Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio - 2001 - Make Love, And War (The Wedlock of Equilibrium)

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.94

This one changes the room again. After so much Cold Meat Industry material built from dread, pressure, ritual severity, and industrial ruin, Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio enters with a different kind of danger: elegance. Make Love, And War: The Wedlock Of Roses does not feel like a bunker, a prison, or a machine chamber. It feels like a bedroom arranged as a chapel and a battlefield at the same time.

By 2001, Tomas Pettersson’s project had shifted from Ordo Equilibrio into Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio, with Rose-Marie Larsen replacing Chelsea Krook and “Rosarius” added to the name. That change matters. The rose becomes central: beauty, wound, devotion, erotic symbol, religious symbol, and thorned emblem of contradiction. The group’s whole language depends on those pairings: love and war, flesh and ceremony, pleasure and ruin, softness and discipline.

Compared with the harsher CMI releases nearby, this album is almost songlike. Acoustic guitar, martial percussion, spoken vocals, ritual repetition, and neofolk structures make it more immediately accessible, but not exactly safer. Accessibility here is part of the spell. The music lets the listener walk in more easily, then surrounds them with slogans, erotic fatalism, and ornate symbolic tension. It is not trying to crush the listener with force. It is trying to persuade.

That makes Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio one of the strangest flowers in the Cold Meat Industry garden. The label could be brutally bleak, but this project brings a decadent composure to the catalog. It does not abandon darkness. It dresses darkness beautifully enough that the listener has to ask whether beauty is a mask, a weapon, or a genuine path through contradiction.

The title is almost too perfect: Make Love, And War. Not “make love, not war,” the old utopian reversal, but both at once. The phrase refuses peace as innocence. It suggests that intimacy and conflict are not opposites but intertwined forces, each capable of sanctifying or destroying the other. The subtitle, The Wedlock Of Roses, makes that union ceremonial. This is not casual contradiction. It is marriage, vow, binding.

That is where the album’s strength lives. It is not merely provocative. It is organized around polarity. Roses bloom beside militarized rhythm. Tenderness is spoken in the language of command. Erotic imagery is placed inside almost liturgical repetition. The result can feel seductive, absurd, troubling, and beautiful within the same minute. That instability is the point.

Inside this archive sequence, the album also provides relief from the CMI tension without escaping it entirely. It is warmer than Brighter Death Now, less cavernous than Megaptera, less mystical than Coph Nia, and far more stylized than Proiekt Hat. But it still belongs to the same underground inquiry: how do desire, power, symbolism, and violence become sound?

Make Love, And War is not a record that resolves those questions. It arranges them into a ritual bouquet and leaves the thorns exposed.