Crematorius
Efterbörd
Phage Tapes
Another year, another new project from industrial/EBM legend Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk. Sunrise, sunset. Well, that’s not exactly fair – Crematorius isn’t entirely a new project, but one which Bjorkk recorded a tape of material for way back in 1987, which likely never saw official release until 2023. Out on the always active Phage Tapes, Efterbörd is effectively the first new material under that moniker in nearly four decades. That said, whether you have been tracking Nordvargr’s work since shortly after the inception of the more well-known Mz.412 project or have only cottoned onto it in recent years, the murky morass of power electronics and death industrial which holds sway on Efterbörd will likely feel familiar.
The component parts that make up Efterbörd – saturated drones and pads, intermittent percussion, distortion for distortion’s sake, and processed beyond all recognition vocals – are all things Bjorkk is adept at wielding in any number of combinations under a range of monikers. The voluminously titled “We Are Broken. We Have Wasted Away. This Is Our Way Out Of This Hell.” is as representative of the LP’s mood as any of its other eight compositions, with a full court press of grey noise echoing and rumbling at a distance, with more proximal sine waves connoting quavering radio frequencies and digital compression errors at turns. It’s a dense sonic palette which could be at turns disquieting or relaxing, depending on volume and one’s headspace, were it not for the yowling vocals punctuating the ‘serenity’.
That maximalist approach to death industrial is something which has helped to cement Bjorkk’s legacy (his recent collaborations with Trepaneringsritualen have made for nice cross-generational arrivals at the same point), but it isn’t held to throughout the record. “Forbidden Nightmares” features soupy, burbling vocals which punctuate lengthy spaces between slow echoes of noise (recent work from another Swedish project, Analfabetism, comes to mind). That it’s one of the more sedate and funereal pieces makes sense given that it’s a co-production with legendary dark ambient project Megaptera. Then there’s the more sparse “You Never Happened”, in which an almost waltzing march of metallic percussion echoes in a boiler room, swinging beneath the mashed vocals.
As much as we’ve seen Nordvargr showcasing his range by pinging back and forth between EBM, martial industrial, and more accessible electronics over the past few years, the general field Crematorius lies within feels like his native clime (as evidenced by how early the project was begun). For those attuned to the mores of that environment, the subtler choices made in fine-tuning Efterbörd‘s mood and sound are a welcome reminder of his power within it.
