for lunch: cold meat

Nothing enhances the gloom of late-night winter in suburban Pennsylvania like the sound of six Swedes screaming over an air compressor. Or so it was in the mid-90s, when I first started collecting releases by the obscure and then-terrifying label Cold Meat Industry. After restlessly burning through Goth staples like Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy, I started to require something more a little more harrowing to maintain my misery fix. A friend of mine had been faithfully collecting every CMI release, and it wasn’t too long before I started following his lead. With the label’s arrival on eMusic, that process gets a bit easier.

Full confession: you’re only getting half the Cold Meat experience with just the MP3s because so much of what made these records alluring was the packaging. They came wrapped up in black ribbons and sealed in red wax, like spell books or death announcements. Some of the discs were swaddled in sheets of rice paper embossed with eerie cult iconography. I remember one of their compilations was came in an elaborate cardboard casing designed to look like a mausoleum. You opened the doors, lifted up the rice paper “shroud” and there was the, uh, body of work. I’m not sure if CMI releases are still packaged this way, but at the time it felt like you were getting releases straight from a strange, secret Scandanavian death cult — some creepy evil document you weren’t really supposed to have. Typing this now, I’m not sure why these qualities were so appealing to me. But there you go.

The music on the CDs was just as harrowing as the packages they came in — think Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle, but less poppy. Most of the albums were just odd thundering machine-sounds, grinding metal, whooshing air compressors and eerie disembodied voices