60 minutes, 2 seconds

Heid
Pilgrim of the Sublunary World

Cold Meat Industry is the 4AD of industrial music. I'm hard-pressed to think of another example of a label with such a recognizable look and feel, and even sound. "Brand," as the corporate types like to say. Just like 4AD, CMI manages to confer a certain quality on the artists it chooses to release. You may not always like the music they put out, but you respect it. You'll give it a listen, because it comes with a pedigree. And just like 4AD's elegant CD artwork by Vaughan Oliver and his 23 Envelope design studio, CMI wraps its releases in the brooding layouts designed by the label head himself, Roger Karmanik.

The Hands and Prikosnovénie labels come close to achieving this synergy of sound and design--a total vision for what they want their label to be--but for some reason they don't strike the same chord in me. The overall quality just isn't quite there, especially in comparison to 4AD and CMI.

The now-defunct Heid is perhaps not the best example of CMI's music (or CD design, for that matter), but it's a representative example: just-this-side-of-melodic ambient industrial. But if Cocteau Twins were the emblematic band of the 4AD label at its height, Raison d'Être has to be the CMI equivalent. The oppressive sonic coupling of creeping, clanking noises with synth-based strings and ghostly Gregorian chants owed a debt to early Delerium, to be sure, but Raison d'Être pushed the sound to a higher emotional plane, investing it with a bit more heaviness, a bit more sorrow. (Titles like "Ordeal in Chapel" certainly helped.)

All this is to say that CMI has created something lasting and recognizable, and I guess I've always aspired to do something like that. Judging by the number of readers, it, uh, probably won't be this blog...

Also today:

60:01 Vidna Obmana, Shadowing in Sorrow
60:00 Noisuf-X, Tinnitus
60:00 Phallus Dei, Nature Mortes
60:00 Sol Invictus, The Devil's Steed
59:59 Amygdala, Memento Mori
59:59 Delerium, Faces, Forms, and Illusions
59:59 Stahlfrequenz, Coma Themes
New arrival! 76:55 Peter Andersson, Music for Film and Exhibition (CD 2 of 2)
New arrival! 74:08 Peter Andersson, Music for Film and Exhibition (CD 1 of 2)
New arrival! 61:11 Black Lung, The Great Architect
New arrival! 60:23 Black Lung, Extraordinary Popular Delusions
59:59 Suicide Commando, Bind, Torture, Kill