Here’s Malfeitor (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR318CD), another horror from that infamous Swedish trio of “black industrial” merchants here credited as Maschinenzimmer 412.
It’s a CD reissue of their 1989 release – I think the second item in their catalogue – after which they let their bones lie fallow in the charnel fields and soon reinvented themselves as MZ.412. It’s that latter incarnation that has plagued my life so much, and when Cold Spring reissued a number of their “core” releases, I had to summon all my writing abilities to convey the sense of sheer horror and nausea induced by those audio beasts. Malfeitor originally came out as a vinyl record on the Cold Meat Industry (yuck!) label and reckoned by some to be some sort of benchmark of achievement in the “black industrial” sub-genre which they invented, an accolade accorded to them by their faithful, and original vinyl slabs could now cost you anything between 40 to 60 bones. That’s not slang for money, you actually have to pay with your own bones!
Meanwhile the over-heated press notes for this Cold Spring reissue speak warmly of “evil incarnate”, “darkness fused with machines”, and “unequivocal dystopian outlook”…it’s about fear and it’s about death, and they express it using factory-type rhythms, “metallic” sounds, pounding percussion, and endless loops…in fine, the familiar tropes of that strain of industrial music which assumes that the entire world is an evil factory, in this case one which is going to grind you up into beef-steak Tartare. Well, compared to what I can remember of those other later MZ.412 albums – what I can bring myself to remember, as I lie on a bed with packets of laudanum in reach – we could observe that Malfeitor is much more back-to-basics, a stripped down and stark expression of the themes these Swedish maniacs wish to explore. The 1990s albums, particularly Burning The Temple Of God, were more like vast, ambitious, story-telling projects – unrolling horrifying wide-screen vistas of carnage, peopled with multitudes of black devils, in unflinching detail. Malfeitor, conversely, all seems to be happening inside a cramped, claustrophobic cell, probably a dungeon or torture chamber. I realise the cover art here seems to be taking place outside, in a dark Gothic fantasy version of a Nordic forest, but the original 1989 cover art…well, don’t even look at it, is my advice.
Hard to process this kind of grim, sickening poundage as a “ritual”, but fans of the genre frequently utilise this term, applying it to any recording or performance that is informed by a sense of purpose, no matter how ghastly it may be. I suppose we could say the vocal elements – sampled, spoken (in one instance, derived from a poem) – could be mistaken for a form of chanting, but the whole intention of Malfeitor is unholy, blasphemous, and malign. They may not make plain their alliance with Satan and their contempt for religion on this particular album, but all of that sentiment was to emerge in the forthcoming years. We have to assume this is mostly the work of Henrik “Nordvargr” Björkk, also known as Kremator and many other aliases, and participant in many similar horrific projects in his part of the world. My usual health warnings apply to this record. From 3rd January 2023.