Mortiis - 1997 - Reisen Til Grotter Og Odemarker VHS

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.48

After Brighter Death Now’s Innerwar, the Cold Meat Industry sequence makes a strange and necessary turn. Mortiis does not continue the label’s descent through psychological pressure, military authority, erotic inversion or death industrial machinery. Reisene Til Grotter Og Ødemarker opens a different kind of chamber, one built from fog, stone, water, keyboard grandeur and solitary fantasy. It is not less dark than the surrounding releases, but its darkness is not punitive. It does not try to crush the listener. It invites the listener to enter an imagined place and remain there long enough for ordinary time to loosen.
As a VHS artifact, this release matters because Mortiis was already a visual world before he was simply a recording artist. The music from Keiser Av En Dimensjon Ukjent had its own internal geography, but the video gives that geography a body: ruins, landscapes, cloaked movement, castle walls, frozen theatrical poses, and the famous Mortiis face appearing like a creature from a private childhood mythology that refused to disappear with age. This is not a music video in the commercial sense. It does not sell a single, compress a persona into a few memorable shots, or translate a song into narrative entertainment. It behaves more like a moving booklet, a ritual companion to the album, or a fan-made dream given official form before “fan edit” culture became a daily internet language.
The title translates roughly into journeys to grottoes and wastelands, and that is exactly how the piece moves. Nothing hurries. The camera and music share a patience that now feels almost impossible in a culture trained to slice atmosphere into fragments. Mortiis asks the viewer to accept duration as part of the spell. The synthesizers do not function as background scoring for action. They are the action. Their slow fanfares, minor-key progressions and medieval-fantasy gestures create the sensation that the landscape is thinking. Trees, water, fortress stone and mist become extensions of the keyboard lines. The visual world does not illustrate the music from outside; it appears to have grown out of the same mossy circuitry.
Mortiis’ Era I work has often been gathered under the later term dungeon synth, but this video makes clear why that term can be both useful and limiting. The “dungeon” is not merely a genre location, a set of lo-fi keyboard tones and fantasy signifiers. It is an emotional architecture. It is the inner room where isolation becomes kingdom, where adolescent grandeur becomes sacred rather than embarrassing, and where a person can convert social distance into mythic distance. Mortiis had come out of black metal, but here the aggression has been removed and the aura remains. The corpse-painted forest becomes a fairy-tale ruin. Satanic opposition gives way to invented monarchy, exile, towers, secret books and nameless travel through empty lands.
That emptiness is central. The video’s landscapes do not feel populated by an ordinary world just beyond the frame. They feel abandoned to imagination. Mortiis appears less like a character acting inside a story than a figure who belongs to a realm after everyone else has vanished. His costume and prosthetic image can look theatrical, even awkward, but that awkwardness is part of the truth of the work. This is not cinema polished by professional fantasy infrastructure. It is personal myth-making under material limitations. The rubber, fabric, fog, stone and VHS texture do not hide their construction. Instead, they create a handmade portal, one whose sincerity becomes stronger because the seams remain visible.
The music itself gains something from being attached to these images. Heard alone, “Reisene Til Grotter Og Ødemarker” unfolds as one of Mortiis’ long-form keyboard journeys, moving through repeating themes and grand changes in mood without conventional song structure. Seen here, the repetition becomes travel. The return of a phrase feels like passing the same ruin from another angle, or remembering a place before reaching it. The length allows the viewer to stop waiting for plot and begin dwelling inside atmosphere. That is the secret of early Mortiis. The compositions often seem simple if measured by virtuosity, but they are unusually effective at making the mind furnish a room. The listener supplies corridors, banners, fires, caves, stairways and forgotten thrones.
Within the CMI catalog, this VHS also expands the meaning of the label’s darkness. Cold Meat Industry is often remembered through industrial severity, ritual dread and bleak ambient force, but Mortiis brings a more romantic and solitary dimension. The darkness here is not only horror. It is distance from the modern world. It is the hunger for elsewhere. It is the desire to live inside a symbol so completely that the symbol becomes more emotionally convincing than daily life. That desire connects Mortiis to metal, fantasy literature, old electronic music, role-playing imagination and outsider self-invention all at once. The video captures a moment before these ingredients hardened into retro genre vocabulary. It still feels like one person building a weather system around himself.
There is also a beautiful contradiction in having such private music preserved through VHS, then later through digital files and now through online video. A work about hidden realms and distant ruins keeps surviving through increasingly public formats. The original tape belonged to the era of mail order, small catalogs, traded lists, specialized shops and myth carried by physical scarcity. A rip turns it into a file. A blog post places it within a catalog archaeology. A YouTube upload lets the same murky procession appear instantly on a screen for someone who may never touch the tape, read the original insert, or know what Cold Meat Industry felt like as a distant name in the 1990s. Something is lost in that movement, but something else is protected. The kingdom becomes less secret, yet less likely to vanish.
Reisene Til Grotter Og Ødemarker is therefore best understood not as a bonus curiosity beside the albums, but as a concentrated statement of Mortiis’ early project. It shows the music, image and mythology working as one object. The keyboards build the horizon, the ruins give the sound a body, and the Mortiis figure stands between childhood fantasy and underground extremity with complete commitment. Its slowness is not a flaw. Its handmade quality is not a weakness. Its refusal to behave like a normal music video is exactly why it remains valuable. It preserves the moment when one person’s internal landscape became visible enough for others to enter, wander, and maybe recognize some abandoned chamber of their own.

Deutsch Nepal - 1997 - Comprendido! Time Stop! ...And World Ending

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.49

VA - 1998 - The Absolute Supper 2xCD

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.50

The Absolute Supper is not merely a sampler. It is Cold Meat Industry arranging its own dining table at the exact moment when the label’s language had become large enough to require a map. By CMI.50, the catalog was no longer a single tunnel leading into industrial darkness. It had become a network of chambers: death industrial, ritual ambient, martial neoclassical, dungeon synth, apocalyptic folk, sacred ruin, noise, horror electronics, and deep Scandinavian isolation all touching one another through shared weather. This double CD understands that range. It does not try to smooth the label into one sound. It stages the differences as courses in a long ceremonial meal.
“In Slaughter Natives” opening the set with “INRI… Raped by the Cross” is immediately decisive. The compilation begins not with atmosphere as background, but with accusation, procession and religious violence transformed into architecture. In Slaughter Natives have always sounded less like a band than a punitive institution discovered under a cathedral. Their drums, chants and orchestral gestures create a feeling of judgment already underway. As an opening statement, the track announces that the compilation will treat darkness not as decoration but as spiritual pressure. The listener is not being introduced politely to the label. The listener is being admitted through iron doors.
The first disc then turns toward a more theatrical and neoclassical register. The Protagonist’s “Imitation” and “Zoroaster” bring formality and dramatic poise, suggesting another route through Cold Meat Industry: not the collapsing factory or the underground cell, but the stage, the mask, the historical tableau. Ordo Equilibrio’s “The Perplexity of Hybris. I Glorify Myself.” follows naturally because Tomas Pettersson’s world also thrives on posture, ritual and declaration. Yet Ordo’s contribution is more intimate and dangerous in a different way. It brings the body back into the ceremony. Pride, desire, occult self-fashioning and moral inversion appear not as noise assault but as disciplined confession. The track sits in the compilation like a rose pinned to a military coat.
Sanctum’s untitled piece and Puissance’s “Love Incinerate” push the sequence into machinery and command. Sanctum bring a harder, more physically agitated industrial edge, reminding the listener that CMI’s darkness was never only fog, bells and distant choirs. Puissance then widen the frame with synthetic orchestral force, turning emotion into scorched public ceremony. “Love Incinerate” is a perfect title for them because Puissance often make feeling sound as if it has been absorbed by historical catastrophe. Love does not bloom here. It burns into emblem, banner, ash and slogan.
The middle of the first disc is where the compilation reveals its breadth most beautifully. Arcana’s “Winds of the Lost Soul” opens the chapel doors toward mourning, while Mortiis’ “Child of Curiosity & the Old Man of Knowledge” leads the listener into fantasy solitude. These are not minor detours away from the label’s “harder” identity. They are essential to it. Cold Meat Industry’s darkness could be violent, but it could also be devotional, nostalgic, lonely and mythic. Arcana create sacred distance, while Mortiis creates imagined geography. One makes grief sound like a procession beneath vaulted ceilings. The other turns exile into a kingdom of caves, old wisdom and private symbols. Together they show that CMI’s catalog was not simply about horror. It was about elsewhere.
Desiderii Marginis, Sephiroth, raison d’être and Hazard close the first disc by expanding that elsewhere into emptier and more abstract zones. Desiderii Marginis’ “Chaos Undivided” and Sephiroth’s “R’lyeh” suggest vast spaces whose meanings are not fully readable. Raison d’être’s “The Verge of Somnolence” brings Peter Andersson’s unmistakable talent for suspended decay, where bells, drones and choral traces sound like a monastery remembering itself after abandonment. Hazard’s “Who Blew Out the Northern Lights?” ends the disc with a more severe environmental mystery. The title itself feels like a cosmic crime scene. Something beautiful has been extinguished, and the music studies the remaining cold.
The second disc begins with Brighter Death Now’s “I Wish I Was a Little Girl,” and the entire atmosphere changes. If the first disc often moves through ruins, cathedrals, wastelands and ceremonial landscapes, the second begins inside damaged psychology. Roger Karmanik’s work makes discomfort physical. The title is deliberately disturbing because it drags vulnerability, identity, power and degradation into one unstable phrase. Brighter Death Now does not let the listener admire darkness from a balcony. The sound enters the nervous system and stains the room. It is a reminder that CMI’s central figure was not only a curator of atmospheres but a maker of some of the most oppressive death industrial music of the period.
Frozen Faces’ “Zyklon B Doll” and MZ.412’s “N.B.S. Act 1 - Begravning” continue that descent through poisoned symbols and black ritual. The compilation is not trying to make these images comfortable. It preserves how extreme industrial culture repeatedly used taboo, atrocity, sacrilege and contamination as methods of confrontation. That does not make every gesture morally clean, and it should not. Part of listening carefully is recognizing the difference between atmosphere, critique, fascination and reckless aesthetic handling of real historical horror. The second disc lives inside that contamination. It is the side of the supper where the candles smell wrong and every object on the table has been handled by ghosts.
Megaptera’s “Don’t Desecrate the Dead” is perfectly placed after MZ.412 because it turns from ritual assault toward cinematic dread. Megaptera’s death industrial often feels less declarative than Brighter Death Now and less occultly militant than MZ.412. It works through spaces of pursuit, burial, machinery and unseen bodies. Deutsch Nepal’s “Logo” then performs one of the compilation’s great pivots. Lina Der Baby Doll’s world is rhythmic, drugged, sardonic and ritualistic in a looser, more unstable way. Where some CMI projects build stone monuments, Deutsch Nepal smears symbols across the wall and laughs from a room with bad lighting.
Nacht, Archon Satani and Ildfrost extend the second disc’s emphasis on trance, burial and frozen ceremony. “Svartsinn,” “A Time of Ruin,” “Hearts Perturbe” and “Slept Awake” all belong to a zone where movement becomes minimal and mood becomes total. These pieces are not concerned with showing off composition in a conventional sense. They are concerned with changing the air. Cold Meat Industry’s great achievement was partly its ability to make small repeated gestures feel enormous when placed in the right shadow. A drone, a bell, a loop, a whisper or a low rhythm could become a whole geography if the listener entered it correctly.
Cintecele Diavolui’s “The Devil Must Kill” closes the set by returning to explicit infernal theater, but after more than two hours the title feels less like a simple provocation than the last mask at a long banquet. The compilation has passed through Christ wounds, Zoroastrian grandeur, self-glorification, incinerated love, lost souls, old men of knowledge, sleeping ruins, ruined northern lights, industrial trauma, poisoned dolls, funerary rites, desecrated bodies and blackened folklore. Ending with the devil is almost classical. After every chamber of the label has opened, the final figure is not a surprise guest. He has been sitting somewhere near the head of the table all along.
The Absolute Supper is valuable because it captures Cold Meat Industry as a living ecosystem rather than a brand summary assembled after the fact. It shows how these artists could differ radically while still belonging together. The shared element is not tempo, instrumentation or ideology. It is a commitment to atmosphere as a complete world. Each project builds a room, a doctrine, a wound, a landscape or a ritual system and then asks the listener to remain inside it. As CMI.50, the compilation functions like both milestone and inventory: here is what has been gathered, here is what the label can contain, here are the many kinds of darkness that fit under one roof. Anyone who discovered CMI through this double CD would not receive a simple introduction. They would receive a keyring, heavy with doors.

Ildfrost - 1997 - Natanael

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.51

Arcana - 1997 - Lizabeth

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.52

Lizabeth feels less like a separate Arcana statement than a small sealed doorway between Dark Age of Reason and Cantar de Procella. That makes it easy to underestimate. At just under fifteen minutes, it does not have the full architectural sweep of the albums surrounding it, but the brevity gives the release a different kind of power. Arcana compress their sacred mourning, medieval atmosphere and processional melancholy into three chambers, each one carrying a slightly different relation to storm, sleep and sovereign light. If Dark Age of Reason was a ruined chapel remembered in darkness, Lizabeth is the candle flame carried from that chapel into rougher weather.
“Cantar de Procella (The Opening of the Wound)” immediately announces a more turbulent Arcana than the one heard on the debut. The title’s storm-song is not merely decorative. The piece has the feeling of pressure gathering in the air before the emotional wound fully opens. Peter Pettersson’s arrangement still depends on the familiar Arcana materials: deep percussion, solemn keyboard orchestration, choral resonance and voices set at a ceremonial distance. But the movement feels more urgent than much of Dark Age of Reason. There is less mist around the pillars. The music does not simply mourn from within a frozen sanctuary; it begins to summon, to stir, to call something painful into visibility.
The parenthetical phrase “The Opening of the Wound” is important because Arcana’s beauty here is not anesthetic. The music does not cover injury with ornament. It frames injury until the listener can approach it as ritual. This has always been one of Arcana’s strongest qualities. Their grandness is not triumphal in the Puissance sense, nor authoritarian, nor even fully ecclesiastical. It is a way of making sorrow inhabitable. The wound becomes a doorway rather than only a damaged surface. Voices rise out of the arrangement not as characters in a drama but as presences inside a vaulted room, turning pain into resonance.
“The Dreams Made of Sand” softens the attack but deepens the fragility. Sand is already a perfect Arcana image because it carries time, ruin, burial, and impermanence without needing to announce any of them loudly. Dreams made of sand cannot be held. They can be shaped briefly, but they are always on their way back into formlessness. The track moves with that knowledge. Its atmosphere feels suspended between lullaby and procession, tenderness and dissolution. Ida Bengtsson’s vocal presence gives the piece its pale radiance, but as with the debut, her voice does not simply console. It seems to shine from a place the listener cannot reach. The beauty is real, but it is separated by distance.
This is where Lizabeth shows the development happening inside Arcana’s language in 1997. The debut already had scale, but here the emotional images feel sharper. The music is still dreamlike, yet the dream has acquired more specific weather. Storm, sand, wound, sun: these are elemental symbols, simple enough to appear ancient, but arranged in a sequence that makes psychological sense. First something opens. Then the dream begins to lose its shape. Then a figure of power and illumination appears, though not necessarily as rescue. Arcana are not writing stories in a literal sense, but their track order creates a symbolic motion from injury through impermanence toward radiance.
“Emperor of the Sun” closes the single with the most compact and majestic gesture. The title suggests authority, but Arcana’s sense of authority is not military. The emperor here feels remote, solar, almost mythological, a sovereign presence glimpsed through light rather than command. The shorter duration gives the piece a concentrated glow. It does not have time to build an enormous ceremonial hall, so it works more like an icon: a small object holding a large symbolic charge. The keyboards and voices create a vertical feeling, as though the music is looking upward after the two previous tracks have moved through wound and dream.
Because these songs sit so close to Cantar de Procella, Lizabeth also functions like a preview of Arcana’s second major stage. The project’s medieval-romantic sadness remains intact, but the sound is becoming more assertive and more dramatically formed. The music is still synthetic in its orchestral texture, but that artificiality continues to serve the spell. These are not historical reenactments. They are memory-instruments, digital ghosts of choirs, drums and courtly chambers. Arcana’s world becomes convincing because it does not pretend to be a real past. It feels like the remains of a past imagined so intensely that it begins to behave like inheritance.
As an object, the single format suits Arcana unusually well. A cardboard-sleeve CD with only three tracks feels like a devotional fragment, something discovered beside the larger manuscripts rather than a complete book. Within the Cold Meat Industry catalog, CMI.52 also offers a brief return to sacred melancholy after The Absolute Supper’s vast label-banquet and the many more violent or contaminated forms of darkness surrounding it. Arcana’s darkness is not less serious because it is beautiful. It is serious because the beauty is always vanishing. Lizabeth captures that vanishing in miniature: a storm-song, a sand-dream, and a sun-emperor passing across the interior sky before the chamber closes again.

Puissance - 1997 - Totalitarian Hearts 7''

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.53