MZ.412
Infernal Affairs

And what if Hell wasn't that majestic grand-guignolesque universe described to us by Dante, that majestic and colorful orgy of crowded circles and allegories, the damned and torturing demons, smells, noises and reflections, stories of love and betrayal, punishments and counterpoises inflicted with enviable literary imagination?

And what if instead Hell was nothing more than a rancid and humid basement, narrow and stinking and dark dungeons, places of torture and tremendously calculated suffering?

MZ.412 explain Hell to us without much poetry.

They explain it with their latest work "Infernal Affairs," released in 2006, the epilogue of a nearly twenty-year-long delirium (their debut, "Malfeitor," dates back to 1989).

"Infernal Affairs" is the much-awaited return that breaks a musical silence that had lasted since 2000, the year when the controversial "Domine Rex Inferum" was released, seen by many as a half misstep, later buried by the solo exploits of the head honcho Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk and his side projects, especially Folkstorm.

The importance of the MZ.412 entity is unquestionable, so much so that in the 1990s, they birthed a new branch within the industrial scene, the so-called "black industrial". As for me, I would simply define it as music of anguish and agony: one-third dark ambient, one-third power electronics, one-third ritual music, MZ.412 know how to unsettle with intelligence and mastery of the medium.

Being good Swedes, Nordvargr, Drakhon, and Ulvtharm maintain the use of their gray matter amidst the delirium, and for this, we forgive them a certain dose of cheap satanism, which, however, deprives them of that penetrating ability which is instead proper to the genre's initiators, primarily Current 93: the important thing to understand is that their extremism never appears as an end purpose provocation, but the pinnacle of an aesthetic of the ugly that must be appreciated in its conceptual-musical language and foundations, beyond its grim brutality.

"Infernal Affairs" unfolds within a maze of sinister corridors and terrible rooms, where, as makeshift Dante Alighieris, we are led to bear witness to unspeakable scenes and timeless afflictions: sometimes eavesdropping at the rusty door of a cell, sometimes being catapulted into the middle of agony, directly in front of the rough table on which tortures are carried out, powerless observers of punishments inflicted with ruthless mechanical precision.

There are no cobwebs in these decaying tunnels because they teem with incessant activity, whether it be the meticulous action of the executioner or the dripping of the putrid water that infests these places of abandonment and perdition.

During the first three tracks, in truth, we're not exultant, and the impression is that of being confronted with the same stuff that in recent years Cold Meat Industry has been offering us, more or less honestly.

The brief "Preludiumh" has the task of indicating the path: a dreary trombone that floats desolately in the silence materializes before us the metaphysical door that gives access to the terrible dimension into which we are about to sink. "Infernal Affairs I" resumes the theme and boasts martial percussion that aspires to be majestic but actually describes a dark and squalid corridor that (which we don't know yet) leads to much worse places. The following track introduces abrasive sounds, foreshadowing the worst, but the worst is that we are still in the waiting room, waiting for our turn.

Cell no. 4, "Point of Presence": the torment begins. The floor trembles, piercing screams shake us to our core: someone is probably having their balls cut off with a chainsaw. The track is able to define the real potential of MZ.412, a damned punch in the stomach: this is what playing power electronics is all about! Sudden explosions, sounds overlapping in incredible crescendos of agony, sudden pauses, and then agony again, a drill in the rear end: there inside, they are truly hurting someone!

The door closes, they tell us we must proceed, and we, still panting, are glad; but we, poor us!, don't know what awaits us.

Cell no.5, "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of your Wrath", the dark ambient as God (...) commands: echoes of Raison D'Être and Blood Axis intersect in menacing orchestrations, drums beating to death, deviated electronics growing in the dark. We talked about agony, but also anguish, because there are those who are tortured, and there are those who are sadistically left to rest, to better suffer the subsequent torment: it is here that we learn the immensity of the pain, suffered and feared, much deeper than the miserable 3m x 4 cell we are in.

The reverberations of the electronics still echo in our ears when we find relief in "Epilogh", a few seconds of pseudo-silence.

Melodious ambient keyboards embrace us again; the voices, the laments beyond the doors are barely perceptible; the deformed hallway leads us elsewhere as we hear distant footsteps mingling with the beat of our hearts; we quicken our pace to leave it all behind, but as we proceed, the creaking of the executioner's instruments becomes unbearable, accompanied by the sighs and sobbing of the damned, while the space around us, for what we can perceive, becomes more cramped and claustrophobic. A few rebellious spirits, maddened by pain, pass through us dying, a sudden noise makes us jump. We stop in front of a door: a woman crying on the other side of the wall arouses our morbidity.

We hoped it was all over, yet...

Cell no. 8, "Unhealing Wounds", the apotheosis: the sighs of the unfortunate are overwhelmed by inevitable waves of noise, while resounding percussions materialize out of nowhere, powerfully marking, like from other worlds, like from the top of a pulpit where a demon beats tibias and femurs on drums of bones and skulls, a tsunami of agony of enormous proportions. The executioner's action here has nothing poetic and picturesque, only the perverse intelligence to inflict the most fitting torture to their victim's malaise: in the same way, MZ.412, with the malice and maniacal calculation typical of true noise masters, deliver terrible but perfectly calibrated blows, so much so that what we hear we can still call music, and we can even enjoy it at exorbitant volumes without risking neither dying nor killing our stereo.

Once the door is closed, we move on, towards the epilogue of this dark initiation journey. "Mourning Star", another track of powerful dark ambient, sounds friendly in tempering the tones from agony to simple unease, but even in these pieces, which disturb us less, the tension remains high. Above all it's important to appreciate the attention to detail (the voices, the steps, the smallest movements that occur in the dark), a characteristic we find and will find throughout the fifty-five minutes of the work.

"Infernal Affairs II", with its driving orchestrations and solemn winds, is perhaps the most "Dantesque" piece of the lot, capable of encompassing in its martial pomp something grandiose and monumental, which until now had been buried by the fear and squalor of the "Clinic of Evil" atmosphere that permeated the moods of our crossing.

Maybe it's because we feel the journey is coming to an end, maybe because the experience with its traumas has somewhat vaccinated us against such suffering, but our immune system seems to withstand with greater strength in front of the Swedes' last assaults. "Postludiumh" ends our (dis)pleasure trip in the name of desolation: stunned, we continue in the hope of eventually finding the way out. A solemn cosmic wind accompanies our last steps, while the senseless touches of a piano drown in a bubbling pool of black ooze. In front of us: darkness. But we are too tired to even remotely admit that at the end of the tunnel, there is no longed-for exit.

Finally a bit of air and light...

Or is it just a pious illusion granted to us sadistically to make the torment awaiting us beyond the darkness even deadlier?