Debauch preserved absence through blank files. Malfeitor follows it with an album that seems determined to fill every empty room with rhythm, machinery and hostile breath. CMI-06 existed in the downloaded collection mainly as a numbered position, evidence that a rare video had once occupied the space. CMI-07 returns the catalog to audible matter. The machinery starts again.
The title resembles “malefactor,” a person who commits evil or causes harm, but its unfamiliar spelling makes it sound less like a legal category than a summoned identity. Malfeitor could be a criminal, demon, machine or condition spreading through the record. The album never supplies a stable body for it. Evil is not portrayed by one narrator. It circulates through voices, loops, percussion and rooms that seem abandoned while their equipment continues operating.
The cover avoids the crowded executions, monuments and religious figures appearing across the preceding Cold Meat Industry releases. A broad red strip crosses a dark grey-green field. At its center sits a small black-and-white photograph of an empty interior, perhaps a corridor, industrial room or damaged institutional space. The image is too small to enter comfortably. It resembles a surveillance photograph documenting the location after whatever happened there has ended.
The red band gives that tiny room an alarming intensity. It can suggest warning paint, blood, a sealed evidence strip or the graphic division used in an official file. The surrounding darkness makes the record look less like a doorway than a specimen mounted for examination. Something occurred inside the photograph, but the music supplies no reliable report.
“Virus” begins with propagation rather than impact. A virus does not need architectural grandeur or visible strength. It survives by entering another system and using that system to reproduce itself. The track’s repeated rhythm acts in the same way. Once established, it occupies attention and makes every additional sound part of its cycle.
This is one of the album’s central methods. The rhythm is rarely accompaniment. It is the environment. Voices, metallic tones and electronic disturbances do not stand above it as a completed song. They appear infected by it, forced to repeat or move according to a mechanism already in operation.
“Malfeitor” gives that mechanism a rougher vocal body. The track comes closer to industrial dance music than the ceremonial constructions of In Slaughter Natives or Memorandum, but it never offers the clean propulsion of club-oriented electronic music. The beat pulls forward while the surrounding material makes movement feel compulsory rather than liberating.
That tension reveals how close several late-1980s electronic languages still were to one another. Industrial noise, electronic body music, ritual percussion and dark ambient had not settled into isolated shelves. A sequence could be danceable, ugly, theatrical and psychologically oppressive at the same time. Malfeitor belongs to this unstable crossing before “black industrial” became a dependable description.
“The Death of Lasarus” introduces biblical resurrection through its opposite. Lazarus is remembered because he returns from death; the title concentrates upon the death that made the miracle necessary. The misspelled “Lasarus” also loosens the figure from formal scripture, turning him into another distorted name inside the album’s private mythology.
The music offers no radiant return. Its repeated movement feels more like a body being processed after spiritual certainty has failed. Resurrection becomes another mechanical cycle, a person called back not into freedom but into the same damaged world.
“Cold Face” removes warmth from identity. A face ordinarily reveals emotion, recognition and social intention. Made cold, it becomes mask, corpse, photograph or unresponsive screen. The title also connects with “Ecaf Dloc II,” which later reverses the letters and makes the face unreadable at the level of language.
This mirrored naming is more than a puzzle. The album repeatedly turns surfaces around to see whether anything changes behind them. A phrase is reversed, but its emotional temperature remains. Coldness survives translation.
“Auguste Piccards Nightmare” briefly enlarges the album beyond its enclosed rooms. Piccard’s name evokes exploration at extreme height and depth, movement into environments where ordinary human bodies require technological protection. The nightmare suggested here is not simply fear of travel. It is the possibility that machinery carries us somewhere the body was never meant to survive.
The track’s heavy, measured rhythm resembles equipment continuing under pressure. Its darkness feels less religious than physical, a sealed vessel surrounded by hostile space. Malfeitor repeatedly imagines technology as both protection and threat. The machine allows entry while making escape dependent upon the machine’s continued function.
“Introspektion” turns that pressure inward. The unusual spelling again makes a familiar concept feel altered by transmission. Looking inside does not reveal an authentic, peaceful self. It reveals another chamber of loops and commands.
This is industrial introspection rather than therapeutic self-discovery. The mind is approached as machinery whose operations may be observed but not easily stopped. Thought repeats, feeds back and becomes indistinguishable from the systems surrounding it.
“Public Worship” then moves private fixation into collective behavior. Worship can join people through devotion, but publicity changes its character. Belief becomes display, ceremony and social proof. Bodies gather, repeat words and demonstrate allegiance before one another.
The track does not identify what is being worshipped. God, machinery, authority, violence and the rhythm itself remain possible. That uncertainty is crucial. The music reveals the structure of worship without providing a trustworthy object at its center.
“Ecaf Dloc II” reverses “Cold Face” and appears after “Public Worship” like language viewed from behind an altar. Meaning is technically recoverable, but only through effort. The title behaves like a coded message whose secrecy is extremely simple, suggesting that obscurity itself may create authority.
The music is equally direct beneath its atmosphere. Its power does not come from elaborate development. A restricted set of sounds is placed into motion and allowed to harden through repetition. What one listener hears as monotony another may hear as discipline. Malfeitor repeatedly stands on that border.
“Still” closes the original LP in barely more than a minute. After an album of constant cycles, the word can mean motionless, continuing, or a frozen image. All three meanings apply. The machinery stops, but its pressure remains. The cover photograph becomes a still taken from an event whose movement is no longer available.
This ending also gives the album an unexpected restraint. It does not conclude with its loudest proclamation or a grand collapse. It leaves a small remainder, as though the signal has been cut while the room continues existing beyond the recording.
Placed after Debauch, “Still” acquires another meaning. The missing VHS survives only through still images and empty filenames. Malfeitor ends by naming exactly what remains when motion disappears.
The album is historically important not because every experiment is fully developed, but because its future is audible without being complete. The martial rhythms, occult atmosphere, industrial loops and corrupted religious language that later defined MZ.412 are already gathering. Yet the record remains closer to electronic body music and primitive tape industrial than the immense blackened rituals the project would later construct.
That incompleteness is its personality. Malfeitor sounds like musicians discovering that a simple rhythm can become an institution if it is repeated with sufficient conviction. The early equipment does not create seamless darkness. Its edges remain visible, allowing the listener to hear the system being assembled.
Cold Meat Industry’s preceding releases had imagined death as monument, sacrifice, meat processing and historical shadow. Maschinenzimmer 412 introduce another possibility: darkness as infection. It enters through rhythm, reproduces inside the listener and continues after the short final track has stopped.
CMI-06 left an empty folder shaped like a vanished video. CMI-07 fills the next position with a machine that does not know when to quit.
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