Who is Deathpact? From the moment “Life and Death” featuring Deathpact was announced as a track on Rezz’s “A Certain Kind of Magic” this is a question that Rezzbians, bass lovers, and Reddit users alike have been asking ourselves. If you are as curious of a person as I am you too have spent a good amount of time pondering and researching to find any solid answer to this question. If you’ve looked hard enough, you know the answer–or rather the path to it–is well-guarded with puzzles.
It started last summer when the Deathpact twitter account sent out DM’s to random twitter users with a key emoji, nothing more nothing less. Given you sent the proper response you were sent a link that led to a phone number and rabbit hole of puzzles. I have to admit these puzzles are clever, extremely clever. So clever that I could not complete them on my own and ended up working with a small group of people to navigate through them. We spent a good amount of time theorizing and trying to understand each step of the puzzle even when we felt like we might be being mocked. (Yes, I said mocked…at one point THIS is what you run into trying to solve a part of the puzzles). Along the way, we realized we weren’t the only ones following the puzzles. In fact, there is now a whole Discord and Facebook Group dedicated to not just the puzzles but also Deathpact’s music.
Now, down to the nitty-gritty. Who IS Deathpact? It is not unlike Rezz to collaborate with smaller, less-known artists such as 13, but 13 had music released prior to his first collaboration with her. There are no releases attached to Deathpact predating “Life and Death” so many people believe that this is a new alias for an existing artist. It has been theorized that it might be Madeon or half of–possibly even both of–Odesza. Not much proof beyond theory between fans has surfaced to convince that it could be Odesza; additionally, both Madeon and Rezz have confirmed that it is not him either. When directly asked Deathpact will tell you, “We are all Deathpact”, which is the most honest answer I have come to myself.
From the first moment I received that DM, I reached out to others who may have an idea of what it means. Every single clue I received, or one of the others received, we spent time looking for answers together. There was never a moment along the way where I worked on these puzzles alone, it was always with a group of others with the occasional cryptic DM from Deathpact themselves. The fact that there is a whole facebook group and discord server dedicated to solving these puzzles convinces me even more, Deathpact is not one person it is a community, we are all Deathpact. After their live debut at Shambhala and many, many releases later I hope the conversation shifts from “Who is Deathpact?” to “What IS Deathpact?” and we can look to the music and community that has brought us together.
*Featured Image via Deathpact*
