Skip to content

death industrial

Trepaneringsritualen * Veil The World (2011/2014)

Cold Spring recently rereleased this early Trepaneringsritualen tape. (The very first release (“Ritualer, Blot & Botgöring“) has been rereleased on cd by the Rusian label Infinite Fog Productions.) “Veil The World” contains the typical Trepaneringsritualen death industrial sound, but what makes these ‘early’ recordings interesting are the times that the distortion is limited and the sound goes into a more ‘minimal wave’ direction. These less typical elements make “Veil The World” not only interesting for archival reasons, but also shows that Cold Spring made a good choice to rerelease this particular tape.

Links: Trepaneringsritualen, Cold Spring Records

Femeheim ‎* Grenzniederkunft (cd 2013)

Death Industrial from a Belgian label that I do not think I heard of. Only now I see that I bought the debut of this project while there is a more recent release available through the same label. It is not like Femeheim sounds like Brighter Death Now. The music is dark and noisy, but not all tracks have the massive low frequencies of projects like Ex.Order. There are some pretty good tracks to be found here though. The rest is more like very dark ambient with a noisy edge which works as background music.

Not bad and this does make me curious about the second album.

Links: Femeheim, Death Continues Records

Brighter Death Now * With Promises Of Death (cd 2014)

CMI may be dead and buried, but Roger Karmanik apparently wanted to keep full control, so he founded a new label, Familjegraven, to release his own material. “With Promises Of Death” is the first effort.

The album contains dark and pounding, noisy industrial. Most of the tracks are not the chaotic, earcracking type of noise that BDN delivers sometimes, but more my kind of noise. “Death industrial” is a good way to describe the music. For those of you who know BDN there will be no big surprises. I am personally not an avid follower of BDN (in fact, this is the first album that I review…), but this new album sounds about as good as the wonderfull “Kamikaze Kabaret” of 2005. I do not know if I have heard each and every album in between, but there you might have an idea of the sound of the new cd.

Links: Brighter Death Now, Familjegraven

Gnawed ‎* Feign And Cloak (cd 2014)

Many thanks to Noise Receptor for this excellent suggestion. The project’s name sounds somehow familiar. This is possible, since it has released quite a number of albums (including several splits), but the labels do not really ring bells, so I doubt I ever heard anything of Gnawed. Now this American project got the possiblity to release an album through Malignant which will certainly help to raise its name. The album is even available on Deezer (but not on Spotify)!

“Feign and Cloak” contains a piece of dense and dark death indutrial. Mostly low frequency walls of noise, often with aggressive vocals; my kind of noise. Think of Ex.Order, Operation Cleansweep, Trepaneringsritualen. The music is often slowly rhythmical and highly distorted. Industrial noise, so to say.

Yep, an excellent album!

Links: Gnawed, Malignant Records

Trepaneringsritualen * Papist Pretender (2014)

It looks like I missed the 7″ version of this release. Now it is added to the band’s Bandcamp so you can buy a download. I suggest you do! “Papist Pretender” is TxRxP at its best. The opening track with its dark vocals and slowly pounding beats reminds a bit of Mental Destruction. Lateron Ekelund proves that things can get even slower, dirtier and darker. The most remarkable track is a cover of The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud; of course untitled, but when I say: “into the dark night, follow a true light”, I am sure you will know what song we are talking about. Where the TMLHBAC version is relatively light and happy, Trepaneringsritualen turned it into a horror soundtrack.
Yep, TxRxP again proves to be one of the more interesting artists in the current industrial scene.
Links: Trepaneringsritualen, La Esencia

Trepaneringsritualen‎ * Perfection & Permanence (cd 2014)

Trepaneringsritualen released material on a whole range of small labels. This is the third release on a relative major (after an lp and cd on Malignant). This will certainly be good for the spread of the wonderfull name. Cold Spring made a very nice digipack and what is more, this album might very well contain the best Trepaneringsritualen material so far. It reminds a lot of the WGT show in Leipzig. It is very industrial, with a lot of beats, rhythm and screamed vocals. Several earlier releases have less energy, are more ‘ambient noise’ so to way. “Perfection & Permanence” lives up more to the often used description “death industrial” that people put on this Swedish project.
This new cd might not only be more easy to obtain than other releases of Trepaneringsritualen, but for all of you who have not yet hear this project, give a great idea of how dark and aggressive this project (and his live shows!) can get.
Links: Trepaneringsritualen, Cold Spring

v/a * Revenge?! Yes! Nordic Audio Modern 2012 (cd 2012)

Yes this compilation is a couple of years old and yes it was released in a limited edition of 500 copies, but my eye fell on it in the Cold Spring mailorder and the line-up looked interesting enough to get it. That was a good guess! Not that this is a superb compilation, but there is an alternative version of Ex.Order’s “Shuchu Ryoku Pt.03” (a more dark ambient track by the way), a wonderfull collaboration of Deutsch Nepal and Trepereringsritualen (the two are apparently working on more material) and the track of Deutsch Nepal alone is good too. Moreover it was nice to hear In Slaughter Natives in the old style again, there are two new names for me (Maldur Atai and oro!oro!) and the rest of the projects included include Land:Fire, Inade and Trepaneringsritualen.
It looks like it that this compilation accompanied some Lithuanian festival. It makes a nice compilation with more dark ambient and a little bit of noise so certainly not such a bad buy.
Link: Autarkeia

Trepaneringsritualen‎ * Roi Perdu (mc 2012)

This mini album was also released on iDEAL recordings and Black Horizons and Thomas Martin Ekelund took it as a start for his very own label: Beläten. As you can see I have been scanning the Beläten catalogue for releases I wanted to have a better listen to. There is quite a lot of interesting material in that catalogue!
Trepaneringsritualen makes extremely dark, ritualistic and somewhat noisy industrial. This tape/download makes no exception. It makes another nice “ritual”. This makes it extra nice that many of the later Beläten releases would have ‘more logically’ come from the minimal wave scene, while Ekelund released them after his own dark industrial release. As dark uncanny Trepaneringsritualen sounds, as poppy and danceable are some later Beläten releases. It is a combination of styles that I alternate myself too and quite a couple of Beläten releases are very good, so I am happy that I finally had a better look at the label and I definately need to follow them more closely than I have so far.
In any case. You can get this early trepanningsritual should you have missed it too. It seems like Trepaneringsritualen got better over time, but this tape is certainly not bad.
Links: Trepaneringsritualen, Beläten

Æther & Trepaneringsritualen‎ * Edifice Of Nine Sauvastikas (mc 2012)

Beläten also released a tape of Æther in 2013, but I found that (on quick hearing) a bit too soundscapishly monotous. Since I need to collect Trepaneringsritualen material anyway, I opted for this split. One 10 minute track of each project.
The Æther is indeed a quite monotous soundscape, just a little bit noisy, apparently formed of field recordings. It is not bad, but not entirely my cup of tea.
Also Trepaneringsritualen presents a sort of soundscape, but much darker, more threatening and more industrial in sound. The vocals are left out for this sonic ritual, but Ekelund certainly set a pretty damn dark atmosphere again.
Links: Trepaneringsritualen, Beläten

T x R x P * Berliner Ritual (mc 2014)

Just before the best show of the 2014 Wave Gotik Treffen I bought the only merchandise available of Trepaneringsritualen (on this tape TxRxP), a shirt and a cassette limited to 100 copies. As the title suggests, this is a live recording of a Berlin show of late October. Like during the performance in the Moritzbastei, “Berliner Ritual” is an extremely dark piece of industrial. Low frequency industrial rhythms with distorted sounds and screamed vocals. Ekelund stormed the stage with a bag over his head, but without he looked as scary as with. I have no idea if much of the music was live (save for the vocals) but who cares, it was darkly moody in that old bunker in the centre of Leipzig. Judging the photos in the cassette, the Berlin show looked similar.
A couple of things. There is not much information on the cover. Being a tape, there are two sides and I have not yet tried to find out if both sides contain the same recordings (if not, this was a very long show). There are no tracks or titles, just an ongoing show. What is less positive, though, is that my tape only has sound in the right speaker (and my tape player or amp do not have a ‘mono’ button).
I actually had the idea that this is quite an obscure project, but judging Discogs there are plenty of releases, including a 2014 cd on Cold Spring, so I am going to look for that!
Links: Trepaneringsritualen, Aufnahme + Wiedergabe