Morthound - 1991 - This Crying Age

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.12

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.

In Slaughter Natives - 1992 - Sacrosancts Bleed

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.16

Sacrosancts Bleed begins with a grammatical wound. “Sacrosanct” normally describes something too holy, protected or institutionally powerful to be violated. In Slaughter Natives turn it into a population, the sacrosancts, then give them the most ordinary proof of bodily vulnerability. They bleed. The title does not merely announce blasphemy. It asks what remains of sacred authority once its supposedly untouchable representatives are revealed to possess skin, fluids, organs and fear.
The cover makes that exposure physical. A heavy black cross dominates the upper left, with the artist and album title printed across its horizontal bar. Behind it, a distorted profile emerges from murky brown and green light. The figure appears part animal, demon, mask and wounded human, its teeth or tusks protruding from a face too corrupted for stable recognition. Narrow blue bands frame the image like cold light entering from outside the chamber. The cross does not protect the creature or defeat it. Symbol and body occupy the same contaminated field.
This is a denser, more bodily In Slaughter Natives than the project heard on the early self-titled cassette. That first release transformed primitive electronics into processions, tribunals and ruined sacred architecture. Sacrosancts Bleed enters those structures after something has begun rotting inside them. The ceremonial scale remains, but surfaces have grown thicker, percussion more crushing and voices more deeply embedded in the mass. The cathedral no longer stands at a safe visual distance. The listener has been moved beneath its floor.
“Chaos Breeding” establishes creation as infection. Chaos is not merely present. It reproduces. The title reverses the idea that disorder is an absence of organization waiting to be corrected. Here disorder possesses fertility, generating further structures from itself. The martial percussion does not discipline the chaos so much as give its multiplication a rhythm.
This is one of Jouni Havukainen’s strongest methods. Repetition appears to impose control, yet every repeated impact increases the scale of the threatening environment. The beat resembles columns being erected, but the columns support an architecture devoted to instability. Order and chaos become partners rather than enemies.
“Koprofagi Christi” profanes sacred language through bodily waste and consumption. Coprophagy is already an extreme image because it collapses the boundary between nourishment and excretion, what enters the body and what the body rejects. Joined with “Christi,” it drags Christian divinity into the digestive system.
The title could function as adolescent shock alone, but the music gives the violation ceremonial weight. Christianity is built around transformed consumption: bread becomes body, wine becomes blood, and believers ingest sacred matter through communion. In Slaughter Natives place an obscene mirror beside that sacrament. If holiness enters flesh, it also enters the processes through which flesh metabolizes, decays and expels.
“Fifth Skin” continues the album’s anatomy while introducing an impossible layer. Human beings do not possess five literal skins, so the title imagines repeated coverings: biological skin, clothing, social identity, religious identity, and whatever defensive membrane remains beneath those structures. To reach a fifth skin requires penetration through several protections.
The track feels less like peeling than compression. Percussion and orchestral force press inward until distinctions among body, garment and armor begin collapsing. The fifth skin may be the final private self, or another surface revealing that no final self exists.
“Taste of Human” makes consumption explicit. The phrase does not say human taste, which could describe judgment or preference. It describes the flavor of a human being from the position of something consuming one. The listener is moved from subject to meat.
This reversal belongs naturally within Cold Meat Industry, whose very name reduces the body to processed material. Yet In Slaughter Natives approach the transformation ceremonially rather than industrially. The human is not merely butchered for efficiency. Consumption becomes sacrament, taboo and proof that spiritual grandeur cannot protect flesh from appetite.
The title piece gathers these contradictions into a blunt declaration. What is sacred bleeds, and the bleeding proves that sacred status was either fraudulent or dependent upon a vulnerable body all along. Institutions often present themselves as timeless, but every institution is maintained by mortal people. Gods may be declared immortal, but their images crack, burn and require restoration. Priests, rulers and martyrs carry authority through bodies that can be injured.
The track’s force does not sound like liberation from authority. It sounds like discovering that authority’s vulnerability makes it more dangerous. A wounded sacred order may not surrender. It may demand sacrifice, retaliation and renewed obedience. Blood can disprove divinity or become evidence of it.
“Scum” removes ceremonial language and leaves residue. Scum forms at a surface where unwanted material accumulates. It is neither the complete substance beneath nor something entirely separate from it. It is the visible result of contamination and separation.
Coming after the title track, “Scum” suggests what remains once the supposedly sacrosanct body has opened. The elevated figure becomes waste. The insult also has political force because societies repeatedly classify unwanted people as filth in order to make their removal feel hygienic. Calling someone scum prepares the imagination to accept treatment that would otherwise appear cruel.
“Intercession” returns to formal religious vocabulary. Intercession is mediation, especially prayer performed on behalf of another. It assumes that someone possesses sufficient proximity to sacred power to carry another person’s request across the distance.
Within this album, that mediation cannot be trusted. The sacred authorities bleed, the body has become consumable and the architecture surrounding prayer feels hostile. Intercession may be an act of compassion, but it may also reinforce hierarchy by insisting that ordinary people require approved representatives before they can be heard.
“Christians” removes abstraction and names a living community. The title does not distinguish believers by denomination, practice, character or historical period. It turns them into one collective body, much as hostile political language often does.
The music’s massed quality intensifies this reduction. Individuals disappear inside choral and martial weight. Yet Christianity itself repeatedly works through collective identity: church as one body, congregation as shared voice, faith expressed through repeated ritual. In Slaughter Natives magnify that unity until fellowship begins resembling submission.
The album does not offer a straightforward anti-Christian argument. Its relationship with sacred material is too fascinated for simple rejection. Havukainen understands that religious music, architecture and symbolism can generate genuine awe even when their authority is being attacked. Blasphemy requires continued recognition of the sacred object. Otherwise there is nothing powerful enough to violate.
“Inferno” expands the punishment beyond one institution. The title carries Dante, Christian Hell, fire, judgment and cultural images accumulated across centuries. In Slaughter Natives need not describe circles of punishment literally. Their inferno is acoustic architecture, a place whose scale is created through pounding rhythm, voices and depth.
The track’s severity comes from inevitability. Hell is frightening not merely because it hurts, but because it is imagined as a system from which no appeal is possible. The music’s repetition captures that closed logic. Every return of the rhythm confirms that the structure remains intact.
“Invocation” differs from intercession because it does not plead through a mediator. It calls a presence directly into the space. The identity of that presence is left uncertain. God, demon, dead ancestor, violent memory or the music’s own accumulated force could answer.
The extended duration makes invocation feel procedural. A name or rhythm must be repeated until the boundary weakens. The composition becomes both the ritual and the evidence that the ritual is working. More layers gather, and the environment seems increasingly occupied by something that cannot be isolated as one sound.
“Mortified Flesh” joins physical decay with spiritual discipline. Mortification can mean gangrenous tissue dying within the body, embarrassment, or the religious practice of denying bodily desires. The title binds these meanings together until holiness and decomposition become difficult to separate.
Ascetic traditions sometimes treat the body as an obstacle to spiritual purification. In Slaughter Natives ask what happens when that hostility toward flesh is carried to its material conclusion. The disciplined body becomes damaged matter. Purity begins resembling necrosis.
This is among the album’s central ethical disturbances. Religious suffering may be framed as sacrifice, but suffering remains physical even when assigned transcendent meaning. A wound does not become less painful because an institution calls it holy. The title restores biological consequence to spiritual rhetoric.
“Arcanum” closes with secrecy. An arcanum is hidden knowledge, a mystery available only to those granted access or willing to pass through initiation. After an hour of corrupted sacraments, exposed bodies and infernal ceremony, the final truth remains concealed.
That withholding is appropriate. The album does not reveal what lies behind the cross on its cover or identify the creature emerging beside it. It presents religious and bodily systems under pressure without delivering a doctrine to replace them.
The concluding piece feels less like resolution than the sealing of a chamber. Something has been invoked and examined, but not explained. The listener leaves carrying evidence rather than certainty.
Placed after Morthond’s This Crying Age, the transition is dramatic. Morthond dissolved human grief into clocks, dreams, faded frames and glacial duration. In Slaughter Natives pull the body back into the foreground and make the surrounding architecture strike it repeatedly. One album lets the human disappear into landscape; the next reveals that sacred structures are equally capable of bleeding.
Both records remain concerned with time. Morthond hears time as erosion. In Slaughter Natives hear it as ritual repetition, the repeated actions through which institutions preserve authority across generations. A glacier moves because pressure continues. A religion survives because ceremony continues. Neither requires visible speed to reshape the world.
Sacrosancts Bleed represents a point where Cold Meat Industry’s early vocabulary has become confident enough to turn back upon sacred authority with full theatrical force. The sounds are no longer tentative experiments in creating dark atmosphere. They form a complete system of percussion, orchestral mass, processed voice and symbolic violence.
The danger of such confidence is that transgression can become another style. Crosses, Hell, corrupted flesh and blasphemous titles may eventually function as predictable furnishings. The album avoids complete theatrical emptiness because its contradiction remains active: it is genuinely attracted to the grandeur it contaminates.
That attraction gives the music weight. In Slaughter Natives do not stand outside the cathedral throwing stones at it. They enter, absorb its acoustics, learn its ceremonies and then make every holy surface reveal the vulnerable matter beneath.
The cross remains upright. The creature remains beside it. Neither defeats the other.
The sacrosancts bleed because nothing granted a body can remain inviolable forever.

XXX Atomic Toejam - 1992 - A Gathering of Tribes

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.17

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.

Raison D'Etre - 1993 - Prospectus l

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.18

 

VA - 1993 - In The Butchers Backyard

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.19

 

VA - 1993 - Karmanik Collection

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.20

Deutsch Nepal - 1993 - Benevolence (Flogging Satan Alive)

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.21

Benevolence carries one of the most revealing contradictions in the early Cold Meat Industry catalog. The main title promises kindness, generosity and an inclination to do good. The stamped subtitle, Flogging Satan Alive, immediately turns that promise into punishment. Mercy and violence are not presented as opposites. They are folded together until benevolence begins to sound like a justification used by whoever holds the whip. Deutsch Nepal builds the album inside that uncertainty, where devotion, cruelty, eroticism and ritual can exchange masks without warning.
Deutsch Nepal’s music feels less architectural than In Slaughter Natives and less medically procedural than Brighter Death Now. These seven pieces move through loops, percussion, buried voices and slow electronic pressure with a peculiar looseness. The machinery is dark, but it also sways. Rhythm does not simply march the listener toward punishment. It lures, circles and allows the body to become involved before the mind has decided whether the environment is hostile.
“Impassive Metal Sex” opens by joining cold material with bodily intimacy. Metal does not feel desire, and sex is rarely impassive, yet the track makes the contradiction believable through repetition. The pulse suggests contact without tenderness, movement continuing after emotion has been removed. It is neither a conventional industrial assault nor a dance track offering uncomplicated release. The body is active while the surrounding system remains indifferent.
That indifference is central to the album. Deutsch Nepal does not fill every space with drama. Sounds are allowed to repeat until they seem detached from whoever originally produced them. Voices become residue. Percussion resembles a mechanism that would continue whether anyone listened or not. The music’s menace comes partly from realizing that the system does not require hatred in order to act upon the body.
“Angel Impact” gives spiritual presence the force of collision. An angel is normally imagined as messenger, protector or radiant intermediary, but impact suggests sudden contact, damage and transferred momentum. The track avoids illustrating wings or heavenly ascent. Instead, it creates the sensation of something entering from outside ordinary perception and striking the room hard enough to change its pressure.
“The Fire Inside My Cold Heart” is the album’s longest piece and its emotional center. The title contains a familiar romantic contradiction, but Deutsch Nepal drains it of sentimental warmth. Fire remains trapped inside coldness rather than overcoming it. The surrounding drones and recurring figures make inner heat feel less like salvation than a condition that cannot escape its container.
This is where the album’s sound becomes unusually intimate. Earlier CMI releases often enlarged suffering into cathedrals, graves, mythological landscapes or institutional systems. Deutsch Nepal keeps returning to the closed body. Metal, angels, fire and benevolence are all experienced as pressures passing through flesh and private thought. The world may be enormous, but its effects are measured internally.
“Benevolence (of the Fittest God)” turns kindness into competition. The parenthetical phrase borrows the logic of survival of the fittest and applies it to divinity. The strongest god does not need to be the most compassionate, only the one capable of surviving, dominating or absorbing rivals. Benevolence then becomes something granted from above by power rather than shared among equals.
The track’s ritual movement reinforces that ambiguity. Repetition can create community, but it can also train obedience. A group repeating the same gesture may be worshipping, dancing, working or submitting. Deutsch Nepal leaves those possibilities overlapping. The listener feels the attraction of the rhythm while remaining unsure what participation might endorse.
“Entrance Part II” is a wonderfully destabilizing title because no “Part I” appears on the album. The listener is told that entry has already begun somewhere else. The short track behaves like a corridor connecting larger rooms, but its numbering implies missing history. We arrive late, crossing a threshold whose first stage is unavailable.
That absent beginning suits the entire Cold Meat Industry experience. Releases often reach later listeners through incomplete editions, copied tapes, compressed files and catalog numbers detached from their first circulation. The archive may preserve the object while losing the exact moment of entry. “Entrance Part II” makes that incompleteness part of the composition rather than a defect to be repaired.
“Carrions Still Walking” gives dead flesh motion. Carrion ordinarily lies still while animals, insects and decay process it. Here the remains continue walking, turning the human body into an undead carrier of its own decomposition. The title could describe people whose inner lives have been exhausted while social routines keep them moving. It could also describe recorded music itself, dead moments walking again whenever playback begins.
The track is comparatively concise, but its image lingers because it describes the album’s method. Voices and rhythms survive after their sources have disappeared. Nothing is resurrected completely. Fragments remain mobile.
“Mantra” closes by naming repetition as spiritual technology. A mantra can focus attention, alter consciousness and give the mind a structure through which distraction is reduced. Industrial loops can perform a similar action without sharing the same religious purpose. Repeat a sound long enough and its meaning loosens. Texture, rhythm and bodily response take over.
Deutsch Nepal’s mantra is not peaceful. It does not guide the listener toward a clean interior silence. It leaves contamination active, gathering the album’s metal, fire, divinity and walking remains into one final cycle. The closing repetition feels less like an answer than an acceptance that the system will continue after the album stops.
The cover refuses the expected funeral severity. A green decorative pattern repeats tiny theatrical figures and star-like emblems, while a purple stamp-shaped image shows a grinning man pressed between two smiling women. The scene resembles cheap wrapping paper, an erotic postcard and a damaged family photograph sharing one surface. DEUTSCH NEPAL is printed across the image, while BENEVOLENCE runs vertically through the dark strip at the left. Seduction, humor and menace are made inseparable before the disc begins. The actual first-edition stamp carrying Flogging Satan Alive adds another layer, as though this already strange object had been officially processed after manufacture.
Benevolence is important within the catalog because it does not merely increase the weight of CMI’s established darkness. It makes that darkness more unstable and bodily. There is groove without comfort, spirituality without protection and cruelty without the clean spectacle of open attack. The music seduces more than it commands.
That quality also makes this a sensible place for the archive to become selective. Skipping catalog entries removes the false idea that every numbered object deserves equal labor or attention. What remains is present because it generated enough curiosity to survive the cut. Benevolence does not arrive through completion pressure alone. It earns its position through its own diseased magnetism.
The title never resolves. Kindness may conceal domination. Punishment may be described as moral duty. Fire may remain alive inside something outwardly frozen. The strongest god may offer mercy only because power has already been established.
Deutsch Nepal leaves all of these contradictions moving together. Benevolence smiles, raises the whip and invites the body to follow the rhythm.

Lille Roger - 1993 - Golden Shower

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.22

Golden Shower is a resurrection disguised as bad taste. Lille Roger had ended with Undead in 1987, and Roger Karmanik had already moved on to Brighter Death Now, Great Death, and the expanding labor of Cold Meat Industry. Six years later, the dead project returns as a seventy-six-minute retrospective, packed into a bright pink object whose title turns bodily humiliation into a joke, fetish, insult, and celebratory spray. This is not a respectful memorial. It is an old identity dragged from storage, cleaned unevenly, rearranged, and made to perform again.
The cover immediately separates Lille Roger from the increasingly solemn atmosphere surrounding Cold Meat Industry. Pink and orange photographic blur resembles overheated flesh, cheap glamour printing, flowers, fire, or stained fabric. An identification-style photograph shows Karmanik with a black bar across his eyes. Beneath it appears a list of murder, corruption, sadism, necrophilia, child abuse, lies, mutilation, sexual torture, cannibalism, and strangulation. The design combines tabloid criminality, bureaucratic identification, erotic color, and absurd self-advertisement.
The effect is deliberately juvenile and unpleasant. It does not possess the grand crosses, tombs, monuments, or glacial landscapes that had begun defining the label. Lille Roger’s world is smaller, cheaper, more embarrassing, and more directly connected to private compulsion. The material often sounds as though it was created before anyone had decided what Swedish death industrial should become. That uncertainty gives it life.
“My Girl” opens with intimacy already damaged. The title could belong to a pop song, private dedication, or affectionate memory, but Lille Roger removes the social reassurance normally attached to it. Repetition makes affection feel obsessive, while low-fidelity processing keeps the supposed beloved behind electrical dirt. Love is present as possession, fixation, or an image repeatedly handled until the original person disappears.
The short untitled tracks scattered through the disc interrupt the named pieces like bits of damaged tape left inside the archive. They are not acknowledged on the original sleeve, yet they occupy numbered positions on the CD. Their presence prevents the compilation from becoming too orderly. Golden Shower may be retrospective, but it refuses the clean behavior of a museum catalog. Waste material, transition, noise, and accidental residue are allowed to remain visible.
“Hamburg -35” and “Empty Flesh” demonstrate how much atmosphere Karmanik could build from restricted means. A few loops, voices, crude electronics, and repeated tones create private rooms that feel sealed rather than enormous. Later Brighter Death Now would develop heavier low-frequency pressure and more controlled violence. Lille Roger remains nervous, thin-skinned, and close to the tape.
That closeness is important. The sounds do not create a convincing fantasy of machinery operating in a distant factory. They reveal somebody touching equipment, repeating material, and discovering what happens when a small sound is denied release. The listener hears obsession being constructed rather than a completed genre being performed.
“478:5 Pt. 2” carries the impersonal authority of a code, legal section, measurement, or file number. Lille Roger often places emotional disturbance beside administrative language, allowing numbers and titles to suggest systems that cannot be entered fully. The coded exterior makes the private interior feel more dangerous. Something has been classified, but not explained.
“They Burn” and “Free At Last” create another contradiction. Burning can mean punishment, destruction, purification, or evidence being removed. Freedom should represent escape, yet inside this sequence it sounds provisional. Lille Roger repeatedly uses titles that promise transformation while the music remains trapped inside repetition. Release is announced, but the loop returns.
“Zum Morgen,” “Triumph,” and “A Rare Experience” briefly widen the emotional vocabulary. Morning, victory, and exceptional experience are words associated with renewal, yet none arrives cleanly. Karmanik’s early work often sounds unexpectedly vulnerable beneath its hostile imagery. There are traces of what his later retrospective description called minimal industrial angst pop, small melodic or emotional figures trying to survive inside tape abrasion.
That mixture is what keeps Golden Shower from becoming a simple collection of primitive Brighter Death Now sketches. Lille Roger is stranger and less settled. Some pieces resemble postmortem electronics, others minimal synth songs after their social life has been removed, and others private sound experiments that never learned to behave like finished compositions.
“The Story of K” appears autobiographical without offering a usable biography. The letter could stand for Karmanik, another person, or an invented case. The title promises narrative, but the music refuses ordinary storytelling. Identity survives as initial, atmosphere, and damaged evidence.
“Today I’m Deadly” and “Touch Me” place danger beside contact. One title warns the listener away, while the next asks for intimacy. The contradiction summarizes Lille Roger’s emotional posture. The work attracts attention through threat while repeatedly exposing a desire to be approached, recognized, or physically confirmed.
This instability separates the project from later death industrial authority. Brighter Death Now often sounds like a complete oppressive system. Lille Roger sounds like the person building that system while still visible inside it. The machinery does not yet hide vulnerability completely.
The final stretch returns to the material that originally ended the project. “Undead,” “Unit 731,” and “In Himmel” reproduce the complete CMI-01 sequence before “Hear Me” provides one last demand for attention. The project reaches its epitaph, then continues beyond it.
That arrangement changes the meaning of Undead. In 1987, the single was a conclusion and the first Cold Meat Industry release. In 1993, it becomes one section inside a larger recovered body. What once functioned as an ending is surrounded by earlier material and followed by another voice.
“Hear Me” is therefore an exact final title. The compilation does not ask to be admired, understood, forgiven, or historically elevated. It asks to be heard. The dead project has been given a CD, a catalog number, new mixes, and another opportunity to enter rooms beyond its original cassette and seven-inch circulation.
The 1993 remixing complicates the archival claim. Golden Shower does not preserve Lille Roger in untouched historical condition. Karmanik revisits the tapes after years of developing Brighter Death Now and running Cold Meat Industry. The younger artist’s material passes through the older artist’s technical judgment. Memory edits its own evidence.
That intervention may improve clarity or continuity, but it also makes the album a conversation between two versions of the same person. Lille Roger supplies the obsessions, limitations, crude machinery, and unstable emotion. The 1993 Karmanik decides how those remains should be sequenced and presented after the project has already acquired underground significance.
Placed after Deutsch Nepal’s Benevolence, Golden Shower strips away another layer of CMI dignity. Deutsch Nepal made cruelty sway through ritual rhythm and diseased seduction. Lille Roger returns the catalog to cheap tape, nervous fixation, black humor, and the embarrassing emotional material from which Karmanik’s later severity developed.
It is fitting that the archive now reaches this collection after you decided to skip releases that produce no interest. Golden Shower is itself an act of selection. It does not contain everything Lille Roger recorded, and the later Undead 1984–87 box would expand the history enormously. This CD chooses one concentrated version of the past, preserving enough to reopen the identity without pretending that completeness is possible.
The MP3 folder continues that selective survival. A limited pink digipak becomes 173.53 MB of files, detached from its tactile joke and criminal word-list. Yet its uneven sequence remains: named pieces, hidden fragments, affection, codes, fire, freedom, murder, heaven, and the final request to listen.
Lille Roger died so Brighter Death Now could exist. Golden Shower proves that artistic deaths are rarely final once recordings survive. The old identity returns, urinates on the memorial, and asks to be heard again.

Brighter Death Now - 1994 - Great Death Box Set

 

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Cold Meat Industry – CMI.23

Memorandum - 1994 - Ars Moriendi

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.24

Mental Destruction - 1994 - When Madness Strikes

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.25

Morthound - 1994 - The Goddess Who could Make the Ugly World Beautiful

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.26

Raison d'etre - 1994 - Enthraled by the Wind of Lonelines

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.27

Ildfrost - 1995 - Autumn Departure

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.28

Atomine Elektrine - 1995 - Elemental Serverance

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.29

Elemental Severance changes the lighting inside Cold Meat Industry. The preceding catalog had become increasingly skilled at producing tombs, churches, forests, wounds and ruined civilizations from electronic sound. Atomine Elektrine keeps the ceremonial atmosphere but introduces motion, color and a sense of technological wonder. The darkness remains, yet it is no longer the entire sky.
Peter Andersson’s Raison d’être often sounds as though sacred architecture has survived after faith has departed. Atomine Elektrine approaches the same ruins from another direction. Sequencers begin flashing across the stone. Rhythms activate dormant chambers. Choirs and orchestral samples remain, but they are placed beside electronic patterns suggesting laboratories, spacecraft, computer systems and imagined futures.
The project name joins the smallest physical scale with electrical energy. Atomine suggests atoms, invisible matter and nuclear transformation. Elektrine resembles electricity, electronics and an invented feminine or mechanical identity. Together the words sound scientific without belonging to a real scientific vocabulary. They describe technology as mythology.
“Severance” opens by cutting the listener away from the expected CMI environment. The music is spacious and melodic, with a pulse that suggests movement rather than imprisonment. Severance normally means separation, but here separation creates possibility. The album detaches itself from the label’s established machinery and enters a brighter electronic field.
“Film” follows as a brief orchestral scene, almost an image appearing between larger sections. The title acknowledges the visual quality of Andersson’s work. These pieces do not tell stories through lyrics, but they repeatedly suggest landscapes, ceremonies and machinery arriving in sequence. The listener supplies the invisible screen.
Three short interludes divide the album, preventing its longer pieces from forming one continuous trance. They behave like corridors, airlocks or changes of camera angle. Their brevity gives the larger tracks additional scale while making the album feel deliberately assembled rather than simply allowed to drift.
“Entrance Mirage” is the first extended destination. The title promises arrival while admitting that the destination may not exist. A mirage can guide movement even when it cannot be reached. The sequenced rhythm creates forward momentum, while surrounding voices and textures keep dissolving the apparent horizon.
This is where Atomine Elektrine’s difference becomes clearest. Rhythm is not used for the militarized procession heard in In Slaughter Natives, nor for the bodily oppression of Brighter Death Now. It produces curiosity. The listener is still being organized by repetition, but the organization feels exploratory rather than punitive.
“Oświęcim” introduces a far heavier historical association. The Polish town is internationally associated with the Auschwitz concentration-camp complex established nearby. Placing that name inside an album otherwise filled with electronic wonder creates an abrupt moral shadow. Technology cannot be treated only as liberation, cosmic exploration or beautiful abstraction. It also belongs to systems capable of classification, transportation and industrialized murder.
The track does not explain that history or attempt an adequate memorial. Its title places an obstruction inside the album’s futuristic movement. Progress cannot continue innocently once technological imagination has passed through the twentieth century.
“Reliance” restores force through percussion and sampled speech. The title can describe trust, dependency or a system upon which continued operation depends. Electronic music itself relies upon electricity, hardware, storage and machines remaining compatible. Human freedom inside technology is always accompanied by vulnerability to the structure supporting it.
“Voices of Trinity” returns to sacred language, but the voices appear as fragments within an electronic composition rather than as a congregation standing before the listener. Trinity may remain Christian, but it can also suggest three linked forces, signals or states. Religion enters the machine and becomes another transmitted frequency.
“Kalfatra” is one of the album’s most fluid pieces, balancing rhythmic propulsion with floating atmosphere. Its unfamiliar title avoids forcing the music into a specific historical or religious scene. The listener enters a territory created almost entirely through sound.
That freedom is valuable after so many early CMI releases whose titles arrived carrying death, punishment, disease and theological violence. Atomine Elektrine allows electronic sound to mean movement, beauty and altered perception without requiring that every luminous passage conceal a corpse.
“Fragments of the Past” brings history back as incomplete material. The past does not return whole. It arrives through voices, melodies, samples and emotional traces whose original environments are absent. Andersson treats those fragments less like evidence in an archive than matter capable of entering a new electronic organism.
This also describes the album’s later survival. The original multitrack recordings were erased and reused for Brighter Death Now material. One Cold Meat Industry world was physically recorded over by another. Elemental Severance survived through its completed master and later reconstruction rather than through an untouched studio archive.
That loss gives the title another meaning. The album was severed from the individual tracks and sources from which it had been assembled. The finished recording became the only complete memory of a process whose working parts disappeared.
“Atom” reduces the scale from historical fragments to the smallest unit implied by the project name. The track is concise and melodic, imagining matter not as dead substance but as energy held within structure. An atom appears stable while containing constant movement and enormous potential.
“Hyperion” closes with a name associated with height, celestial scale and mythological distance. The original version is surprisingly brief, ending the album without a grand cosmic finale. The journey does not arrive at the edge of the universe. It simply stops after opening a direction the project can continue exploring.
Elemental Severance is uneven in a productive way. Its sacred samples, trance rhythms, cinematic passages and cosmic electronics occasionally feel as though they belong to several neighboring albums. The interludes help turn those differences into one sequence, but the seams remain visible.
Those seams are part of its identity. This is not a perfected genre statement. It is a side project discovering how much distance can exist between Raison d’être’s ruined chapels and the electronic pioneers who imagined synthesizers as vehicles for space travel and inward exploration.
The album may now sound unmistakably connected to mid-1990s ambient trance, sample-based spirituality and the era’s fascination with electronic mysticism. That period character should not be removed. It captures a moment when digital technology could still feel mysterious, optimistic and capable of creating unexplored mental spaces.
Placed within Cold Meat Industry, it also prevents the catalog from becoming one endless corridor of death. The label’s familiar choirs and darkness remain, but rhythm carries them somewhere less predictable. The sacred does not only decay. It enters orbit.
The MP3 archive completes another severance. The limited CD, booklet and physical manufacturing disappear, leaving thirteen tracks inside a 116.86 MB folder. Yet the music’s internal movement survives. Ancient voices, programmed rhythms, orchestral fragments and imagined machinery continue sharing one electrical field.
Elemental Severance does not escape the past or surrender entirely to the future. It places both inside the sequencer and allows them to move together.

A - 1995 - And Even Wolves Hid Their Teeth And Tongue Wherever Shelter Was Given

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.30

By 1995, Cold Meat Industry no longer needed to prove that it could sustain a catalog. It needed to show what kind of world that catalog had become. ...And Even Wolves Hid Their Teeth and Tongue Wherever Shelter Was Given performs that task with unusual efficiency. Fifteen projects are placed inside one sequence, allowing a listener to move from mourning and ruined sacred space through fantasy landscapes, ritual electronics, industrial pressure and bodily decay without purchasing fifteen separate releases first.
The title is grand enough to sound like a forgotten proverb. Wolves hide both teeth and tongue when shelter is offered, temporarily concealing violence and voice in exchange for protection. The phrase suggests predators entering domestic space under uncertain terms. Safety depends upon everyone pretending that instinct has been suspended.
That is an appropriate image for a label whose beauty repeatedly contains threat. Choirs, strings, drones and melodic passages offer shelter, but violence remains nearby. The artists may lower their voices, soften the rhythm or surround the listener with solemn atmosphere, yet the teeth have not vanished. They are merely hidden inside the arrangement.
Arcana open with “The Song of Mourning,” immediately announcing a newer CMI language. Instead of primitive tape loops or overt industrial punishment, the compilation begins with neoclassical solemnity. Voice and instrumentation create the impression of an older ceremonial world, although the music is a modern construction assembled from contemporary longing for historical depth.
Raison d’être’s “Euphrosyne” follows by moving from public mourning into ruined spiritual space. Peter Andersson’s work repeatedly suggests monasteries, crypts and abandoned sacred interiors without reconstructing any actual religious ceremony. The atmosphere feels inherited, but the inheritance has lost its doctrine.
Ordo Equilibrio add rhythm and ritual sensuality through “Reaping the Fallen... The First Harvest.” The title joins agriculture, death and ceremony. What has fallen becomes material to be gathered. CMI’s landscape is not merely filled with ruins; people are actively collecting something from them.
Mortiis then opens a fantasy horizon with an excerpt from “En Mørk Horisont.” His synthesizer world differs from the industrial and ritual projects around it, but the emotional geography fits. Solitude, distance and imagined antiquity connect dungeon-like fantasy to the label’s broader culture of exile and lost worlds.
Aghast’s “Enter the Hall of Ice,” misidentified as “Sacrifice” on the first edition, pushes that fantasy toward spectral female voices and frozen ritual. The printing error almost belongs to the compilation’s atmosphere. One dark ceremony is named as another, while the audio continues unaffected beneath the incorrect inscription.
MZ.412’s “God of Fifty Names” interrupts the drifting landscapes with harder occult-industrial structure. A god with many names can pass among cultures, identities and ritual systems without becoming completely knowable. The track sounds less like worship than machinery built to summon authority.
Mental Destruction’s “Wound” turns that authority back toward the body. The piece is brief, but its title provides a direct opening through the compilation’s elaborate scenery. Beneath every imagined kingdom, ritual system and spiritual struggle lies flesh capable of being damaged.
Ildfrost’s “That I May Drink, and Leave the World Unseen” restores melancholy and concealment. The title expresses a desire not simply to escape the world, but to become invisible while escaping it. Intoxication, grief and withdrawal gather inside one sentence.
ConSono’s “Beyond the Ocean” widens the distance. The ocean functions as border, route and scale, suggesting somewhere inaccessible through ordinary movement. The track belongs to CMI’s gift for making geography psychological. The far shore is not necessarily a physical country. It may be another historical age, spiritual condition or protected interior.
Desiderii Marginis enter with “Solemn Descent,” one of the compilation’s clearest movements downward. Dark ambience often claims depth through long duration, but this selection establishes its chamber quickly. The descent feels ceremonial rather than accidental, as though the listener has agreed to enter what waits below.
Atomine Elektrine’s short “Voices of Trinity” introduces electronic brightness without breaking the sequence. Technology, sacred voices and cosmic suggestion coexist for ninety seconds, proving how wide the CMI identity had become. The label could include sequenced electronic futurism without abandoning its spiritual darkness.
Memorandum’s “New Primitivism” reaches backward through modern machinery, constructing imagined ritual from samples and percussion. Its presence reminds us that CMI’s apparent ancientness was always technologically manufactured. Tape, digital processing and compact discs carried fantasies of worlds before industrial modernity.
Morthound’s “Whole End” excerpt brings the compilation toward environmental dissolution. Human presence fades into a broader atmospheric field. The title suggests not one death but total completion, the end becoming whole enough to include everything surrounding it.
Deutsch Nepal’s “Gouge Free Market” then introduces diseased rhythm, black humor and a more bodily form of industrial repetition. The title attacks economic language through physical violence. A market supposedly governed by freedom becomes something to scrape, wound or hollow out.
Brighter Death Now close with an excerpt from “Soul in Flames.” Roger Karmanik places his own project at the end rather than the beginning, allowing the label’s full range to pass before the founder’s machinery seals the structure. Fire reaches beyond flesh toward whatever the title calls the soul, leaving the compilation without a protected interior.
The sequence is remarkably effective because it does not attempt to make all fifteen artists sound identical. The contrast is the point. Arcana’s mourning, Mortiis’s fantasy, MZ.412’s ritual machinery, Atomine Elektrine’s electronics and Brighter Death Now’s oppressive decay become neighboring regions inside one climate.
This was also a practical act of label-building. A listener attracted by one track could follow the booklet toward another album, then another catalog number. The compilation was a map disguised as a listening experience. It reduced the risk of entering an unfamiliar label by providing enough of each project to create recognition.
For someone moving backward through the catalog, it functions differently. We have already encountered many of these names individually. The sampler now feels like a checkpoint where the earlier scattered releases become one public identity. Cold Meat Industry is no longer a secret chain of cassettes, limited vinyl and unusual projects. It can present itself confidently in one object.
The 165.77 MB archive performs the same introductory function without the booklet, physical design or catalog list. The map has lost some of its printed instructions, but the route remains. Fifteen files move through mourning, ice, fire, ocean, descent, wounds and hidden shelter.
The wolves enter quietly. Their mouths remain closed long enough for the listener to mistake the darkness for safety.

Mortiis - 1995 - Anden Som Gjorde Oppror

 

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.31

Ånden som gjorde opprør enters Cold Meat Industry like a traveler from another mythology. The label’s catalog had already included ritual percussion, industrial decay, Christian judgment, occult machinery and dark ambient landscapes, but Mortiis arrives with an entire imaginary kingdom. The darkness is no longer attached primarily to hospitals, factories, ruined churches or historical atrocities. It belongs to forests, towers, distant horizons and a past that never existed outside the music.
The title means “The Spirit Who Rebelled,” placing resistance at the center of the album before a single note appears. This is not rebellion expressed through speed, shouted slogans or social confrontation. Mortiis constructs separation. The rebellious spirit withdraws from the ordinary world and builds another reality where its own rules, geography and history can operate.
That withdrawal is fundamental to the early Mortiis sound. The keyboards are obviously electronic, yet they are used to imagine something ancient. Synthesized brass, strings, choirs and simple melodic figures suggest courts, armies, abandoned castles and journeys through unfriendly terrain. The music does not conceal its artificial materials. Its power comes from how completely those materials are believed in.
“En Mørk Horisont,” meaning “A Dark Horizon,” begins with distance. A horizon is always visible but never reachable. Every movement toward it causes it to retreat, making it an ideal image for music built around longing. Mortiis establishes a destination whose reality depends upon its remaining far away.
The composition unfolds through recurring keyboard themes rather than conventional verse and chorus. Melodies return with altered surroundings, giving the impression that the traveler has crossed into another region while remaining inside the same larger world. The repetition is not oppressive in the Brighter Death Now sense. It resembles landmarks encountered from different positions.
The sound is grand but homemade. The synthetic instruments imitate orchestral forces without becoming a convincing orchestra, and that gap is part of the appeal. A perfectly realistic symphonic recording would place the listener before trained musicians in a professional hall. Mortiis’s unreal brass and strings belong nowhere except the imagined landscape they create.
This artificiality gives the album something close to the emotional logic of childhood world building. A crude object can become a fortress when imagination supplies sufficient conviction. The kingdom does not fail because its walls are made from inexpensive keyboards. The limitations help separate it from the everyday world.
The first piece moves between martial passages, solitary melodies and calmer expanses without producing a simple heroic narrative. There is forward motion, but no clear victory. The dark horizon remains dark. Whatever waits beyond it continues influencing the journey without becoming visible.
“Visjoner av en Eldgammel Fremtid” translates as “Visions of an Ancient Future,” a phrase that folds time back upon itself. The future is normally imagined as new, technological and unknown. Mortiis imagines it as ancient before it arrives. The spirit rebels not by rushing toward progress, but by discovering that what lies ahead may resemble a buried age.
This contradiction describes the album’s entire aesthetic. Electronic instruments look forward technologically while the compositions look backward culturally. The machine is used to summon preindustrial fantasy. The result belongs neither to historical reconstruction nor futuristic science fiction. It occupies a private time outside both.
The second composition feels more reflective, as though the journey toward the horizon has produced a vision rather than a destination. Melodies rise with ceremonial weight, then fade into quieter passages where the imagined world seems temporarily empty of inhabitants. Mortiis allows enough space for the listener to wander rather than constantly directing attention toward dramatic events.
There is loneliness throughout the album, but it is not ordinary social loneliness. It is the solitude of someone who has traveled too far into an inner world to explain it easily to others. The music provides evidence that the world exists, but not instructions for how to live there.
That quality connects Mortiis to Cold Meat Industry despite the fantasy imagery. Many CMI artists construct sealed environments from limited means. Raison d’être creates abandoned sacred architecture. Morthound creates glacial distances and dream landscapes. In Slaughter Natives builds ceremonial chambers. Mortiis creates a kingdom with enough internal consistency to function as an alternate reality.
The difference is that Mortiis allows more melody and narrative suggestion. His themes can feel almost welcoming, even when the world they describe remains lonely and severe. The listener is not simply trapped inside an oppressive atmosphere. There is an invitation to explore.
This made early Mortiis unusually accessible without making it conventional. The music has almost no rock instrumentation, no standard vocals and only two tracks across approximately forty minutes. Yet its melodies are direct enough to remember. One does not need to understand dark ambient technique or industrial history to imagine walking beneath its horizon.
The album is also important to the development of what would later be called dungeon synth. That label gathers many different projects now, but Mortiis established one of its most recognizable possibilities: long-form keyboard music functioning as fantasy geography. The composition does not merely accompany an invented world. It is the world’s primary surviving artifact.
The title’s rebellious spirit can therefore be understood as the artist himself separating from black metal’s established language. Mortiis had emerged from that culture, but here aggression is translated into isolation, atmosphere and total imaginative control. The music retains darkness while removing the band, guitar attack and communal performance.
A solo electronic project offers a different kind of authority. One person can determine the entire climate without negotiating with other musicians. Every melody, transition and imagined location belongs to the same private system. This control strengthens the feeling that the listener has entered someone else’s internal territory.
There is a danger that fantasy music becomes decorative wallpaper, a collection of castles and medieval gestures with no emotional pressure beneath them. Ånden som gjorde opprør avoids that problem because its world is built from genuine estrangement. The landscapes feel necessary rather than ornamental. They provide somewhere for the rebellious spirit to exist after rejecting ordinary reality.
Placed after the enormous label sampler ...And Even Wolves Hid Their Teeth and Tongue Wherever Shelter Was Given, the album feels like selecting one path from that compilation and following it beyond the map. Mortiis had appeared there through an excerpt from “En Mørk Horisont.” CMI-31 now reveals the full territory surrounding those minutes.
The MP3 archive removes the original CD’s physical enclosure, but the two-part structure survives intact. This is not an album improved by random selection. Each long piece requires enough time for its world to stabilize around the listener. Skipping through it reduces landscape to a row of keyboard sounds.
Given uninterrupted space, the artificial horns become signals from distant walls, the repeated melodies become roads, and the transitions become changes in weather. Nothing physically appears, yet the listener finishes with memories of places that were never shown.
The spirit rebels by refusing the world it inherited. Mortiis answers that refusal not with destruction, but construction. He raises another horizon and disappears beyond it.

Ordo Equilibrio - 1995 - Reaping the Fallen...the First Harvest

Cold Meat Industry – CMI.32

Reaping the Fallen... The First Harvest enters the Cold Meat Industry catalog carrying many of the label’s familiar materials, but arranging them around a different center. There are drones, ritual rhythms, religious language and a persistent atmosphere of decline, yet Ordo Equilibrio make darkness feel intimate rather than monumental. The music rarely crushes the listener beneath architecture. It draws the listener into a private chamber where spirituality, erotic power, melancholy and ceremonial control have already become inseparable.

Tomas Pettersson had previously worked within Archon Satani, whose music often treated ritual as an oppressive system built from repetition and spiritual threat. Ordo Equilibrio retain that ceremonial gravity while allowing more vulnerability to enter. Chelsea Krook’s voice, acoustic textures and softer passages create spaces where attraction can operate alongside fear. The listener is not merely confronted by darkness. The listener is invited to approach it.

The cover makes that invitation uncertain. A blurred red and white landscape surrounds a solitary hooded figure holding what appears to be a long blade or agricultural tool. The image may suggest executioner, mourner, monk or harvester. The overexposed background resembles fire, foliage and damaged memory at once. In the upper corner, a wheel-like emblem appears beside the title, converting the harvest into a repeated cycle rather than a single event.

“De Profundis” opens from the depths named by its Latin title. The piece moves slowly through drones, restrained percussion and voices that seem to rise from somewhere below ordinary speech. Rather than beginning with a clear declaration, Ordo Equilibrio establish a state of submission. The listener has entered after the ceremony began and must learn its rules through atmosphere.

“Where Happiness Ruled” turns happiness into a vanished political order. The title does not say where happiness lives, but where it once ruled. Joy belongs to the past, remembered as a lost kingdom whose authority has been replaced. Chelsea Krook’s voice gives the piece an almost fragile beauty, yet the surrounding darkness prevents nostalgia from becoming comforting. Memory preserves happiness only by confirming that it has ended.

The title track introduces the album’s governing metaphor. To reap the fallen is to collect what has already been brought down by age, violence, exhaustion or fate. Harvest normally transforms natural growth into nourishment, but here the crop appears human or spiritual. The first harvest suggests that the process will continue. This is an inaugural gathering of bodies, beliefs and desires that have reached the end of their upright state.

The music’s repetitive movement gives the harvest a ceremonial pace. Nothing is collected in panic. The fallen are gathered methodically, as though decline has been anticipated and incorporated into the order of things. Ordo Equilibrio repeatedly find beauty inside such systems without pretending that beauty makes them harmless.

“This Is Darkness. There Will Be Light.” offers one of the album’s clearest statements of equilibrium. Darkness is acknowledged in the present tense, while light is postponed into the future. The promise may be religious, psychological or manipulative. Someone suffering now can be persuaded to endure almost anything if light is always described as approaching.

The track does not provide a triumphant transformation. Light remains an idea held against the existing darkness. This refusal of easy resolution gives the album strength. Opposites coexist, but they do not cancel one another. Hope remains possible without becoming evidence.

“Safe Sane and Consensual” introduces the language of negotiated sadomasochism directly into the sequence. Safety, sanity and consent establish boundaries within acts that may outwardly resemble domination or punishment. Their presence complicates the album’s imagery because control is not automatically treated as abuse, and submission is not automatically treated as helplessness.

The music remains subdued and sensual, approaching power as something deliberately exchanged. Ordo Equilibrio understand that ritual and erotic practice can both depend upon agreed roles, repeated gestures and temporary transformations of identity. The person who kneels may possess agency, while the person appearing powerful may be bound by the conditions of consent.

“Angels of the Highest Order - We Are Seraphim” raises that human arrangement toward divine hierarchy. Seraphim traditionally occupy one of the highest angelic orders, associated with fire and proximity to God. By declaring “we are seraphim,” the title removes spiritual authority from a distant heaven and places it inside the speakers themselves.

This can sound grandiose, but within the album it also suggests self-creation. The participants do not wait for religious institutions to grant them sacred status. They invent their own order, rituals and forms of transcendence. Erotic power, occult language and private ceremony become tools for constructing another spiritual identity.

“Dominatrix Purgatory” combines authority with suspension. A dominatrix controls the scene, while purgatory is a temporary condition of purification and waiting. The title imagines punishment administered not as eternal damnation but as an organized passage toward another state. Pleasure and correction become difficult to separate.

The track’s slow movement keeps this from becoming theatrical shock. Power is conveyed through patience. The atmosphere waits, watches and allows anticipation to perform much of the work. Ordo Equilibrio’s darkness is often strongest when very little happens visibly, because the listener begins supplying the missing tension.

“Silent Hymn for Ms. Antrophy” turns misanthropy into a woman’s name and gives her a hymn that cannot be heard. The wordplay could have become merely clever, but it suits an album filled with personified conditions. Happiness once ruled, darkness occupies the present, angels declare themselves and misanthropy receives ceremonial honor.

The music treats withdrawal from humanity less as rage than as tired devotion. A silent hymn does not attempt conversion. It exists privately, perhaps sung inwardly by someone who has stopped expecting the world to answer.

“In Nomeni Dei Nostri, Satanas Luciferi Excelsi - In Hoc Signo Vinces...” concludes the principal sequence through an elaborate Latin invocation of Satanic and Luciferian authority. The language resembles formal religious ceremony while reversing its allegiance. Christianity’s structure is retained even as its divine occupant is replaced.

The brief “…Again - Encore” repeats the gesture, suggesting that invocation does not finish cleanly. Ceremony returns because repetition is what gives it power. The album closes not with escape from its ritual but with the machinery preparing to begin once more.

This debut already contains most of the tensions Ordo Equilibrio would continue exploring: darkness and light, domination and consent, sacred order and personal rebellion, tenderness and cruelty, creation and destruction. The balance is never neutral. Opposing forces do not stand peacefully on equal scales. They press against one another until the friction becomes the music.

Reaping the Fallen... The First Harvest remains closer to ritual dark ambient than the more song-oriented apocalyptic folk Ordo Equilibrio would later develop. Its melodies and acoustic elements appear as openings inside the drones rather than as the album’s primary structure. That unfinished transition gives the record a distinctive atmosphere. The old Archon Satani shadows remain visible, but another identity is already emerging from them.

The first harvest gathers what has fallen from the previous project and plants it inside a new order. What grows is softer, more erotic and more openly concerned with human relationships, but no less severe. The blade on the cover may belong to a killer or a farmer. In this world, the same hand can perform both tasks.