Folkstorm - 2002 - For The Love of Hate

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.99

Folkstorm’s For The Love Of Hate feels like Cold Meat Industry throwing the switch from atmosphere to attack. After the label’s corridors of ritual darkness, neofolk symbolism, obsessive psychology, and subterranean ambience, this record comes in with a more direct physical intent. It is less interested in haunting the room than occupying it.

Released in 2002 as CMI.99, For The Love Of Hate sits right before the catalog’s missing CMI.100 gap and just before Brighter Death Now’s 1890. That placement gives it a strange charge, like the label approaching a threshold and deciding to mark the moment with something blunt, martial, and ugly. Folkstorm was connected to Henrik “Nordvargr” Björkk and Ulvtharm, both deeply tied to the MZ.412/black industrial universe, but this project channels that energy into something more stripped and battering. CyberNoise lists it as a 2002 Cold Meat Industry release, and later reissue notes describe much of the album as recorded live in the studio, with Nordvargr and Ulvtharm laying down track after track with “ferocious intensity.”

That live-in-the-studio detail is useful because the album does not feel overly sculpted. It feels driven. The sounds hit with the impatience of people who know exactly what kind of force they want and do not need to decorate it. Martial rhythms, distorted vocals, harsh electronics, industrial churn, and samples combine into a record that is more locomotive than architectural. It has direction. It moves forward whether the listener is ready or not.

The title is almost too obvious, but Folkstorm make obviousness work by treating it as fuel rather than thesis. For The Love Of Hate does not present hate as subtle philosophy. It treats hate as a material: something percussive, repetitive, energizing, poisonous, and mechanically useful. That is what makes the album uncomfortable. It does not merely depict hostility. It organizes itself around hostility’s momentum.

Inside the broader CMI sequence, Folkstorm is valuable because it cuts through some of the catalog’s more ornate or symbolic tendencies. Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio turns contradiction into ceremony. Coph Nia moves through esoteric initiation. Megaptera builds vast dark spaces. Folkstorm sounds like boots, engines, slogans, wires, impact. It is not the most mysterious room in the structure, but it is one of the rooms where the walls shake.

There is also a kind of danger in how effective this music can be. Martial industrial often walks a narrow ridge between critique, fascination, and aesthetic intoxication. Repetition and force can make power feel thrilling even when the subject matter is ugly. Folkstorm does not solve that tension. It embodies it. The listener has to decide what they are doing with the energy the record generates.

That may be why this kind of release can produce fatigue in a long Cold Meat Industry run. Not because it lacks value, but because its value is abrasive. It demands the nervous system. The archive does not need every record to be loved equally. Some are pressure points. Some document a mood, a method, a danger, a historical current, a sound-language that underground culture needed to test and preserve.

For The Love Of Hate is not a gentle artifact, and it is not trying to be. It is industrial music as mobilization: crude, forceful, repetitive, and grimly alive. In the archive, it stands as a reminder that darkness does not always whisper from the corner. Sometimes it marches through the middle of the room and leaves bootprints on the floor.