Ichor follows Aux Morts by replacing the monument with the wound. The previous album addressed the dead through stone, ritual, sacrifice and organized remembrance. This three-track 12-inch asks what might continue flowing after the memorial has been built. Blood ordinarily confirms mortal life, but ichor belongs to two opposing vocabularies: the supernatural fluid of immortal gods and the unhealthy discharge escaping from damaged flesh. Memorandum places its music directly between those meanings. Something elevated is leaking, and something diseased is being mistaken for sacred.
The cover resembles a document contaminated during storage. A textured reddish-brown field surrounds a central square where a human figure, blocks of printed language and scratched visual material have been pressed into one damaged surface. The text cannot be read continuously. It survives as fragments behind and across the image, suggesting that explanation once existed but has become inseparable from the thing it was supposed to describe. MEMORANDUM remains clearly printed at the top, while ICHOR sits below like the diagnosis attached to the evidence.
A memorandum is normally intended to make information clear enough for institutional use. This sleeve does the opposite. Writing has accumulated until it becomes texture, while the central figure is obscured by the very material that might identify it. The record looks like an official file retrieved after moisture, blood or chemical exposure made its contents unreliable. Documentation has not defeated decay. It has decayed alongside the body.
The move from an eight-track LP to a concise three-track 12-inch also gives Memorandum greater concentration. Aux Morts crossed mythology, sacrifice, extermination, ritual and public memorial. Ichor chooses three chambers and seals the listener inside each one. The music remains percussive and ceremonial, but it feels less like a survey of death’s institutions and more like direct contact with one unstable substance.
“New Primitivism” begins with a phrase carrying enormous historical baggage. Primitivism in modern art often described the use of forms that European artists imagined to be more instinctive, ancient or uncorrupted than industrial civilization. That fantasy frequently depended upon reducing living cultures to a symbolic outside, a source of rhythm, mask, ritual or bodily intensity available for Western reinvention.
The word “new” does not resolve that problem. It suggests that primitivism can be technologically reconstructed after modernity has supposedly destroyed the conditions that once produced it. Memorandum does not return to an authentic ancient music. Electronics, sampling, amplification and studio organization manufacture a modern image of ritual force.
The track’s percussion sounds physical without pretending to be ethnographic documentation. Repetition creates the impression of collective action, but the collective may consist entirely of one artist layering and processing separate events. A private studio produces an imaginary tribe. Technology does not merely record ritual; it invents the social body performing it.
This contradiction is central to early post-industrial music. Artists opposed the smoothness and rational organization of modern commercial culture by turning toward bodily rhythm, sacrifice, ruins and pre-Christian imagery. Yet they reached those imagined territories through tape machines, mixers and duplicated media. The proposed escape from technology depended completely upon technology.
“New Primitivism” is strongest when heard not as a successful recovery of something ancient, but as evidence of modern people longing for intensity they believe modern life has removed. The beat becomes a demand for contact, repetition and shared physical meaning. Whether that desire discovers anything beyond itself remains uncertain.
“Malebolge” moves from invented origin toward organized punishment. The title comes from Dante’s name for the eighth circle of Hell, divided into ten trenches where different forms of fraud receive carefully designed penalties. The word joins evil with a system of ditches, making damnation architectural and administrative rather than chaotic.
That structure suits Memorandum perfectly. The project’s cruelty is rarely presented as uncontrolled eruption. Sounds are placed, repeated and processed according to severe order. The listener enters a mechanism whose purpose appears punitive even when no crime has been identified.
The track does not need to illustrate Dante’s individual trenches. Its relationship with Malebolge is structural. Hell becomes a set of specialized departments, each designed to process another category of offender. Punishment has classification, location and procedure.
This is much closer to a factory, prison or bureaucracy than to a wild supernatural abyss. Evil gains endurance when it acquires architecture. A single violent act ends; an institution can repeat the act across bodies while treating repetition as routine.
Memorandum’s percussion functions like labor occurring within that structure. Metallic impacts and recurring patterns suggest gates, tools and steps rather than conventional drumming. The rhythm does not invite escape through dancing. It measures passage through the system.
The title also reveals the strange dignity industrial music can grant to punishment. Dante’s Hell possesses theological and poetic grandeur; Memorandum’s sonic trenches can feel immense, mysterious and attractive. The listener admires the architecture while recognizing that the architecture exists to inflict suffering.
That moral discomfort is not accidental residue. It is the “aesthetics of cruelty” named by Memorandum on CMI-02. Form makes cruelty coherent enough to contemplate and, potentially, enjoy. The music does not stand safely outside that problem. Its power depends upon it.
“Where the Dead Lost Their Sleep” closes with the release’s most haunting title. The dead are traditionally imagined as sleeping, resting beneath the ground until resurrection or remaining permanently beyond disturbance. Memorandum removes even that final privilege. The dead have reached a place where sleep itself has been lost.
The phrase reverses ordinary insomnia. A living person cannot enter sleep; these dead cannot remain inside it. Something has awakened them, or death has failed to provide the stillness it promised. They become neither alive nor peacefully absent.
Recording is one possible cause. The dead lose their sleep whenever their voices, images or histories are activated by the living. An old sample plays, a monument is visited, a name is read and the absent person is made to act again within memory. Preservation disturbs.
Cold Meat Industry’s developing catalog is already full of such disturbances. Lille Roger becomes undead. Executed bodies remain on sleeves. victims of historical atrocity are invoked through titles. Ancient rites are translated into electronic compositions. The label continually enters burial sites and returns with reusable fragments.
“Where the Dead Lost Their Sleep” may therefore describe the archive itself. A record collection is a place where finished events remain available for repetition. Nothing placed inside it is permitted to conclude completely.
The track’s tension comes from refusing a dramatic resurrection. The dead do not rise with renewed identity or deliver a message explaining what lies beyond. They remain caught inside continuation. Sound keeps moving while personhood remains absent.
This makes the piece a perfect ending for Memorandum’s active recording life. Ichor would be the project’s final independent release before its material was gathered into Ars Moriendi. The later collection’s title, “the art of dying,” converts a short discography into one retrospective body. But Ichor ends before that archival closure, while the fluid is still escaping.
The three tracks form a severe progression. “New Primitivism” searches for an imagined condition before modern civilization. “Malebolge” enters the elaborate moral architecture civilization constructs around wrongdoing. “Where the Dead Lost Their Sleep” reaches the remainder after punishment, burial and historical transmission have done their work.
Origin, institution and aftermath are compressed into less than twenty minutes. Memorandum no longer needs an album-sized sequence to build its system. Three titles and three concentrated sound structures are enough.
Placed after MZ.412’s Malfeitor, Ichor also changes the nature of infection. Malfeitor used repetition like a virus entering machinery and consciousness. Memorandum turns infection into fluid. It flows through divine, medical and archival bodies, carrying both authority and contamination.
The young Cold Meat Industry catalog is gradually becoming anatomical. Meat, blood, wounds, bodies and death are no longer isolated shocking images. They are the materials through which institutions, religions and recording technologies become understandable. The label examines culture as something constructed around vulnerable flesh.
The 22.09 MB MP3 archive continues the same contradiction. The original 12-inch was limited to 840 physical copies, but its compressed digital remainder can circulate far beyond that number. The object becomes less complete and more difficult to bury.
Artwork, vinyl color, groove spacing and the act of turning the record disappear. Sequence and sound survive. The archive does not restore Ichor’s original body; it keeps its fluid moving after the body has changed.
That is the release’s final image. The gods are wounded, the dead are awake, and the memorandum has become stained beyond perfect readability. Something continues to leak through every attempt to contain it.
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