Elementary deductive reasoning, my dear Watson. Mayhem spent much of 88/89 on semi-hiatus with Maniac out of the band, Dead intermittently busy with Morbid and Euronymous busy getting fucked up in Eastern Europe. None of the 1980s releases from the band (nor the extent live shows) include any of the post-
Deathcrush tracks from
Live In Leipzig, and the concert itself was recorded in late (November, I think) 1990. Taken with the slightly slower tempos than we find in later versions of the tracks and the slightly unsteady playing (the same is true of the performance recorded on
Dawn of the Black Hearts), and it's clear that these were songs that the band hadn't practiced much as a band, which would indicate they were written shortly before hitting the road for the 1990 tour.
So this pretty much comes down to you calling the period where the second wave was developing the "dormant period" rather than the "developmental period."
What 'developmental' period? With the exception of Mayhem (and, if one is charitable, Thorns, although the early tracks never got beyond the instrumental stage), the second wave bands weren't even playing black metal AT ALL until 1991. That's when Varg recorded the first Burzum demos, when the first black metal recording from Immortal was made (the
Immortal demo, from October of that year), and when Enslaved released their
Nema demo and Darkthrone was busy writing and recording the songs that would become
A Blaze in the Northern Sky. Prior to that point, none of these bands or their personnel were involved with black metal. They were all playing in straightforward, Swedish inspired death metal acts. There simply was no period of 'development.' In 1990, Mayhem was the only black metal band in Norway, by late 1991, most of what would become the Norwegian scene had made the switch from death metal to black metal. By early 1992, these bands were beginning to release their classic albums. We're talking about a span of like, 9 months here, not '3-5 years.'
Hardly common knowledge what you are proposing, I think that most see the early Norway scene as bridging the gap between
Morbid Tales(etc.) and DMDS (a better theory, I think, than proposing Euronymous' sudden development as a musician/writer as the catalyst), ignoring that leaves a bit of a missing link that one could easily characterize as a "dormant period."
Could you outline the difference you perceive between Sodom-influenced "death metal"
The only overtly Sodom influenced band in the scene was early Mayhem, which obviously was a black metal band (though, at that point, not one making a meaningful contribution to the development of the genre). Everyone else in the Norwegian scene was busy with Swedish/Autopsy influenced death metal, which is fairly common knowledge. Have you really never heard say,
Achieve the Mutilation or
The Older Ones? 'Hellhammer influenced black metal' they ain't...
