A memorandum is a document created so that something will not be forgotten. It may record a decision, transmit an instruction, preserve a fact or remind an institution of unfinished business. Aux Morts addresses such a document “to the dead,” creating an immediate impossibility. The intended recipients cannot read it, reply to it or correct its account. The record is therefore made for the living while pretending to face in the opposite direction. It organizes those who remain around people who have disappeared.
This is where Cold Meat Industry’s early catalog becomes an archive rather than merely a sequence of disturbing objects. CMI-01 declared Lille Roger undead and accidentally created a future. CMI-02 gathered several projects under death’s shadow. CMI-03 processed pain through machinery, historical horror and bodily reduction. CMI-04 raised that machinery into the ceremonial architecture of In Slaughter Natives. CMI-05 now turns the growing catalog into a memorial system. Sound is no longer only an expression of darkness. It becomes a method for recording the absent.
The project name and album title lock together with unusual precision. Memorandum supplies the document; Aux Morts identifies its impossible addressee. Neither phrase describes the music stylistically. Together they describe its function. These eight pieces are reminders sent toward people who cannot receive them, and their failure to arrive becomes part of their force.
The cover confirms that this relationship with death is not generic industrial decoration. The small central image reproduces Albert Bartholomé’s Monument aux morts at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, a vast funerary work in which human figures gather around a dark entrance. At the center, a couple moves from the world of the living toward the tomb. Around them, bodies bend, recoil, cover their faces, cling to one another or appear unable to accept the passage taking place before them.
Marklund does not reproduce the entire monument clearly. He places a small fragment within a mottled grey surface resembling granite, concrete, ash, oxidized metal or photographic emulsion. The LP looks less like a record decorated with a memorial than a memorial slab that happens to contain a record.
The tiny image creates distance. A listener cannot immediately study every facial expression or sculptural detail. The monument appears as evidence embedded inside another material, already becoming difficult to read. This is how historical memory often reaches us. The object survives, but scale, reproduction and missing context reduce what can be understood from it.
The surrounding grey texture gives the sleeve physical age before the record has been handled. It resembles a surface exposed to weather, burial or institutional storage. MEMORANDUM appears above the image with severe simplicity, not as a dramatic logo but as an inscription identifying what kind of object we are facing.
A monument and a memorandum share an underlying purpose. Both are technologies against disappearance. One uses stone, public space and collective ceremony; the other uses writing, bureaucracy and circulation. Neither can restore the dead. They preserve a relationship among the living by creating an agreed location where absence may be addressed.
Recorded sound adds a third technology. A vibration that would ordinarily vanish becomes repeatable. The person who produced it may die, the room may be demolished and the equipment may become obsolete, yet the event can occur again whenever the medium is activated. Every record is already a small machine for making absence behave as presence.
Industrial music intensifies this quality because it often refuses to simulate a living ensemble performing naturally before us. Loops continue without fatigue. Voices enter without visible bodies. Impacts repeat with more precision than a person could sustain. The recording does not disguise its undead condition. It makes repetition itself the evidence that something has been detached from ordinary life.
Aux Morts is the first full-length Cold Meat Industry object pressed as a twelve-inch LP, following two seven-inches and two cassettes. That physical expansion matters. The young label now possesses enough confidence, money, material and expected audience to manufacture a larger object whose surface can carry Marklund’s complete thirty-minute statement.
An LP also changes the social meaning of underground sound. Cassettes can be dubbed privately and inexpensively, with variation entering through machines, tape stock and generational copying. Vinyl requires industrial manufacture beyond the artist’s room. Lacquers, metal parts, pressing machinery, labels and sleeves convert private work into standardized physical units.
The phrase Cold Meat Industry becomes increasingly literal at this stage. Sound is processed, pressed, packaged and numbered. A project concerned with death, sacrifice and extermination enters an actual production line. The record’s content examines the transformation of bodies into material while the label transforms magnetic and electrical events into merchandise.
This does not make the object hypocritical. It exposes the industrial reality underlying every independent record. Underground culture may reject major corporate scale, but it still relies upon factories, money, labor, distribution and systems of ownership. The difference lies in who controls the process, how small the network remains and what forms of expression the process permits.
The colored copies add a strange hidden vitality. Beneath the grey memorial sleeve, some early buyers discovered pink or brown vinyl. Pink feels almost indecently alive beside the tomb image, a color of flesh, candy, decoration and synthetic brightness. Brown returns toward soil, dried blood, wood and decay.
The color remains invisible until the record is removed, meaning private handling reveals something the public face withholds. Death outside; concealed color inside. The object contains its own small contradiction between memorial severity and material pleasure.
Petter Marklund had already appeared on CMI-02 through “Esthetiks of Cruelty,” a title that would eventually become almost a description of Cold Meat Industry itself. Aux Morts gives him enough duration to demonstrate that his aesthetic is not built from cruelty as mere subject matter. It is built from the organization of pressure.
Memorandum is often described as apocalyptic tribal industrial, a phrase that identifies genuine sonic features while also revealing the historical vocabulary through which this music was sold. Percussion is heavy, cyclic and stripped of rock momentum. Voices appear from a distance. Metallic sounds suggest tools, chambers or ritual implements. Electronics provide depth without smoothing the physical edges of the sources.
Yet “tribal” can become an extremely lazy word. It may mean nothing more precise than repetitive hand-like percussion, non-Western samples, imagined ritual or music that appears collective without using conventional European harmony. The term compresses unrelated societies into one fantasy of the primitive.
Aux Morts itself participates in this compression. Norse apocalypse, Roman sacrifice, hoodoo, sanctums and extermination are drawn into one symbolic field without regard for historical or cultural boundaries. The album is powerful partly because it treats human ritual as a recurring structure, but that universalizing gesture can also erase the specific people whose traditions supply its vocabulary.
This tension should not be cleaned away in retrospect. It belongs to the record’s period and method. Late industrial culture often searched across history for images of sacrifice, ecstatic religion, warfare, disease and ceremony, then removed those materials from their original settings so they could communicate through atmosphere.
The result could be intellectually liberating, revealing relationships excluded by conventional musical history. It could also become a cabinet of severed cultural objects, each retained for its visual or emotional voltage. Aux Morts contains both possibilities.
What distinguishes Memorandum from In Slaughter Natives is the scale at which these objects are organized. Jouni Havukainen built enormous chambers, processions and corrupted sacred architecture. Marklund works closer to the excavated mechanism beneath ceremony. His percussion sounds less like an army entering a cathedral than a team uncovering something below its foundations.
The music is leaner and more percussively exposed. It does not depend upon sustained orchestral grandeur to establish authority. Repetition functions as evidence of labor, ritual and administration. A beat is not merely a beat. It is an action that must be performed again because the underlying process has not been completed.
“A Harsh Grating Death” opens in less than two minutes, and its title nearly serves as a technical specification. Harsh identifies the sensation. Grating identifies friction between surfaces. Death identifies the result. Nothing in the phrase promises narrative, character or metaphor.
The opener behaves like a tool being tested against the material of the album. Abrasion establishes the threshold. The listener is not invited ceremonially toward the dead. The entrance must be scraped open.
Grating is especially appropriate because it describes sound generated through resistance. Two surfaces cannot grate without contact, pressure and unevenness. The ugliness is relational. It does not belong completely to either object but emerges between them.
Industrial music repeatedly locates its most important activity within such relationships. Signal meets distortion. Metal meets metal. tape meets playback head. Body meets institution. Memory meets physical decay. Cruelty becomes audible where one system presses against another.
The piece is too short to create a fully developed environment, but that limitation gives it the authority of an inscription. It announces the record’s operating conditions and moves aside. Death will not arrive as soft disappearance. It will be produced through friction.
“Drums of Agony” turns suffering into measurable repetition. Agony is private, unstable and difficult to communicate. A drumbeat gives it timing. Once pain acquires rhythm, it can organize other bodies.
This transformation is morally ambiguous. Rhythm may help people endure labor, mourning, fear or bodily stress by converting isolated sensation into collective movement. It may also train bodies to continue through conditions that should be resisted. Marches, work songs, religious ceremonies and military drills all use repetition to make effort socially sustainable.
Marklund’s drums do not offer the release of dance music. They seem burdened by the act of returning. Each strike confirms that the condition remains active.
The pattern is forceful but not triumphant. There is little sense of an individual drummer displaying technique or personality. Percussion behaves as an impersonal procedure. Someone must strike again because the process demands another strike.
This is the album’s version of ritual. Ritual is not presented primarily as colorful costume or mystical revelation. It is repetition assigned meaning by a group. The same action, performed according to sequence, moves participants from one social or spiritual state into another.
“Drums of Agony” leaves uncertain whether its ritual relieves suffering or maintains it. The rhythm may accompany mourning, torture, initiation, labor or the simple inability to stop remembering. Agony has learned to keep time.
“No Pain or Pleasure” removes the distinction through which bodily experience is usually judged. Pain tells the organism to withdraw. Pleasure encourages approach and repetition. Without either signal, behavior can continue without emotional orientation.
The title can suggest anesthesia, shock, discipline, depression, ideological conditioning or a state beyond ordinary sensation. It might appear peaceful, since pain has disappeared, but the removal of pleasure makes that peace indistinguishable from deadness.
The track’s repetition creates emotional zero without creating sonic emptiness. Activity continues, yet the listener receives little assurance about why continuation matters. Machinery operates after reward and punishment have lost effectiveness.
This is a particularly industrial form of nihilism. The system does not collapse because nobody feels anything. It becomes more efficient. A worker who experiences neither pain nor pleasure can continue without protest, desire or distraction.
But human beings do not ordinarily inhabit such neutrality completely. The music’s pressure keeps generating bodily response even while its title denies sensation. Marklund creates a conflict between declaration and experience. We are told there is no pain or pleasure while the sound continues acting upon nerves.
This contradiction may be the piece’s deepest cruelty. An institution can deny suffering in language while producing it materially. Official vocabulary declares neutrality; the body receives the truth.
“Carnage of Ragnarök” closes the first side by enlarging the field from individual sensation to cosmological destruction. Ragnarök is not simply a battle or apocalypse. It is a mythic collapse involving gods, monsters, fire, flooding, death and the later emergence of a renewed world.
Industrial and metal cultures have often emphasized Ragnarök’s violence while neglecting its cyclic and regenerative dimensions. Carnage offers immediate imagery: bodies, conflict, wreckage and heroic extremity. Rebirth is less useful when the desired atmosphere is annihilation.
Marklund’s title belongs partly to that severe reduction. Ragnarök becomes carnage, stripped toward its most physically spectacular stage. Yet placing it at the end of side A introduces a necessary interruption. The needle reaches the inner groove, the listener lifts it and turns the record over. The world ends; the object requires human intervention before another world can begin.
This physical pause supplies the rebirth the title omits. Side B cannot occur until the dead side is reversed. The hand performs a small cosmic reset.
The sequence across the first side is remarkably compressed. Death begins as friction. Pain becomes rhythm. Sensation is neutralized. Destruction expands to mythological scale. Individual body and entire cosmos pass through the same machinery.
Nothing resolves. Side A ends because the available surface ends. Vinyl imposes a boundary more absolute than the compositions provide.
“Inner Sanctum” opens the second side by moving away from public catastrophe toward a protected interior. A sanctum is a sacred or private space whose importance depends upon restricted access. An inner sanctum is therefore enclosure intensified, the chamber behind the chamber.
After Ragnarök, privacy itself becomes strange. What sanctuary can remain after the world has been destroyed? The title may describe a spiritual center surviving catastrophe, or the final sealed location where power protects itself while everything outside collapses.
Memorandum’s music repeatedly complicates the promise of sacred space. Low sound and repeated percussion can make an interior feel secure, but they can also make it impossible to leave. A sanctuary and a cell may share the same architecture.
The track’s depth comes from withholding a visible central object. Something is being protected, worshipped, hidden or processed, but the listener cannot enter far enough to identify it.
This reproduces the power structure of esoteric systems. Knowledge becomes valuable because it is restricted. Each degree of initiation promises access to another chamber, while authority remains with whoever controls the doors.
The album’s cover offers a literal version. Bartholomé’s couple enters the dark doorway of the tomb. We can see the threshold but not the interior. Death is the ultimate inner sanctum because every living observer remains outside it.
“Taurobolium” carries the listener from the hidden chamber toward sacrifice. The title refers to an ancient Roman bull-sacrifice rite later connected with the worship of Cybele, the Great Mother. Later accounts turned it into an image of blood purification, with a participant beneath the slaughtered animal, although the reliability and historical extent of that description remain contested.
That uncertainty makes the word especially suited to industrial music. The rite reaches modern imagination through inscriptions, archaeological evidence, religious controversy and hostile literary description. History has already processed it into several competing versions before Marklund converts the term into sound.
The spectacular image of blood raining downward is difficult to resist, which explains why it has survived so powerfully even where scholarship questions it. Human imagination often remembers the most extreme version of a ritual because extremity provides a complete picture.
Industrial culture operates through this same attraction. A word such as taurobolium enters with blood, antiquity, secrecy and sacrifice already attached. The title performs considerable atmospheric labor before the track begins.
Marklund’s composition does not provide a historical reconstruction. No evidence survives of what this ancient rite “sounded like,” and attempting authenticity would be theatrical invention. Instead, the piece uses repetition and weight to explore the social mechanics of sacrifice.
A sacrificial ritual converts a living body into a medium connecting community, deity, power and promised transformation. The animal is not killed privately or accidentally. Its death is organized, witnessed and assigned meaning.
That assignment is where cruelty and aesthetics meet. Rhythm, costume, architecture and sequence can make violence appear necessary, beautiful or sacred. The event acquires authority because every element agrees that the event belongs.
Memorandum does not give us the original rite. It gives us a modern electronic meditation upon the machinery through which killing becomes ceremony.
“Hoodoo Tribal Ritual” reveals both the album’s reach and its limitations. Hoodoo is not a vague ancient tribal practice. It is a specific African American spiritual tradition developed under slavery and shaped by West and Central African religions, Southern Black life, Christianity, herbal knowledge, healing, protection, divination, resistance and ancestor relationships.
The track title removes much of that specificity. “Tribal ritual” places hoodoo inside an imagined global category of primitive spiritual intensity. Roman sacrifice, Norse apocalypse and African American conjure become neighboring exhibits within one European industrial record’s cabinet of ritual forms.
This is historically imprecise and culturally extractive. The word hoodoo is retained for its atmosphere while the people who developed and sustained the tradition become invisible.
Acknowledging this does not require pretending the track possesses no musical force. Its force may partly expose why such borrowing happened so easily. Industrial musicians wanted sound outside the polished rationality of modern Western culture. They searched for traditions in which rhythm, body, death, spirit and material objects remained visibly connected.
But describing those traditions as “tribal” allowed artists to admire their imagined intensity without confronting colonialism, slavery or the specific histories through which they survived. Difference became aesthetic fuel.
The album’s title makes this erasure particularly interesting. A memorandum is supposed to preserve information, yet the track demonstrates how transmission can remove information while preserving emotional charge. Hoodoo survives as a word; its history disappears behind a generalized ritual image.
This is the opposite of a reliable archive. It is memory reduced to a useful sign.
The tension becomes part of the review because Aux Morts is fundamentally concerned with what reaches the living from the dead. Cultural traditions also travel through incomplete, distorted and appropriated forms. Some elements remain; others are renamed, generalized or detached from the people who carried them.
The music can therefore be heard as both participation in that process and evidence of it. The track is not innocent, but neither is it useless. It documents a particular late-industrial way of imagining ritual, one that should be examined rather than quietly reproduced.
“Insecticide” closes with ruthless compression. After death, agony, Ragnarök, sacred chambers and sacrificial systems, the final title names a commercial method of extermination. An insect becomes a pest once human judgment decides that its life occupies the wrong place.
Insecticide does not require ceremony, hatred or philosophical justification. It presents killing as sanitation and management. A chemical is applied; the unwanted population disappears.
This is the album’s coldest conclusion because grandeur has been removed. Ragnarök destroys worlds. Taurobolium sacrifices an animal before divine or communal meaning. Insecticide kills through routine administration.
The title returns the record to the logic of industrial processing. Life is categorized according to usefulness. What cannot be integrated is exterminated.
Insects also represent collective existence at a scale that unsettles human individuality. Ants, flies, termites and other social or swarming species appear to operate through mass behavior, repetition and distributed intelligence. Industrial rhythm frequently resembles this collective activity.
To destroy insects is therefore to destroy a system whose organization may be impressive but whose interests conflict with ours. The exterminator does not negotiate with the colony. Scale and species difference remove the expectation of consent.
Ending with “Insecticide” shrinks the entire album brutally. The dead are not heroic warriors, sacred victims or mourned ancestors. They may be creatures swept from a room without names.
This movement exposes the hierarchy within memorial culture. Societies choose which deaths receive monuments, ceremonies and permanent inscriptions. Other deaths are counted statistically, processed administratively or never recorded.
Bartholomé’s monument claims dedication to the dead broadly, but no monument can include every vanished life equally. Memory is always selected. The act of preservation creates an outside.
Aux Morts moves continually between monumental remembrance and anonymous extermination. Its cover elevates grief into public stone; its final track reduces death to pest control. The distance between those positions is the moral territory of the album.
Who receives a memorandum? Who becomes material? Who is remembered through a name, and who is absorbed into a process?
Petter Marklund’s production method gives these questions an unusually physical body. The later credits describe the pieces as processed at Katatonenkunsthalle, a self-created name that sounds like “catatonic art hall.” The phrase invents an institution around solitary work.
Katatonenkunsthalle could be a gallery for immobilized consciousness, an exhibition hall in which sound remains awake while bodies cannot respond. It grants the project architectural and bureaucratic scale without requiring an actual public building.
This act of naming is common within underground culture and should not be dismissed as fantasy. A person with limited resources creates a label, studio, institute, archive or art hall through language, then gradually produces enough objects for the imaginary institution to become socially real.
Cold Meat Industry itself began this way. A phrase, catalog number and first release established a company whose future did not yet exist. Each subsequent object added another room.
Katatonenkunsthalle is Marklund’s room inside Karmanik’s building. Tonteknik supplies the professional recording environment where the processed materials are mixed. Private invention and external technical infrastructure meet.
The finished LP feels exact without becoming clean. Metallic percussion, distant voices and low electronic mass retain rough edges, but the tracks are concise and deliberately arranged. This is not an hour of unrestricted ritual atmosphere. Most pieces establish one mechanism, allow its implications to develop and stop.
The compactness separates Memorandum from artists who use duration to produce trance. Marklund often reaches ritual intensity through concentration. A few repeated elements can imply an entire social order if their relationships are sufficiently controlled.
This economy also connects the album with post-punk and cassette industrial practice. Ideas do not need symphonic development to become complete. One strong loop, source and title may contain enough pressure for a piece.
The titles perform an unusually large part of the composition. Heard without them, the tracks would remain forceful but more abstract. The names direct each mechanism toward pain, apocalypse, sacrifice, secrecy or extermination.
This use of language is not merely illustrative. It demonstrates how institutions assign meaning to repeated actions. The same percussion could accompany labor, celebration, punishment or mourning. A title functions like an official document telling the listener what kind of event is occurring.
Memorandum therefore operates through a double system of control. Sound organizes the body; language organizes interpretation. The listener may resist either system, but cannot pretend it is absent.
The phrase “Esthetiks of Cruelty” from the earlier compilation becomes easier to understand here. Cruelty’s aesthetic does not consist solely of ugly sound or violent imagery. It appears when form persuades us to remain with something we might otherwise reject.
Repetition makes pressure coherent. Sequencing makes death feel inevitable. The stone cover gives brutality cultural dignity. Colored vinyl makes ownership pleasurable. The limited edition turns access into desire.
The record does not stand outside these processes and accuse them. It participates. That participation is why it remains worth examining.
A weaker work would rely upon titles and artwork to manufacture severity unsupported by the audio. Aux Morts possesses enough rhythmic and spatial authority to survive separation from its concepts. The tracks can act physically even when their references are unknown.
But the conceptual structure changes how that physical action is understood. Percussion becomes labor or ritual. Reverberation becomes chamber or tomb. Distortion becomes friction against memory. Neither sound nor language possesses complete authority alone.
The album’s later absorption into Ars Moriendi gives the memorandum another life. Ars moriendi means the art of dying, referring historically to traditions that instructed Christians how to prepare for death. As a compilation title, it transforms Memorandum’s small discography into a retrospective funerary body.
Aux Morts sits near the center of that later archive, surrounded by the Ichor material, compilation tracks and unreleased recordings. What began as a self-contained LP becomes one chapter in the complete remains of a short-lived project.
This is an appropriate fate. Memorandum did not produce a long continuous catalog. Its scarcity allows each object to acquire disproportionate weight. The later compilation functions almost like an ossuary, gathering separated bones into one designated place.
Yet reissue chronology can subtly rewrite the original LP. Track order and even the naming of “Hoodoo Tribal Ritual” vary in later documentation. Once material is reorganized, the retrospective version can begin replacing the original object in collective memory.
Preservation is never neutral. To save is also to arrange.
Your post restores the album to CMI-05 rather than presenting it only as tracks six through thirteen of a later CD. This matters because Aux Morts originally stood at the front edge of the label’s development. It was not archival material when released. It was a new statement helping determine what Cold Meat Industry might become.
The next catalog number would be the Debauch video, followed by MZ.412’s Malfeitor. Henrik Nordvargr Björkk later recalled that Memorandum’s first album was among the early CMI objects that immediately attracted him to the label. He recognized a connection between what Marklund and Karmanik were doing and the Maschinenzimmer 412 recordings already taking shape.
This means Aux Morts does more than represent a scene. It helps recruit the next participant. A record reaches someone outside the immediate production circle, and that listener responds by making contact and sending his own tape.
Influence becomes correspondence. The memorandum receives an answer, though not from the dead.
CMI-05 therefore generates part of CMI-07. The catalog is not simply Roger Karmanik selecting isolated artists according to a private master plan. Releases act upon future artists, who then enter the catalog and alter its identity.
This is how underground scenes form when no stable local scene appears to exist. Objects travel farther than people. A record provides evidence that someone else is investigating a related territory. Recognition occurs through sleeves, catalog numbers and sound before friendship or collaboration exists.
The label becomes a message system for people who may feel culturally isolated. One artifact says: this language can exist. Another artist answers: I have been speaking something related.
The 27.39 MB archive continues that function under radically different material conditions. The original LP required pressing machinery, sleeves, storage, payment and postal movement. The MP3 folder can be duplicated almost without limit and transmitted without its sender surrendering possession.
Physical scarcity is removed, but attention remains limited. A thousand original copies created one type of rarity. A file among millions creates another. Availability does not guarantee encounter.
The catalog-number link preserves a crucial thread. CMI-05 tells the listener that this is not merely a collection of eight old industrial tracks. It occupies a specific location between In Slaughter Natives and Debauch, before MZ.412, Ichor and Great Death.
That location changes its meaning. “Esthetiks of Cruelty” has already appeared; the later compilation of that name does not yet exist. Memorandum’s full discography has not been gathered. Dark ambient and death industrial have not hardened into internationally marketable categories.
The album is helping create the language through which later listeners will classify it.
The MP3 cannot reproduce the grey sleeve at twelve-inch scale, the concealed colored vinyl, the act of turning the record after Ragnarök or the surface relationship between needle and groove. But it preserves enough sequence and sound for the machinery to operate again.
This incompleteness mirrors the album’s own subject. No memorandum preserves an entire person. No monument contains every life it claims to honor. No archive restores the original world surrounding an object.
Preservation creates a functional remainder.
Aux Morts remains compelling because it understands death not merely as an image but as a problem of organization. The dead must be named, buried, remembered, represented, certified, forgotten or converted into examples. Ritual and bureaucracy meet around the body after life has ended.
Marklund’s percussion gives those processes rhythm. Repetition makes grief procedural, sacrifice administrative and extermination efficient. The album does not offer the emotional release of mourning. It studies the structures people build because mourning cannot remain permanently uncontrolled.
The cover’s figures approach the doorway. Some accept, some resist and some collapse beneath the knowledge of what is happening. The stone gathers their incompatible responses into one composition.
Memorandum does the same with sound. Agony, anesthesia, apocalypse, secrecy, sacrifice, appropriated ritual and insect death are placed within one thirty-minute document. They do not become morally equivalent, but their proximity reveals how many cultural systems exist for giving death meaning.
The final result is neither a prayer nor a report. It resembles an institutional file discovered in a tomb, its categories still readable though the authority that created them has vanished.
CMI-04 taught Cold Meat Industry how to build upward into processions and sacred architecture. CMI-05 builds inward and downward. It finds the chamber beneath the ceremony where names, bones, tools and records are stored.
The door is small on the cover, but the album passes through it completely.
The dead do not answer. The catalog does.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.