A confluence of genres, aesthetics, cultural formations and schisms intersected in the late-1980s to mid-1990s to produce a musical movement and moment in experimental sounds coming out of Scandinavia. Much has been written about the countries’ black and death metal cultures, Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind's "Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground", being the often-referenced document of the era, as is Daniel Ekeroth's "Swedish Death Metal" published by Bazillion Points. More obscure were the concurrent post-industrial music sounds emerging from Sweden and Norway, then described by the death ambient and black industrial, apocalyptic neo-folk, power electronics, and dungeon synth subgenres that found a locus and home through the record label created by Roger Karmanik. The earliest of these releases issued on vinyl record and cassette in the late 1980s, a component of the global experimental music tape trading culture, and were expressly within the industrial noise and power electronics spheres. These sounds were epitomized by the ritualistic and anti-christian power noise thematics of Maschinenzimmer 412, the pounding industrial percussion of In Slaughter Natives, gloaming atmospheres and harsh textures of Megaptera and Memorandum, and Roger Karmanik's own human depravity-themed Brighter Death Now project. By the early 1990s Cold Meat Industry had expanded its roster to include artists and sounds within the dark ambient and pagan neo-folk scenes. Shifting their focus to the compact disc format, and a heightened sense of graphic design focused on the atmospheric and ethereal, the label released some of the earliest music from Peter Andersson's Raison d'être, and BJ Nilsen's Morthound projects. The former would become one of the mainstays of the label, and over the course of the ensuing three decades Raison d'être would produce a strain of oppressively atmospheric ambient music that stretched the boundaries of abstract industrial into outlying cinematic realms.
In interview, Andersson has made his filmic inspirations evident, and it is elementary that Decibel Magazine would make Raison d'être's music the focus of their, "Dark Ambient: For When You Need to Concentrate…or Meditate on the Nothingness of Existence". By the middle of the decade Cold Meat Industry would come to diversify their sound further to encompass the growing global neo-folk scene, and launch the offshoot label Cruel Moon International to showcase their release. They also enlisted the noise assault of Mental Destruction, blackened ambient music from Aghast, martial industrial from Puissance, pagan ritualistic and neoclassical music from Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio and Arcana, and one of the earliest forays into what would later be termed dungeon synth, "Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør" a largely electronic album from former Emperor bassist, Mortiis. The cohesion of the label's sound, conceptual and aesthetic concerns were highlighted by three compilations released around this time in rapid succession. The first, an anthology of rarities and cassette-only releases that took the form of "In the Butcher’s Backyard", the other two, both overview assemblies, the "Karmanik Collection", and “…Even Wolves Hid their Teeth”, which remain among the most indelible of the label’s releases. In the ensuing years, after a brief label hiatus brought on by deteriorating mental and physical health, Roger Karmanik reactivated Cold Meat Industry in late 2018. Following the successful multiple-day 30th and 35th anniversary festivals, at the Södra Teatern in Stockholm, Sweden, he then engaged in a series of European-centric tours across the continent with a rotating roster of past and current labelmates. Now, on the eve of the release of the successfully crowdfunded documentary, "Soul in Flames: The Adversarial Fires of Cold Meat Industry" this fall, Brighter Death Now will be joining Mortiis and domestic artists Sombre Arcane and Malfet for "The Dungeons are Calling" an extensive United States tour, with a date at Seattle's El Corazon. In a rare interview with Niklas Göransson for Bardo Methodology's seventh issue, Roger Karmanik spoke of his artistic beginnings, improbable successes, and the long journey to reanimate the label, "Cold Meat Industry: Burning the Self to Seed the Soul Anew".
