Raison d'être
In Sadness, Silence and Solitude

Raison d'être is not only the main project of Peter Andersson, a brilliant musician, producer, and mastermind of the indispensable Swedish label Cold Meat Industry. Raison d'être is also and above all the mandatory passage for anyone who wants to delve into the dark world of dark ambient.

"In Sadness, Silence and Solitude", released in 1997, is a fundamental episode in the Raison d'être discography, marking the transition between the industrial of the beginnings and the catacomb-like dark of the subsequent albums. The industrial soul is still present and reveals itself in the noise attitude, in the use of looping and sound sampling techniques, in the fleeting percussive moments (sporadic to tell the truth). But it's quite evident that the process of subtraction and refinement, which will lead towards the introspective and metaphysical shores of masterpieces like "The Empty Hollow Unfolds" and "Requiem for Abandoned Souls," is already underway.

Having absorbed the teachings of master Eno, Andersson's ambient ends up subverting the conceptual pillars of early ambient (a music serving as an ideal soundtrack for specific environments: "Music for Airports" by Eno himself is an example). Andersson's ambient rather ends up losing touch with the concrete spaces of physical reality, until it assumes proper psychoanalytical connotations and becomes the soundtrack of the individual's interiority, or even better, of their inner quest. "Secrets are revealed at the fall of night," reads a phrase in the inner booklet, postulating darkness as something pre-existing to light, and thus something older and deeper. Darkness, therefore, as a chest of hidden truths, a place where the essence of things lies, the opposite of light, seen as a source of confusion and misunderstandings. Finally, knowledge is understood not so much as evidence but as a process of acquisition.
"In Sadness, Silence and Solitude", in its perfect balance between fullness and emptiness, also represents one of Andersson's most inspired moments, whose works, although imposing and extremely polished, always tread the line of mannerism (partly due to a genre that does not allow wide margins for movement and evolution, making repetition and absence its very reason for being).

The album essentially plays on the contrast between exhausting parts of anxious noise and unexpected melodic openings: the impression is that hallucinated state of the dying, who sees their perceptual abilities vastly expand and finds themselves retracing their entire life in the last moments, until the gates of the Afterlife (whatever this term is meant to signify) open and swallow them up forever.
The dripping of water, the clinking of scrap metal, the screeching of chairs on the floor: Andersson's music is like a Pandora's box about to be uncovered, everything collaborates to create an anxious atmosphere of impending catastrophe, as if our home were possessed by demonic presences. Inner landslides, explosions of the Self, collapse of space-time cognition: Andersson's intent is to estrange us and cut the fragile umbilical cord that still ties us to reality, or rather, to what we commonly think of as reality.

But Andersson's approach is that of a scientist rather than a medium, his method is precise and methodical. Andersson skillfully plays with nuances, details, sounds: a digging into nothing and towards nothing that generates in us spectral visions, fear, uncertainty, and urges us to explore the dark areas of our psyche. All of this by simply exploiting the inherently esoteric qualities of music and its natural suggestive power (I call it "secular esotericism"), without resorting to any mysterious evocation of ultra-terrestrial entities (for this reason, I find it out of place to speak of esoteric music in the strict sense).
It is as if Andersson wraps us in a black cloak, takes us elsewhere, and at the right moment slashes the veil with a sharp knife, letting slivers of light penetrate the darkness, opening views to other worlds. And suddenly, from the black boiling magma, threatening Gregorian psalms, unsettling angelic choirs, and the suggestive melodic openings of strings and keyboards materialize, creating panic moments that compose a sort of "afterlife new age", reminiscent of the apocalyptic atmospheres of a film like Blade Runner or the tragic and tense ones of a Herzog film.
Desolate scenarios, distant bangs, death knells, but also the oriental influences of the wind instruments: certainly, this is one of Andersson's most varied and content-rich works, a work that ultimately proves itself perfectly capable, in its perfect alternation of electronic spirals, rhythms, and existential atmospheres, of always keeping the attention alive and not necessarily provoking boredom, despite the genre which, difficult by definition, would seem made just to push the listener straight into the arms of Morpheus.

This "In Sadness, Silence and Solitude" is undoubtedly a good first step to access the dark world outlined by Raison D'être, it is the tree from which to pick the juiciest fruit, before intuition becomes genre and the art of this small-great musician falls into the mannerism of the still always excellent subsequent works.

Good Death to all.