incantatory voices, certain visual codes. This Morn’ Omina has always seemed much more concerned with what rhythm actually does. After three decades, what distinguishes ritual as a real compositional process from ritual as decoration? Is there a point at which repetition ceases to be a musical device and genuinely alters the listener’s state?

Mika: A track is finished when everything has blended into one form that interconnects all elements, whether this is a voice, noise, hand drum or lower frequencies. The whole is ritual, not just one specific element.

Karo: Vestiges also raises the question of memory in electronic music. A photograph or written document tells us something about a past event from a distance, whereas an old rhythm can make a body reproduce an action it performed twenty years earlier. When you hear these tracks together now, is your memory primarily intellectual, remembering studios, people and circumstances, or physical? Can the body remember a piece of music differently from the person who made it?

Mika: I remember all of the circumstances in which these tracks were made. Most of them are good memories; some are tied to lesser ones because of, in most cases, failing gear or erratic musical experiments going off the rails.

Listening to ritual music leaves an imprint on mind and body. That is a personal experience. The creator has no control over that.

Karo: Earlier this year you described Insha as reflective rather than restrained, a necessary return to stability after a period in which This Morn’ Omina had effectively undergone a tabula rasa. That makes the timing of Vestiges intriguing. Does an artist look at his archive differently after having seriously contemplated an ending? In other words, did almost losing the continuity of This Morn’ Omina change your understanding of which parts of those thirty years actually mattered?

Mika: To an extent, yes, because of the necessary turmoil that is part of a tabula rasa. But Insha was not made on a deserted island. It was made on a peninsula, a place that, even though remote, is still firmly connected to the mainland. After Insha, it was with fondness that we looked back upon what had been made before.

Karo: There is also a difficult curatorial question hidden inside every retrospective: exclusion. Eighteen pieces can represent thirty years only by leaving a vast amount outside the selection. Were the omissions harder than the selections? And did you ever reject a track because it was too obvious, too successful or too strongly associated with one historical version of This Morn’ Omina to tell the story you wanted Vestiges to tell?

Mika: Well, blame us for the omissions, hah! It was not hard at all to leave certain tracks out. Vestiges needed to make “sense” to listeners, new and old. Certain tracks did not make it, as otherwise it would have been too long to present in a meaningful way. So we apologize that “your favorite track” was not included.

Karo: You have said recently that stories within This Morn’ Omina matter across past, present and future, and that many different sources can flow toward one larger universal arc. Listening to thirty years compressed into one collection creates an unusual opportunity to test that belief against the work itself. When you place a piece from 1998 beside material conceived many years later, do you discover continuity you consciously planned, or patterns that only became visible retrospectively? Can an artist discover meanings in his own catalogue that the younger version of himself never intended?

Mika: There is continuity. But it is not rigidly planned. In the end, the person or people making it evolved over time, but it is still the same human being at the cradle. The production value definitely went up quite a few notches over time.

Karo: There is a beautiful paradox in releasing Vestiges during what is actually an extremely productive new period for This Morn’ Omina. Insha arrived this year, and you have already said that two further records are in development: Triptych and Rivers Of The Sea, with the latter intended to complete the Kundalini trilogy. Has the process of excavating these thirty years fed back into the music you are making now? I am curious whether an archive can work in both directions: preserving evidence of where you have been while quietly changing where you are able to go next.

Mika: I do not see any paradox at all. Vestiges is a pebble along the same road where Triptych and Rivers Of The Sea will be. We could have waited another 10 years, but we decided not to. This Morn’ Omina has always had a steady output because we feel that there are always new concepts that deserve the light of day, and maybe waiting another 10 years would have made a Vestiges project almost too big and therefore confusing.

Vestiges is not a “best-of.” It is a “part-of.”

Karo: I have to finish with the live side because I have just seen This Morn’ Omina at Castle Party, and it was an extraordinary visual and sonic experience. What struck me was how completely the music occupied the space: rhythm, bodies, light and the almost ceremonial concentration onstage seemed to become parts of the same thing. You still have several dates ahead, including the special 30th-anniversary performance at La Luna Obscura in Ostend, Fourscher Festival in Erfurt, and Schachtfrequenz in Zwickau in February 2027. Are further concerts being planned around the 30th anniversary and Vestiges, and is there anything particular you want these anniversary performances to say about where This Morn’ Omina is now, rather than celebrating where it has been?

Mika: Thank you. We found it a resounding experience as well. A deep connection with the audience was formed through a TAZ. La Luna Obscura is the only real anniversary concert, with a one-off special setlist. The concerts that are lined up, and those not announced yet, will definitely reflect some parts of that, but our aim is the future, with new tracks and new stories to tell.

About This Morn’ Omina

This Morn’ Omina is a Belgian post-industrial and ritual trance project founded in 1996 in Roeselare by musician and producer Mika Goedrijk. Musically the project mixes ritual trance, tribal industrial, power noise and dark ambient, built around polyrhythmic percussion and layered atmospheres. In its early years, the project issued three self-released tapes on the Afterfurcht imprint: “The Future Has Taken Root In The Present” (1996), “Terra Tramuit et Quievit” (1997) and “Decline and Fall of Empires” (1997). These recordings led to the first full-length CD, “Nezeru Enti Sebauem Neterxertet,” on the Italian label Old Europa Cafe in 1997, followed by “Em Sauf Haa Heru” (1998) and “Taiu” (2000), completing the initial Hegira-related cycle.

During the 2000s, This Morn’ Omina released a string of albums on labels including Ant-Zen and Spectre Records, among them “7 Years Of Famine,” “Le Serpent Blanc / Le Serpent Rouge,” “The Drake Equation” and “Les Passages Jumeaux.” The track “One-Eyed Man” became one of the project’s best-known compositions, giving This Morn’ Omina wider recognition beyond its ritual industrial base. In 2017, the project moved to the German label Dependent for the double CD “Kundalini Rising,” followed in 2021 by “The Roots Of Saraswati,” also on Dependent. In 2025, This Morn’ Omina released the four-track digital EP “Omm Of Life” through Zazen Sounds. Beyond This Morn’ Omina, Mika Goedrijk has been involved in several other projects, including Sygo Cries, Nebula-H, Pow[D]Er Pussy, Les Nuits Blanches, Project Arctic, Andraculoid and, more recently, Plan C.

In January 2026, This Morn’ Omina announced “Insha,” released 23 February 2026 as a CD and digital co-release between Cyclic Law and Zazen Sounds, the project’s first new full-length album in five years and its twelfth studio album overall. In June 2026, This Morn’ Omina joined the Dark Dimensions Label Group and announced “Vestiges – 30 Years Of Ritual Sound (1996-2026),” a compilation of known, rare and previously unreleased tracks marking the project’s 30th anniversary, released as a limited edition digipak CD via ProNoize / Dark Dimensions on 26 June 2026. This Morn’ Omina played Castle Party in the summer of 2026 and has further dates ahead, including a 30th-anniversary performance at La Luna Obscura in Ostend, Fourscher Festival in Erfurt, and Schachtfrequenz in Zwickau in February 2027, with two further albums, “Triptych” and “Rivers Of The Sea,” in development, the latter intended to complete the Kundalini trilogy.