Brighter Death Now
Innerwar

Who is Roger Karmanik? Roger Karmanik is the founder of the well-known Swedish label Cold Meat Industry, as well as someone who has made industrial, more than a reason for living, a true mission. Production, distribution, and spreading of the Word, therefore, but also front-line exposure with his project Brighter Death Now: a no-compromise sound assault that will earn the title of death industrial.

Founded in 1989, Brighter Death Now rose to prominence with the memorable trilogy "Great Death." Among the cornerstones of their discography, I would mention "The Slaughterhouse" (1993) and this "Innerwar," from 1996, which I have the pleasure of discussing today.

Explicit from the title, the album in question represents the project in its full maturity. Karmanik is not only a sharp talent scout and a skilled producer: with his Brighter Death Now, he demonstrates high technical skills and a refined industrial sensitivity, showing himself capable of shaping a sound material to his liking that is inexorably hostile and difficult to manage. Continuously on the verge of the daunting territories of non-music, the hand-to-hand assault of Brighter Death Now proceeds nonetheless in a reasoned and rational manner, and perhaps this is the greatest limit of the Swedish musician, a promoter of music that arises more from a passion for the genre and a visceral knowledge of the mechanisms that animate it, rather than from a real artistic need. Incredibly equalized sounds and a refined production work make the work distant from the shapeless sonic mixes often served in the noise and power-electronics field, making the listening incredibly intelligible.

Of course, we are not talking about music for ladies: we are still talking about industrial/noise in its most aberrant form, specifically death industrial. But what is meant by death industrial? Listen to the monstrous distorted growls in "No Pain", "Little Baby" or the concluding "War"; browse through the abominable photo gallery of the booklet depicting massacred dead, intestines exposed on morgue beds, burnt corpses, even the poignant image of a baby prostitute lying with legs open on a filthy little bed, and you will understand. Attraction to the gruesome, a cult of Death, psychosis, sadism: obviously the conceptual apparatus underlying Karmanik's proposal goes hand in hand with what is expressed on the auditory level, a pounding throb of disturbed frequencies, authentic slaughters in loop, noise catastrophes, sonic collapses, crashing notes of an ultra-distorted bass. To illuminate the perilous path, we find only sampled monologues/dialogues, voices (clean and dirty) that run throughout the perfectly calculated hits of a murderous and fierce industrial that proceeds confidently, with no reservations of an ethical or moral order, ignoring what fear is in the face of any obstacle. The rhythmic element, never expressed in the form of canonical percussion, is always present: a belligerent or funerary cacophonic throb depending on the case, overflowing in the more earthquake-like phases, solemn in the catacombal stasis of the more ambient moments.

Among the grooves of this morbid Death Industrial, traces of the leading artists of Cold Meat Industry (MZ412, Deutsch Nepal, Raison D'Etre, Coph Nia, Atrium Carceri, etc.) can be found as if our man managed to imprint his mark on the works produced and distributed over time; or, on the contrary, as if he let himself be influenced by the continuous stimuli that his work presents him daily. However, it is evident that the Brighter Death Now project has its reason, its grim and perverse identity, something that somehow manages to summarize all the atrocities produced in two decades by Cold Meat Industry, but that also knows how to go beyond. It may be the perpetual tension that this music carries with it, the palpable terror as the threat described is real, physical, concrete; noise explosions that grow to then dissolve into murky ambient puddles: a dark-ambient that does not have the sacred/supernatural/esoteric criteria that the genre often requires; rather, a cynical dark-ambient from the operating room, a prelude to the morgue, a prelude to Hell. The beeps of hospital machines announcing imminent death, the distant echoes of the surgeon's voice conversing somberly with his assistant, or more simply the chainsaw of the bloodthirsty madman who dismembers you with the expertise of a Swiss butcher: "Innerwar" is a lucid collection of sound atrocities presented to us, course after course, as in a perverse banquet made of sawn bones and crushed entrails.

A product that perhaps indulges in some formalism but is professionally packaged by a musician who undeniably knows his trade.

In any case, a dish for strong stomachs: welcome to the Karmanik Kabaret!