Pierrepoint - 1994 - Eibon

Celtic Circle Productions – C.C.P. 018  150.16MB FLAC

 Eibon occupies only twenty-two minutes, but it contains the moment Pierrepoint becomes recognizably itself. The project’s 1993 debut Slices of Death still carried evidence of two musicians pulling toward different destinations, one attracted to wave-derived atmosphere and the other toward harder, more rhythmically disciplined electro-industrial music. By the time of this EP, David Kirvel had assumed control and reduced the project to a sharper apparatus. Melody remains, but it no longer softens the machinery. Voices, sequencers and percussion are pressed into compact songs whose structures seem designed less for emotional release than for efficient psychological entry.

That compression gives Eibon a peculiar authority. It does not behave like a miniature album containing six equally developed worlds, nor like a dance single padded with disposable alternate mixes. It feels like a transitional document whose brevity has forced every idea to demonstrate its usefulness immediately. The short title piece establishes the environment, four central songs test different relationships among rhythm, voice and social hostility, and “Equivoke” closes without restoring certainty. No track remains long enough to become comfortable. Each appears, delivers its mechanism and withdraws before the listener can inspect it from a safe distance.

The project name supplies the first mechanism. Pierrepoint refers to Albert Pierrepoint, the British executioner whose work embodied death not as chaotic violence but as professional procedure. Execution by hanging depends upon calculation, preparation, timing and a sequence of actions designed to remove accident from killing. That association fits this music more closely than the uncontrolled aggression suggested by many industrial names. Pierrepoint’s electronics are severe because they are organized. The beats do not rage blindly. They advance with the cold competence of equipment performing an assigned function.

The title Eibon adds another kind of darkness. Whether Kirvel intended a direct reference to Clark Ashton Smith’s mythical sorcerer and forbidden Book of Eibon is not clearly documented, but the name carries that occult association whether deliberately invoked or not. Smith’s Eibon belongs to a prehistoric world of lost knowledge, unnatural gods and texts surviving through corrupted translations. Pierrepoint’s EP similarly presents itself as information transmitted from a hidden system, though its means are electronic rather than magical. The grimoire has become circuitry. Ritual repetition has become the sequencer.

The cover fuses those two systems beautifully. A huge green eye stares from behind a red mechanical form resembling jaws, vertebrae, exposed wiring and the articulated interior of an artificial predator. White cables cross the image like optic nerves disconnected from their original anatomy and routed through switches. The eye suggests consciousness, witness and surveillance; the machine surrounding it suggests that sight has been captured and placed inside an apparatus that can act upon whatever it observes. The artwork does not show a human using technology. It shows perception becoming technological.

That is also what the music does. The electronic body hears and responds without sounding fully human. Kirvel’s vocals are processed enough to inhabit the machinery while retaining the recognizable pressure of breath and language. They do not float above the tracks as a singer’s emotional commentary. They become command signals, damaged reports or traces of somebody still alive inside an automated process. This balance would become central to European dark electro throughout the decade: the human voice remains present precisely so that the electronics can demonstrate how thoroughly it has been altered.

The brief “Eibon” functions as an access code. It does not need to develop a conventional verse or chorus because its purpose is architectural. The listener is moved from ordinary space into the EP’s sealed interior, where synth tones and mechanical rhythm establish the governing temperature. Its two-minute length feels less like a complete statement than the opening of a file, a ritual preparation before the larger social subjects begin.

“Perfect Society” is the EP’s first full demonstration of Pierrepoint’s new identity. The title belongs to the language of political fantasies, religious programs, technological utopias and authoritarian planning. Every proposed perfect society depends upon deciding what counts as imperfection. The phrase may initially promise harmony, but within industrial music it almost inevitably suggests selection, normalization and the removal of whatever refuses the design.

The track’s compact rhythmic construction reinforces that implication. Repetition creates collective movement, but it also disciplines the body. A club rhythm appears to offer freedom because people choose to move within it, yet every participant is responding to the same grid. Pierrepoint uses that contradiction effectively. The beat can be enjoyed physically while its rigidity suggests a society in which coordination has become compulsory. Pleasure and control travel through the same signal.

This tension is one reason early-1990s electro-industrial remains so distinctive. It had not yet separated completely into dark electronic music made primarily for dance floors and abstract industrial sound intended for listening outside them. The music could function in a club while maintaining an atmosphere of contamination, surveillance and bodily unease. Eibon’s tracks are concise and memorable, but they do not become sleek. Their surfaces retain grit, narrow frequency spaces and the sense of equipment operating close to its limits.

“Perfect Society” also reveals the influence of Belgian electro-industrial, particularly the stripped, confrontational minimalism associated with Dive. That influence does not reduce Pierrepoint to imitation. Kirvel absorbs the lesson that heaviness need not require dozens of simultaneous layers. A dry beat, a repeated bass sequence and a voice treated as hostile material can produce more pressure than a crowded arrangement. Space becomes part of the attack because every sound enters it alone enough to remain visible.

“Why Do...?” changes the direction of the voice. “Perfect Society” looks outward toward a system; “Why Do...?” begins with a question whose missing object makes it impossible to answer. Why do what? Why obey, harm, desire, continue or repeat? The ellipsis keeps the phrase suspended, allowing the track’s emotional charge to circulate without becoming a specific argument. Industrial music frequently speaks through declarations and commands. A question introduces weakness into that vocabulary, but weakness here produces tension rather than relief.

The machinery continues underneath, indifferent to whether the question receives a response. That contrast suggests a person trying to understand a process that has already moved beyond explanation. Rhythm is particularly effective in this role because it can continue after language fails. The speaker asks “why,” while the sequencer answers only by repeating the conditions that made the question necessary.

The writing credited to Axel Kleintjes across most of the EP gives these songs enough linguistic identity to prevent them from becoming anonymous dance tracks, while Kirvel’s performance keeps the words embedded in the physical environment. The collaboration exists at a slight distance. One person supplies much of the language; another turns it into voice, electronics and rhythm. That separation mirrors the music’s larger division between human intention and machine execution.

“Hoffnung Auf Die Wiederkehr,” translated as “Hope for the Return,” is carried forward from Slices of Death in remixed form. Its presence is essential because it makes the EP’s transformation audible rather than merely historical. The older composition enters Kirvel’s newly concentrated system and emerges shortened, tightened and redistributed. Eibon is not produced by erasing the first album but by processing it.

The title contains a surprisingly vulnerable idea. Hope is directed toward something absent, and return implies that whatever is desired once existed but has been lost. Within Pierrepoint’s severe electronic environment, this longing does not become romantic warmth. It resembles a signal transmitted toward a destination that may no longer be capable of receiving it. The beat keeps the message moving, but movement cannot guarantee arrival.

The remix also demonstrates how industrial culture understood repetition across releases. A song was not always finished when its first version appeared. It could be reconstructed according to new equipment, new club expectations or a changed artistic identity. The remix became a way of examining the composition’s skeleton. Elements once central could be removed; rhythms could be strengthened; atmosphere could be converted into propulsion. Pierrepoint uses “Hoffnung Auf Die Wiederkehr” as a bridge between its earlier wave-inflected body and the colder electro-industrial organism now taking shape.

“Slaughter” abandons ambiguity at the level of its title. The word describes killing performed at scale, often through established facilities and repeated procedures. It fits the Pierrepoint name because slaughter is not necessarily a spontaneous explosion of hatred. It can be institutional, scheduled and economically organized. The horror lies partly in efficiency.

The track compresses that idea into a danceable electronic form, exposing the uncomfortable proximity between mechanical pleasure and mechanized violence. The listener’s body responds to repetition while the title assigns that repetition a murderous context. This does not mean the music literally depicts a slaughterhouse or execution chamber. It uses the word to alter how rhythm is perceived. A beat becomes an impact; a sequence becomes a production line; a processed voice becomes either the operator or the material being processed.

This is where Eibon’s restraint proves more effective than cinematic excess would have been. There is no need for elaborate screams, gore samples or orchestral horror. The title supplies the image, and the electronics remain impersonal enough to let the image spread. Pierrepoint’s violence is strongest when it resembles routine.

“Equivoke” closes the EP with a word suggesting equivocation, ambiguity and a refusal to commit to one stable meaning. The spelling itself looks slightly corrupted, perhaps an invented term, perhaps language damaged during transmission. After the certainty of “Perfect Society” and “Slaughter,” the final track restores uncertainty. The machine has operated successfully, but the information it produced remains questionable.

This is an appropriate conclusion for a recording caught between identities. Eibon establishes the harder Pierrepoint sound, but it does not yet contain the full expansion heard on The Being or the increasingly club-oriented developments that followed. Its importance comes from being a threshold rather than a destination. The project has abandoned part of its former self without completely knowing what the replacement will become.

Celtic Circle Productions was an ideal location for that transition. Its catalog during this period placed Pierrepoint alongside yelworC, Page 12, Red Sekta, Putrefy Factor 7 and the first Covenant album, creating a German label environment where dark electro, EBM, gothic electronics and industrial experimentation remained porous categories. Eibon belongs to this ecosystem before scene vocabulary became so narrowly subdivided that every rhythmic or production difference required another genre name.

The EP can therefore be heard as both an individual turning point and evidence of a larger historical moment. European industrial music was becoming more rhythmically direct, more compatible with clubs and more technologically focused, yet it retained the diseased imagination of the cassette and early-CD underground. Machinery was not yet presented as frictionless futurism. It remained dangerous, unreliable and psychologically contaminated.

The cover’s eye captures that moment. Digital technology promised expanded vision, storage and control, but Pierrepoint imagines the observing apparatus as a jaw. To see is to seize. Information enters the machine and becomes available for judgment, classification and action. The white cables do not liberate the eye from the body; they connect it to another body whose intentions are unknown.

Eibon remains compelling because it does not overstate its arrival. Six tracks, one grotesque image and twenty-two minutes are enough to establish the code Pierrepoint would continue developing for the remainder of the decade. The EP has the density of a document discovered between larger volumes, a few pages from a technological grimoire explaining how to convert longing, social order and killing into sequenced voltage.

The executioner, the sorcerer and the machine meet inside the same name. One calculates the fall, one preserves forbidden knowledge, and one repeats its instructions without conscience. Somewhere among them remains a human voice asking why. The question is never answered, but the apparatus continues running.