A Gathering of the Tribes for the First/Last Human Be-In is the moment Cold Meat Industry briefly replaces stone, blood, burial and religious dread with fluorescent circuitry. The preceding releases had trained the catalog to move slowly through tombs, ruined sanctuaries and glacial spaces. XXX Atomic Toejam arrive carrying programmed beats, distorted guitar, sampled voices and the nervous brightness of early cyberculture. CMI-17 does not deepen the established atmosphere. It interrupts it.
That interruption comes from the partnership of Petter Marklund and Fredrik Thordendal. Marklund had already built Memorandum from ritual percussion, tape processing and an administrative fascination with death. Thordendal brought the metallic precision and rhythmic violence associated with Meshuggah’s early development. Their overlap does not sound like either project wearing a temporary costume. It sounds like two methods colliding in a small digital room and deciding that collision is enough.
The title is much larger than the two-track running time. A gathering of tribes suggests scattered communities converging for a temporary event, each bringing its own language, technology and altered state. “First/Last Human Be-In” turns that gathering into both origin and farewell. Humanity assembles at the beginning of something and at the edge of its disappearance. The slash prevents the listener from deciding whether this is a birth ceremony or final party.
That uncertainty suits the early 1990s electronic imagination. Machines could still appear capable of opening a new consciousness rather than merely organizing work, surveillance and consumption more efficiently. Cybernetic language, psychedelic imagery, dance technology and heavy guitar could be treated as parts of one coming nervous system. XXX Atomic Toejam sound excited by that possibility, but their excitement is chemically unstable. The future they imagine is ecstatic, cheap, overloaded and slightly ridiculous.
“God in a Pill” compresses transcendence into dosage. Divinity no longer requires church, prayer or moral transformation. It can be swallowed, absorbed and activated through chemistry. The title treats spiritual revelation as both genuine possibility and consumer product, something capable of changing consciousness while fitting inside a packet.
The track’s force comes from refusing to choose between belief and parody. Samples, pounding electronics and guitar weight create a state that wants to feel enormous, but the construction remains visibly synthetic. Revelation arrives through equipment. The body becomes another input device waiting for a sufficient signal.
This is far removed from the sacred terror of In Slaughter Natives. There, religious architecture crushed the individual beneath inherited authority. Here, the individual attempts to manufacture a private god through technology and altered perception. The cathedral has become a capsule, club and processor rack.
“Human Be-In” is more spacious and hypnotic, allowing the project’s collision of industrial rhythm, techno pulse and metallic guitar to become a small environment rather than a direct assault. The title places emphasis on being rather than doctrine. People gather, bodies move, and temporary community forms through shared sound. Yet the music never becomes warmly communal. Voices arrive as samples, identity is fragmented, and the beat organizes everyone from outside.
This makes the gathering feel both liberating and controlled. Dance music can produce an intense sense of collective presence, but the participants move according to a machine-generated grid. Freedom occurs inside synchronization. The body escapes ordinary behavior by becoming more obedient to rhythm.
That contradiction is the release’s most interesting feature. XXX Atomic Toejam celebrate technology while revealing how easily celebration becomes programming. The pill opens consciousness but also administers it. The gathering creates community but also makes bodies repeat the same commands. Human beings enter the future by allowing machinery to determine the timing.
The guitars keep this from becoming smooth electronic futurism. Their weight introduces friction, aggression and physical resistance. Rather than floating cleanly through synthetic space, the tracks repeatedly strike something solid. Thordendal’s presence matters because guitar is not used as decorative rock credibility. It behaves like another machine, clipped and disciplined enough to join the programmed architecture.
Marklund’s contribution gives the music its damaged ritual character. Even at its most dance-oriented, the release does not sound like uncomplicated club entertainment. Samples appear like messages from people who have already entered the altered state and cannot explain what happened there. Repetition becomes ceremony without requiring ancient drums, tombs or Latin titles.
This is why the release belongs on Cold Meat Industry despite sounding unlike nearly everything surrounding it. The label’s deeper identity was never one fixed genre. It was the use of repetition, packaging and extreme atmosphere to create self-contained systems. XXX Atomic Toejam simply build their system from cyberdelic brightness rather than funerary darkness.
The miniature scale helps. Two tracks are enough to establish the experiment without forcing it into a full album. A longer release might have exposed how narrow the central idea was, or required the duo to choose between techno, industrial rock and psychedelic sampling. The short form preserves the collision at the moment of maximum possibility.
The full-length project that was discussed but never completed now gives the single another aura. It survives as a door opened briefly onto a room that was never constructed. “God in a Pill” and “Human Be-In” become evidence of a direction Cold Meat Industry could have explored more deeply but largely did not.
That unrealized future is part of the pleasure. The release sits between Memorandum’s ending, Meshuggah’s growing rhythmic language and a strain of early-1990s electronic culture that imagined metal, techno, samples and altered consciousness merging into one form. Later music would explore all those combinations, but this small object retains the ungainly excitement of an experiment without descendants.
Placed after Sacrosancts Bleed, the contrast is almost comic. In Slaughter Natives spend an hour forcing sacred authority to reveal its flesh. XXX Atomic Toejam answer by offering god in pharmaceutical form. One record corrupts the cathedral; the next miniaturizes transcendence until it can be consumed on the dance floor.
The 24.3 MB MP3 archive makes that miniaturization complete. Two tracks once issued as a compact disc become a tiny folder whose size barely suggests the amount of machinery compressed inside it. The promised gathering now occurs whenever one listener opens the files.
CMI-17 is not one of the label’s foundational monuments, and it does not need to be. It is a bright, awkward side passage where two musicians briefly imagine that the future might arrive through heavy guitar, programmed rhythm, chemical mysticism and a crowd moving under artificial light.
The first human be-in and the last human be-in may be the same event. Everyone gathers, the machines start, and nobody knows whether they are celebrating an awakening or dancing through the end.
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