Mortiis - 1997 - Reisen Til Grotter Og Odemarker VHS

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.48

After Brighter Death Now’s Innerwar, the Cold Meat Industry sequence makes a strange and necessary turn. Mortiis does not continue the label’s descent through psychological pressure, military authority, erotic inversion or death industrial machinery. Reisene Til Grotter Og Ødemarker opens a different kind of chamber, one built from fog, stone, water, keyboard grandeur and solitary fantasy. It is not less dark than the surrounding releases, but its darkness is not punitive. It does not try to crush the listener. It invites the listener to enter an imagined place and remain there long enough for ordinary time to loosen.
As a VHS artifact, this release matters because Mortiis was already a visual world before he was simply a recording artist. The music from Keiser Av En Dimensjon Ukjent had its own internal geography, but the video gives that geography a body: ruins, landscapes, cloaked movement, castle walls, frozen theatrical poses, and the famous Mortiis face appearing like a creature from a private childhood mythology that refused to disappear with age. This is not a music video in the commercial sense. It does not sell a single, compress a persona into a few memorable shots, or translate a song into narrative entertainment. It behaves more like a moving booklet, a ritual companion to the album, or a fan-made dream given official form before “fan edit” culture became a daily internet language.
The title translates roughly into journeys to grottoes and wastelands, and that is exactly how the piece moves. Nothing hurries. The camera and music share a patience that now feels almost impossible in a culture trained to slice atmosphere into fragments. Mortiis asks the viewer to accept duration as part of the spell. The synthesizers do not function as background scoring for action. They are the action. Their slow fanfares, minor-key progressions and medieval-fantasy gestures create the sensation that the landscape is thinking. Trees, water, fortress stone and mist become extensions of the keyboard lines. The visual world does not illustrate the music from outside; it appears to have grown out of the same mossy circuitry.
Mortiis’ Era I work has often been gathered under the later term dungeon synth, but this video makes clear why that term can be both useful and limiting. The “dungeon” is not merely a genre location, a set of lo-fi keyboard tones and fantasy signifiers. It is an emotional architecture. It is the inner room where isolation becomes kingdom, where adolescent grandeur becomes sacred rather than embarrassing, and where a person can convert social distance into mythic distance. Mortiis had come out of black metal, but here the aggression has been removed and the aura remains. The corpse-painted forest becomes a fairy-tale ruin. Satanic opposition gives way to invented monarchy, exile, towers, secret books and nameless travel through empty lands.
That emptiness is central. The video’s landscapes do not feel populated by an ordinary world just beyond the frame. They feel abandoned to imagination. Mortiis appears less like a character acting inside a story than a figure who belongs to a realm after everyone else has vanished. His costume and prosthetic image can look theatrical, even awkward, but that awkwardness is part of the truth of the work. This is not cinema polished by professional fantasy infrastructure. It is personal myth-making under material limitations. The rubber, fabric, fog, stone and VHS texture do not hide their construction. Instead, they create a handmade portal, one whose sincerity becomes stronger because the seams remain visible.
The music itself gains something from being attached to these images. Heard alone, “Reisene Til Grotter Og Ødemarker” unfolds as one of Mortiis’ long-form keyboard journeys, moving through repeating themes and grand changes in mood without conventional song structure. Seen here, the repetition becomes travel. The return of a phrase feels like passing the same ruin from another angle, or remembering a place before reaching it. The length allows the viewer to stop waiting for plot and begin dwelling inside atmosphere. That is the secret of early Mortiis. The compositions often seem simple if measured by virtuosity, but they are unusually effective at making the mind furnish a room. The listener supplies corridors, banners, fires, caves, stairways and forgotten thrones.
Within the CMI catalog, this VHS also expands the meaning of the label’s darkness. Cold Meat Industry is often remembered through industrial severity, ritual dread and bleak ambient force, but Mortiis brings a more romantic and solitary dimension. The darkness here is not only horror. It is distance from the modern world. It is the hunger for elsewhere. It is the desire to live inside a symbol so completely that the symbol becomes more emotionally convincing than daily life. That desire connects Mortiis to metal, fantasy literature, old electronic music, role-playing imagination and outsider self-invention all at once. The video captures a moment before these ingredients hardened into retro genre vocabulary. It still feels like one person building a weather system around himself.
There is also a beautiful contradiction in having such private music preserved through VHS, then later through digital files and now through online video. A work about hidden realms and distant ruins keeps surviving through increasingly public formats. The original tape belonged to the era of mail order, small catalogs, traded lists, specialized shops and myth carried by physical scarcity. A rip turns it into a file. A blog post places it within a catalog archaeology. A YouTube upload lets the same murky procession appear instantly on a screen for someone who may never touch the tape, read the original insert, or know what Cold Meat Industry felt like as a distant name in the 1990s. Something is lost in that movement, but something else is protected. The kingdom becomes less secret, yet less likely to vanish.
Reisene Til Grotter Og Ødemarker is therefore best understood not as a bonus curiosity beside the albums, but as a concentrated statement of Mortiis’ early project. It shows the music, image and mythology working as one object. The keyboards build the horizon, the ruins give the sound a body, and the Mortiis figure stands between childhood fantasy and underground extremity with complete commitment. Its slowness is not a flaw. Its handmade quality is not a weakness. Its refusal to behave like a normal music video is exactly why it remains valuable. It preserves the moment when one person’s internal landscape became visible enough for others to enter, wander, and maybe recognize some abandoned chamber of their own.