Trivia / Orden Ogan

• Creator Backlash: Seeb Levermann says he doesn't consider Testimonium A.D. and the whole pre-Vale era of the band to be "real" Orden Ogan, and said in the 2016 Book of Ogan documentary that "[we] chose to keep calling ourselves 'Orden Ogan' when we released Vale more as a tribute to our old days than as a continuation [of that band.]".
  • Despite this, a decent number of songs from Testimonium A.D. and earlier demo tapes made their way onto later records either in whole or in part, with "The Mystic Symphony" and "Angels War" being the most notable examples.
• Distanced from Current Events: The song "December", written in 2019, was supposed to be part of the Final Days album, released in 2021, as one of the variations of The End of the World as We Know It. The song describes a biological weapon leaking from a lab in "the east" and fake news crippling the response. Eerily prophetic, right?^note The "lab leak" was a well-known, but thoroughly debunked, conspiracy theory about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The band thought so, too, and cut it from the original version of the album out of respect for the victims of the real-life COVID-19 Pandemic, putting it on the Orden Ogan and Friends rerelease in October 2022.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Likely due to Old Shame as mentioned below, pretty much everything released by the band before Vale is this; their self-released debut album, Testimonium A.D., has fallen long out of print, as have their three full-length demos from the 90s. Other than the four of seven Testimonium songs included on disc 2 of the Book of Ogan boxset and a few scattered YouTube uploads, good luck finding them.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Almost every album since Vale has had a boxed collector's release. The one for Ravenhead notably featured an intricately sculpted raven bust with glow-in-the-dark eyes, along with an 8-bit remix of "F.E.V.E.R." and a folk version of "To The End". The ones for Vale and To the End themselves had bonus comics that expanded on many chapters of the Alister Vale story not covered by the music.
• Older Than They Think: Some songs featured on the band's modern records were actually written and preformed as far back as their formation in the 90s, most prominently "Angels War" and "The Mystic Symphony" as mentioned above. "Requiem" from Easton Hope also began under the Working Title "...And My Tears Keep Falling".