By 1995, Cold Meat Industry no longer needed to prove that it could sustain a catalog. It needed to show what kind of world that catalog had become. ...And Even Wolves Hid Their Teeth and Tongue Wherever Shelter Was Given performs that task with unusual efficiency. Fifteen projects are placed inside one sequence, allowing a listener to move from mourning and ruined sacred space through fantasy landscapes, ritual electronics, industrial pressure and bodily decay without purchasing fifteen separate releases first.
The title is grand enough to sound like a forgotten proverb. Wolves hide both teeth and tongue when shelter is offered, temporarily concealing violence and voice in exchange for protection. The phrase suggests predators entering domestic space under uncertain terms. Safety depends upon everyone pretending that instinct has been suspended.
That is an appropriate image for a label whose beauty repeatedly contains threat. Choirs, strings, drones and melodic passages offer shelter, but violence remains nearby. The artists may lower their voices, soften the rhythm or surround the listener with solemn atmosphere, yet the teeth have not vanished. They are merely hidden inside the arrangement.
Arcana open with “The Song of Mourning,” immediately announcing a newer CMI language. Instead of primitive tape loops or overt industrial punishment, the compilation begins with neoclassical solemnity. Voice and instrumentation create the impression of an older ceremonial world, although the music is a modern construction assembled from contemporary longing for historical depth.
Raison d’être’s “Euphrosyne” follows by moving from public mourning into ruined spiritual space. Peter Andersson’s work repeatedly suggests monasteries, crypts and abandoned sacred interiors without reconstructing any actual religious ceremony. The atmosphere feels inherited, but the inheritance has lost its doctrine.
Ordo Equilibrio add rhythm and ritual sensuality through “Reaping the Fallen... The First Harvest.” The title joins agriculture, death and ceremony. What has fallen becomes material to be gathered. CMI’s landscape is not merely filled with ruins; people are actively collecting something from them.
Mortiis then opens a fantasy horizon with an excerpt from “En Mørk Horisont.” His synthesizer world differs from the industrial and ritual projects around it, but the emotional geography fits. Solitude, distance and imagined antiquity connect dungeon-like fantasy to the label’s broader culture of exile and lost worlds.
Aghast’s “Enter the Hall of Ice,” misidentified as “Sacrifice” on the first edition, pushes that fantasy toward spectral female voices and frozen ritual. The printing error almost belongs to the compilation’s atmosphere. One dark ceremony is named as another, while the audio continues unaffected beneath the incorrect inscription.
MZ.412’s “God of Fifty Names” interrupts the drifting landscapes with harder occult-industrial structure. A god with many names can pass among cultures, identities and ritual systems without becoming completely knowable. The track sounds less like worship than machinery built to summon authority.
Mental Destruction’s “Wound” turns that authority back toward the body. The piece is brief, but its title provides a direct opening through the compilation’s elaborate scenery. Beneath every imagined kingdom, ritual system and spiritual struggle lies flesh capable of being damaged.
Ildfrost’s “That I May Drink, and Leave the World Unseen” restores melancholy and concealment. The title expresses a desire not simply to escape the world, but to become invisible while escaping it. Intoxication, grief and withdrawal gather inside one sentence.
ConSono’s “Beyond the Ocean” widens the distance. The ocean functions as border, route and scale, suggesting somewhere inaccessible through ordinary movement. The track belongs to CMI’s gift for making geography psychological. The far shore is not necessarily a physical country. It may be another historical age, spiritual condition or protected interior.
Desiderii Marginis enter with “Solemn Descent,” one of the compilation’s clearest movements downward. Dark ambience often claims depth through long duration, but this selection establishes its chamber quickly. The descent feels ceremonial rather than accidental, as though the listener has agreed to enter what waits below.
Atomine Elektrine’s short “Voices of Trinity” introduces electronic brightness without breaking the sequence. Technology, sacred voices and cosmic suggestion coexist for ninety seconds, proving how wide the CMI identity had become. The label could include sequenced electronic futurism without abandoning its spiritual darkness.
Memorandum’s “New Primitivism” reaches backward through modern machinery, constructing imagined ritual from samples and percussion. Its presence reminds us that CMI’s apparent ancientness was always technologically manufactured. Tape, digital processing and compact discs carried fantasies of worlds before industrial modernity.
Morthound’s “Whole End” excerpt brings the compilation toward environmental dissolution. Human presence fades into a broader atmospheric field. The title suggests not one death but total completion, the end becoming whole enough to include everything surrounding it.
Deutsch Nepal’s “Gouge Free Market” then introduces diseased rhythm, black humor and a more bodily form of industrial repetition. The title attacks economic language through physical violence. A market supposedly governed by freedom becomes something to scrape, wound or hollow out.
Brighter Death Now close with an excerpt from “Soul in Flames.” Roger Karmanik places his own project at the end rather than the beginning, allowing the label’s full range to pass before the founder’s machinery seals the structure. Fire reaches beyond flesh toward whatever the title calls the soul, leaving the compilation without a protected interior.
The sequence is remarkably effective because it does not attempt to make all fifteen artists sound identical. The contrast is the point. Arcana’s mourning, Mortiis’s fantasy, MZ.412’s ritual machinery, Atomine Elektrine’s electronics and Brighter Death Now’s oppressive decay become neighboring regions inside one climate.
This was also a practical act of label-building. A listener attracted by one track could follow the booklet toward another album, then another catalog number. The compilation was a map disguised as a listening experience. It reduced the risk of entering an unfamiliar label by providing enough of each project to create recognition.
For someone moving backward through the catalog, it functions differently. We have already encountered many of these names individually. The sampler now feels like a checkpoint where the earlier scattered releases become one public identity. Cold Meat Industry is no longer a secret chain of cassettes, limited vinyl and unusual projects. It can present itself confidently in one object.
The 165.77 MB archive performs the same introductory function without the booklet, physical design or catalog list. The map has lost some of its printed instructions, but the route remains. Fifteen files move through mourning, ice, fire, ocean, descent, wounds and hidden shelter.
The wolves enter quietly. Their mouths remain closed long enough for the listener to mistake the darkness for safety.
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