Estheticks of Cruelty feels like Cold Meat Industry opening a side door in its own fortress and revealing a room full of younger, uglier equipment. After Brighter Death Now’s May All Be Dead, the label’s central death-industrial authority has already reasserted itself through long-form hatred, bodily pressure and obsessive repetition. This compilation does something different. It does not gather the established monumental voices of the label into another banquet like The Absolute Supper. It throws the listener into a Swedish noise basement where projects appear half-named, half-hidden, overdriven, politically infected, sexually hostile, primitive, funny in the sickest possible way, and often more interested in abrasion than architecture. CMI.70 is not a celebration of refinement. It is a survey of contamination spreading through the fields.
The subtitle, An Explicit Odyssey Into Swedish Agricultural Sounds, is almost perfect because it refuses the expected urban-industrial mythology. This is not factory music from a futuristic city. It is rural harshness, barnyard electronics, basement power tools, field rot, private obsession and national claustrophobia. “Agricultural” becomes a joke, but also a useful image. These sounds feel cultivated in isolated sheds rather than professional studios. They grow from mud, boredom, bad weather, local networks, traded tapes and the grim freedom that comes when nobody expects elegance. The compilation’s cruelty is therefore not only thematic. It is procedural. The listener is handled roughly by the sequence itself, moved from death industrial storytelling into harsh electronics, political samples, damaged tape work, sexualized noise and ritualized mechanical disgust.
Nod open the first disc with “And Into Flesh Shall I Return” and “Forget Me Not,” immediately giving the compilation a strange narrative entrance. Their work here feels like childhood story, nightmare and death-industrial pressure folded into one damaged object. The presence of narration or voice does not soften the music. It makes the machinery more personal, as though something intimate and remembered has been dragged into a room where it can no longer remain innocent. Nod’s placement at the beginning is important. They do not simply attack. They lure the listener into a story-space before the compilation begins stripping away the comfort of story altogether.
Iron Justice then brings the record into more direct power-electronics territory with “Nothing and Again Nothing” and “Europe in Flames.” These titles compress nihilism and geopolitical imagery into blunt slogans, and the music follows that compressed logic. Samples, noise, voice and political atmosphere collide without the grand martial orchestration of Puissance or the occult architecture of MZ.412. Iron Justice sound closer to broadcast damage, ideological exhaustion and the cathartic ugliness of yelling into a system that will not answer. “Europe in Flames” especially belongs to the compilation’s polluted political field, where national, continental and historical references recur not as careful argument but as unstable fuel.
The middle of the first disc moves through Dødsdømd, Vehm, Institut, Thurnemans, Irgun Z’wai Leumi, Treriksröset and Bad Kharma with the feeling of being passed from one locked room to another. Some pieces are short eruptions, others more grinding and procedural, but the disc’s larger effect is cumulative saturation. Institut’s “Yashin” and “Monza” are especially useful because they show the harsher, more militant industrial wing of this Swedish network starting to harden into recognizable force. Treriksröset’s “No Doves” brings a different kind of hostility, less monumental and more septic, as if peace itself has been refused at the level of air quality. Bad Kharma’s “Elektra 1” then pushes the listener toward harsh-noise endurance before Proiekt Hat’s “The Wandering Jew” closes the disc in a long, death-industrial chamber.
That Proiekt Hat title is one of the compilation’s most historically contaminated moments. Like Lebensunwertes Leben, it cannot be treated as neutral darkness. “The Wandering Jew” is an old antisemitic figure, a mythic stereotype that has carried centuries of Christian and European hatred. Industrial culture often handles such material by dragging poisonous symbols into sound without explaining whether it means critique, fascination, parody, infection, or provocation. The track’s slow industrial pressure does not resolve that ambiguity. It makes the ambiguity colder. The listener is left with a title that cannot be cleaned, placed over music that withholds comfort. That discomfort matters. It is part of the compilation’s cruelty, and it should not be excused away as mere genre furniture.
The second disc begins with Blod’s “Himmelblau” and “Extremely Shitexplosive Sara,” and the atmosphere shifts toward more bodily, perverse, absurd and sexually grotesque noise. Blod’s contribution is important because it gives the compilation a different texture from the severe death-industrial machinery of the first disc. The sound feels less like a ritual system and more like private compulsion spilling into electronics. Janitor’s “The Four Humours” then adds another crucial link, especially because Janitor involves Lina Baby Doll and B.J. Nilsen, connecting Deutsch Nepal’s ritual-industrial personality with the Hazard/Morthound side of Swedish sound work. The result feels clinical and bodily at once, as if ancient medicine, electronic experiment and diseased humor have been poured into the same container.
Born of Fire, Obscene Noise Korporation and Tape Decay pull the disc into rougher laboratory conditions. Tape Decay’s name is almost a manifesto for this section. The source material sounds handled, damaged, forced, repeatedly copied, allowed to lose fidelity until loss becomes the point. “Force It Hard Thank You” and “Försökspersonerna” suggest not only harsh sound but experiment, pressure and the body as test site. This is where Estheticks of Cruelty differs most clearly from the more polished CMI monuments. The compilation is full of pieces that do not want to create timeless atmosphere. They want to preserve a procedure, a contact burn, a moment when cheap or limited tools were pushed until they revealed something nasty.
IRM’s “Martyr 2000” and “Powerdrill” are among the most historically interesting tracks here because they capture an early stage of a project that would become one of Sweden’s defining extreme industrial voices. Even here, before later work fully sharpens its conceptual and vocal violence, the essentials are present: pressure, bodily threat, disciplined harshness, and the sense that sound can be used as an interrogation device. “Powerdrill” is not a subtle title, but subtlety is not its job. It names the relation between listener and sound with nasty efficiency. IRM make cruelty feel less like spectacle than application.
The later stretch of the second disc becomes more varied and strange. Apostasia’s “Tunnelvision” narrows perception into a long passage of discomfort. Persona’s “Pro Patria” introduces a colder patriotic or militarized shadow, but with enough distance to feel more spectral than declarative. Moljebka Pvlse’s “Aftermath” opens the field toward ambient residue, a reminder that aftermath can be as unsettling as attack. K.l.a.n.’s “Flammable” and “Puppetry” return to combustible power-electronics aggression, while Ovum’s “She’s on the Phone” becomes unexpectedly hypnotic by reducing itself almost to a suspended phenomenon. Bodies Drowned Natural closes with “In Belief,” and the name itself feels like a final image of faith turned into suffocation.
As a compilation, Estheticks of Cruelty is not graceful, and that is part of its value. The Absolute Supper presented CMI as a dark ceremonial empire with many wings. Estheticks of Cruelty presents a rougher Swedish noise ecology before everything has been canonized, packaged, explained and made safe by hindsight. Some tracks feel minor, some feel like sketches, some are ethically filthy, some are blunt instruments, and some still sound like doors opening onto important later developments. The point is not that every piece is equally accomplished. The point is that the collection captures a living pressure zone: projects forming, aliases multiplying, collaborators crossing wires, harsh electronics moving between death industrial, power electronics, tape abuse, ritual murk and rural absurdity.
CMI.70 matters because it documents the label’s willingness to let uglier, less aristocratic darkness into the catalog. There is very little of Arcana’s sacred sorrow here, little of Mortiis’ fantasy exile, little of Puissance’s monumental state ritual. Instead, this is darkness as local infection, cruelty as method, noise as farm equipment dragged into psychic theater. It is a hard listen in part because the compilation does not offer one stable aesthetic identity. It keeps changing masks before any mask becomes comfortable. Anyone who owns the slipcase edition, remembers buying this in 1999, or can identify the smaller aliases and personnel behind the more obscure projects could add valuable field notes, because this is exactly the kind of release where the underground network around the object may be as important as the object itself.
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