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MORTHOUND - Mortology 1990-1996

Format: 5 x CD-BOX Label & Cat.Number: Raubbau RAUB-022 Release Year: 2014 Note: the project MORTHOUND marked the industrial beginnings of BJ NILSEN (now quite well known for his great field recording based compositions released by TOUCH), this box re-issues the three studio albums for Cold Meat Industry, the rare debut MC, all released compilation tracks and 10 more previously unpublished ones!!! Nice copper printed black box with booklet & mini gatefold covers inside.. Price (incl. 19% VAT): €47.50 Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock! More Info "raubbau goes about an ambitious enterprise with this extensive collection, not only re-releasing morthound’s three seminal albums for cold meat industry, but also the sought-after debut cassette, all five exclusive compilation tracks known to man and ten unreleased tracks as well - the entire legacy of what was benny nilsen’s dark musical past. these five discs cover the 6-year-lifespan of morthound and showcase its remarkable metamorphosis from an outlet for noisy juvenile experiments over eerie death industrial and refined dark ambient, via gothic-tinged songs and soundscapes to metal-infused tracks. raubbau has always had a soft spot for artists from the small swedish industrial town of nyköping, like negru voda, deaf machine and the protagonist, and now here’s benny nilsen, possibly the most productive among the lot. he started morthond (originally without the 'u') as a 15-year-old and released the 'death time' cassette on the cold meat industry sublabel sound source just a year later - a sought-after collectors item today. what followed then were three seminal cds for cmi (that have long been unavailable as well) on which nilsen kept reinventing the morthound style before he called it quits in 1996. he then continued to work under the 'hazard' moniker before taking to his actual name, releasing mostly on the british cult label touch. nilsen, having meanwhile relocated to berlin, is nowadays recognized as a leading artist in the area of field recordings and electronica with a sophisticated, academic approach. even though morthound has long been put to rest, one should not underestimate its relevance, as all three cmi albums have had an enormous impact: 'this crying age' still sounds a great dark ambient album today, but its release was actually nothing less than a formative act for the genre; 'spindrift' with its lush atmospheres and vocals helped experimental music to break into a much wider scene (you would even hear morthound on goth dance floors at the time), and 'the goddess who could make the ugly world beautiful' with its heavy guitar riffs helped establish the mutual interest between the industrial and the underground metal scenes. morthound was deservedly regarded as one of the leading artists on cold meat industry in the label’s heyday and also performed his music live at the time to great acclaim. it was about time someone made the effort to re-introduce this genre-defining - and genre-defying - classic swedish act in all its glorious entirety… that’s mortology! black heavy-cardboard box including 8 page booklet + 5 cd's in black gatefold sleeves with copper print." [label info] www.raubbau.org "A precocious one, that BJ Nilsen! Morthound (sometimes spelled Morthond on a couple of releases) was Nilsen's project when he was just a teenager, producing some of the more abstract convulsions of dark ambient and collaged electronics that appeared on the seminal Swedish industrial label Cold Meat Industries. This anthology collects the four Morthound / Morthond records recorded from 1991-1994 before Nilsen dropped the moniker in favor of Hazard, through which he matriculated onto Ash International / Touch Music shortly there after. Nilsen appends most of the discs of Mortology with various tracks from the CMI compilations and rounds out the entire collection with a whole disc of unreleased material. Death Time was Nilsen's first outing - a cassette from 1991 on CMI imprint Sound Source - and speaks much beyond the years of a 15 year old kid in Sweden going down to the library to check out sound effects and wildlife recordings to run through his Akai sampler and into a four-track. Along with those source materials, Nilsen also relied heavily on his shortwave radio, whose detuned transmissions and numbers station broadcasts he liberally cut-up into eerie collages full of shadow, drone, and dread. This Crying Age (also from 1991) was the first widely available Morthound cd, with a deep soundtrackish sensibility that recalled more of the early soundtrack work of Graeme Revell / SPK especially the Zamia Lehmanni album with its esoteric / occult mysteriousness through hypnotic, metal klang loops, emotionally somber rumblings, and wispily opiated flute melodies which sporadically graced the dark electronics. In the liner notes, Nilsen explained that he has never wanted to stick within one particular aesthetic, and Spindrift (1992) was very much a departure for Nilsen with this foray into legitimate psychedelic pop, with "Stairhead" being something of a hypno-drone-pop track of glistening guitars and summery organs with much more in common with Ultra Vivid Scene or A.R. Kane than Brighter Death Now! This track is a bit of anomaly as much of the rest of Spindrift is fleshed out with baroque, synthetically orchestral pieces full of John Carpenter / Halloween arpeggiations, David Lynchian themes within the creepy / maudlin scores, and plenty of saddened atmosphere. The final album recorded as Morthound was The Goddess Who Could Make The Ugly World Beautiful (a quote from Taxi Driver, fyi!), finding Nilsen shifting closer to the sound he would soon perfect under the moniker Hazard with stealth-bomber drones and arctic field recordings, but not before unleashing a handful of tracks inspired in equal parts by early Coil and contemporary In Slaughter Natives with a baroque pagan bombast through thrashy guitar riffs and muscular drum programming. The disc of unreleased Morthound material is uniformly bleak, spacious, and eerily abstract. Again, the material here points closer to the Hazard tracks that soon followed; and actually stands as some of the best material that Nilsen recorded during this time period." [Aquarius Records]