This Crying Age changes the climate of Cold Meat Industry. The preceding releases constructed darkness from bodily damage, religious judgment, institutional cruelty, distorted ritual and machinery. Morthond keeps the darkness but removes much of the visible machinery producing it. The walls recede. Rhythm slows until it becomes environmental pressure. Human figures grow distant enough to resemble traces caught inside weather. CMI-12 does not feel like another room in the label’s developing factory. It feels like the landscape outside the factory after everyone has gone home.
The original project name matters. Morthond was a river in Tolkien’s imagined geography, and Benny Jonas Nilsen chose it before altering the spelling to Morthound the following year. A river is an appropriate identity for music built through gradual movement rather than impact. It possesses direction without displaying a destination, carries material from elsewhere and changes the land by continuing. This Crying Age behaves similarly. Its four long tracks do not announce dramatic transitions. They move slowly enough that the listener notices the changed surroundings before noticing the process of change.
Nilsen was extraordinarily young when he made the record, but the music does not sound juvenile in the ordinary sense. It avoids the temptation to prove seriousness through constant density, aggression or technical display. Its confidence lies in allowing a clock to tick, a drone to remain unresolved and an indistinct voice to continue haunting the background without being dragged into the foreground for explanation.
That patience grew from isolation rather than professional training. Nilsen has described growing up in the countryside, travelling into Stockholm with friends to search record shops and fairs, and realizing that simple means were sufficient to begin making music. This Crying Age preserves the scale of that discovery. A private bedroom imagination expands beyond its physical location, creating glaciers, dream spaces and medieval-seeming distances from samplers, effects and modest recording equipment.
The cover prepares the listener for this transformation through faded materials rather than spectacular imagery. MORTHOND and THIS CRYING AGE appear in restrained red lettering against a pale brown surface. Behind them lies an indistinct photograph or cloth-like form, while handwritten text occupies the right half like a damaged manuscript whose language has survived more clearly as shape than meaning.
The writing gives the sleeve historical depth without providing readable explanation. It resembles a document preserved after its practical use has disappeared. The listener sees that someone once wrote with purpose, but the purpose cannot be recovered immediately. The music will operate through the same distance. Voices, tones and rhythmic traces imply events without restoring their complete context.
“The Age of Crying” begins with a clock. This is not decorative atmosphere added to announce melancholy. The ticking establishes the album’s fundamental cruelty: time can remain perfectly ordered while human experience disintegrates around it. Each tick is nearly identical, yet each one removes another moment from whatever life is being measured.
A clock is a tiny machine that makes disappearance audible. It does not cause time to pass, but it converts passage into repeated impact. Nilsen allows that impact to continue long enough for ordinary measurement to become psychological pressure. The listener initially recognizes a clock, then begins hearing expectation, mortality and the inability to stop the next second from arriving.
Around it, drones and distant voices gather without forming a conventional scene. The track resembles a landscape remembered through grief, but it never identifies who is crying or what has been lost. This absence prevents the piece from becoming sentimental. Crying is treated as an age, an extended historical or emotional condition rather than one person’s temporary reaction.
The title can describe the era producing the record. Early-1990s industrial culture often imagined civilization as spiritually exhausted, technologically overdeveloped and permanently shadowed by historical violence. Yet Nilsen does not express that condition through samples of war or explicit political speech. He makes time itself mournful.
“Age of Dreams” changes the mode of consciousness without offering escape. Dreams might appear to oppose crying, providing an inner territory where physical and social laws can be suspended. Nilsen’s dream space remains uneasy. Its tones drift, but they do not become weightless. Voices and flute-like shapes appear at the edge of recognition, carrying the feeling that something is trying to enter the dream from outside it.
The Indian flute contributed by R.W.L. could easily have become an exotic marker, another example of industrial music borrowing non-Western instruments to signify ancient ritual. Here it is less emphatic. Breath and wood enter the electronic environment as fragile human material, not as a claim to cultural authenticity. The flute does not explain the landscape. It briefly gives the landscape lungs.
The dream age also complicates the preceding clock. Clock time divides experience into shared units, while dreams construct durations that cannot be measured reliably. A few minutes of sleep can contain an apparently enormous sequence; an entire night may vanish without memory. The album moves from external time into internal time, but neither proves stable.
“Frames” is the shortest piece and the most revealing title. A frame determines what can be seen and what remains outside. In film, successive frames create the illusion of continuous movement. In memory, selected moments survive while the intervals between them disappear. Nilsen’s stated interest in making visual music without moving images becomes clearest here.
The track does not supply pictures directly. It creates conditions under which the listener begins producing them. A tone may suggest an empty corridor, a winter field, an underground chamber or light passing through dirty glass, but none of those images is fixed in the recording. The music provides frames, and imagination supplies temporary contents.
This is why This Crying Age feels cinematic without resembling a soundtrack for an existing film. Soundtracks normally support images chosen by someone else. Morthond reverses the relationship. The sound remains primary, and every listener generates a different invisible film around it.
“Frames” also names the problem of genre. Later listeners can place the album inside dark ambient, industrial ambient or the developing Cold Meat Industry sound. Those terms help organize history, but they also frame the record after the fact. Nilsen was creating before dark ambient had hardened into a predictable marketplace of caverns, drones and black landscapes.
The album’s importance lies partly in hearing those materials before they became dependable signs. Ticking clocks, distant speech, glacial synthesizers and ritual breath had not yet settled into a standardized kit. They still feel discovered rather than selected from a genre menu.
“Glaciers of Scandinavia” closes with the largest and coldest image. A glacier appears motionless to ordinary human observation, yet it is continually moving, compressing, cracking and reshaping the ground beneath it. This is exactly the kind of activity Nilsen’s music teaches the ear to notice. Apparent stillness contains force operating at a scale too slow for immediate perception.
The title risks turning Scandinavia into the familiar international fantasy of endless snow, isolation and emotional coldness. The music earns the image by concentrating on geological duration rather than postcard scenery. This is not a picturesque northern landscape. It is mass, pressure and movement continuing beyond the lifespan of its observers.
A melodic line emerges, but it does not provide the triumphant release expected at the end of a long album. It resembles memory passing through ice, still recognizable but altered by the medium carrying it. The glacier preserves and destroys simultaneously. Material trapped within it can survive for centuries, while the glacier’s weight grinds entire landscapes into new forms.
That double action makes the track an ideal conclusion to an archive-minded sequence. Preservation is not the opposite of transformation. The clock preserves measurement by consuming moments. Dreams preserve emotion while changing narrative. Frames preserve selected images by excluding everything around them. Glaciers preserve matter by subjecting it to immense pressure.
This Crying Age performs the same action upon its sources. Voices, flute, electronics and tape are preserved inside a composition that removes their original independence. Each sound survives by becoming part of another climate.
Placed after Mental Destruction’s The Intensity of Darkness, the shift is especially revealing. Mental Destruction treated darkness as a spiritual force confronted through Christian conviction, fire, wrath and bodily struggle. Morthond offers no doctrine and no visible conflict. Darkness becomes the distance through which perception travels.
One record holds a cross inside overwhelming noise. The next holds a clock inside fog. Both ask what remains when familiar orientation weakens, but their responses differ. Mental Destruction resists. Morthond listens.
The album also widens Cold Meat Industry’s emotional vocabulary. Darkness no longer has to mean cruelty, blasphemy, gore or punishment. It can contain sadness without an identified tragedy, beauty without reassurance and silence that feels inhabited rather than empty.
This quieter expansion may have been as important to the label’s future as its harsher releases. Later CMI artists would build enormous catalogs from solitude, ruined memory, sacred distance and landscape. This Crying Age shows that the label could create terror by lowering its voice.
The MP3 archive preserves the original sequence while changing the scale of its object. A 1991 CD assembled through samplers, borrowed effects and reel-to-reel mixing becomes a 121.27 MB folder. The faded manuscript cover shrinks to a screen image, and four environments become files that can be entered separately.
Yet this album benefits from continuous listening. Its clock, dreams, frames and glaciers are not four unrelated scenes. They are successive ways of experiencing time. Measured time becomes emotional time, then visual memory, then geological duration. The human scale gradually diminishes.
By the final minutes, the person who heard the clock at the beginning seems almost too small to locate. The glacier continues, the age continues, and the crying has become indistinguishable from the atmosphere carrying it.
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