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Trepaneringsritualen

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

Trepaneringsritualen ‎* The Totality Of Death (cd 2013)

You have got to love a project with such a name, right? So why did it take until I heard that Peter Johan Nijland (Distel, Hadewych) cooperated to this release before I actually listened to them? The release is somewhat confusing. There is a tape, apparently released by the band themselves and there are two cd versions, one from a label that was unknown to me (Silken Tofu) and another from Malignant. These are not two versions though, but two parts of the same compilation. Roughly said, the first part (Silken Tofu) contains more industrial sounds, the second more ambient. Industrialwise the project goes from somewhat chaotic industrial, reminding a bit of Objekt/Urian, to darker, but also to more noisy sounds. The second cd is pretty dark with, like I said, more ambient sounds but also with industrial and noise influences.

Trepaneringsritualen may not be brilliant, but they certainly released some interesting material, especially for people who enjoy the good old industrial sound.

Links: Trepaneringsritualen, Silken Tofu, Malignant Records