Cranioclast - Post-Industrial Steelmaking

The Ruhr coal basin is one of the most significant industrial and steelmaking hubs on the entire planet. It's no coincidence, then, that one of the world's most important expressions of the post-industrial scene comes from these raw, working-class, hard-toiling regions.

They're called Cranioclast: a German duo formed in the city of Hagen in the very early Eighties, whose name may derive from the surgical instrument resembling a pair of pincers.

In a country where the NDW (Neue Deutsche Welle) had already been born and was moving at a dizzying pace, where the cold electronics of Kraftwerk seemed to have run its course, and kraut-rock was in a phase of relative calm, a whole series of artists with an experimental, avant-garde bent began popping up on the margins, tiptoeing in, eventually establishing themselves as valid and authoritative alternatives to English masters such as Throbbing Gristle and Zoviet France.

One of these alternatives is precisely Cranioclast, who, alongside Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, Gerechtigkeits Liga, HNAS (Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa), Asmus Tietchens, P16.D4, Die Tödliche Doris and many others, best represent that crumbling scene which later came to be known as NDPA (Neue Deutsche Post Avantgarde); a German musical scene that even went on to lend its name to a famous compilation of the era.

Next to nothing is known about the two members, not even their basic personal details. Everything is shrouded in mystery. An enigmatic aura surrounds them – suffice it to say that almost all of their works, as well as the names of the two artists themselves (Sankt Klario and Soltan Karik), are anagrams of the words Cranioclast and Kranioklast, the latter being none other than the name used in their early days for their first albums.

Hagen is a small town on the edge of the Ruhr and its steel industry, but that distance doesn't seem to register at all: throughout almost the entire Cranioclast discography, there's a strong presence of dense ferrous-alloy matrices and scattered impurities of more or less noble metals. To help separate the ferrous alloys from the impurities, playing a little association game with the duo's entire body of work, the Fe-C (iron-carbon) phase diagram – so widely used in industrial metallurgy and steelmaking – might almost come in handy: broadly speaking, it explains the chemical and microstructural behaviour of the Fe-C binary alloy as temperature and carbon content increase.

The ferritic matrix: steels and cast irons

This story begins in 1982: a first vinyl release – now impossible to find and reserved for the chosen few – titled Romatisch & Zartlich/Neurotisch & Exzessiv; in which brief literary passages by Kafka and Büchner serve as accompaniment to four tracks of experimental sound.

Three years of silence follow, after which their grand debut finally arrives with Koitlaransk & Ration-Skalk; although these are two separate releases – Ration Skalk is a live tape that was bundled together with it – their pairing is no accident, not least because around ten years later, Florentine musician Luciano Dari, through his own label Musica Maxima Magnetica, would reissue both on a single compact disc.

Heavily inspired by Ballardian readings, so much so that the reissue's booklet features numerous quotes from the British writer, Koitlaransk & Ration-Skalk is, by definition, what you'd call cast iron.

It's a dark, cavernous album, a fusion of high specific weight, owing to its strong carbon content: ingots of tempered spheroidal cast iron solidifying after violent isotropic crystallisations.

A deep, oppressive record; the absence of breaks between tracks creates a total lack of oxygen. Signals of archaic, primordial metallurgy mix with amplified vibrations of chromed rods; electrons slipping out of their elliptical orbits only to slip back in nanoseconds later, unleashing molecular and subatomic deflagrations in the interstices between metal grains.

Iron and carbon nucleating into body-centred hexagonal cells, until reaching the eutectic point of the binary compound. A steelworks turned into a gothic cathedral; a granite post-industrial monolith: all of this is condensed into Koitlaransk.

Just a year later comes Kolik-San-Art, where the “ferritic” matrix is still very much present, within an album that's complex and hard to absorb.

It sounds like one of those botched castings, where the grain size exceeds the acceptable standard, so that the alloy would – in theory – have to be scrapped and remelted: as if someone had wanted to experiment with one of those new casting production processes, very cautiously dosing the right proportions of the two metals.

Kolik-San-Art is a bizarre, prickly, rambling record. It travels between Minny Pops-style minimal electronics and acid hysterics à la Nurse With Wound. It's a piano seeking escape through intermetallic and intergranular paths (“The Birds Brought Water In Their Beaks Into The Temples”); it's technoid (“Chambre Des Cauchemars Monsieur Zann’s Final Chamber Transformation”) and folk-tinged (“Les Voix Emurants Parlent Dans Les Débris De Tiffauges”), futuristic and electromagnetic (“Ray Treatment”) with hints of rising-sun mysticism (“The Madonna Lost Her Face In The Acid Bath Les Chants De Trois Frères”), as well as slimy and slippery (“Strategies Of Truth”). Its schizophrenic dark-ambient (“De/Camuflage”) ends up morphing into a fusion-industrial alloy, coming close to brushing against the coordinates of droning lounge-music (“Catch A Fading Polaroid And Put It In Your Pocket”).

Kolik-San-Art is one of those alloys that must be produced under controlled temperature and pressure conditions. It's a mosaic depicting thousands of vultures circling above the darkest, deepest coal mine, waiting for the exhausted miners to emerge. Very little drama, but plenty of sickness and chaos.

The path leading to the creation of the heavily alloyed steel that is Iconclastar winds through two low-carbon alloys: the full-length Lost In Karak and the short album – a 12" – Rats Can Coil Cats Can Roil.

The first – we're still in 1988 – is music that burns, and seems to come straight from the blast furnace. A crucible of incandescent sparks of molten iron from wire drawing alternates with dark, latent drones of early-20th-century industrial steelmaking. Muffled ritual-industrial tolling unsettles as much as a first viewing of F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu". Lost In Karak, however, turns out static: as if the steel had been subjected to what is technically called stress-relief heat treatment.

Two years later they released Rats Can Coil Cats Can Roil, which would be their last release for CoC (Coitras Clan): effectively the label the German duo had founded a few years earlier. The record is made up of two tracks: "Rats Can Coil" is a kind of minimal industrial, a pulsing, hammering alternating current, torn open by hints of distorted, demonic, robotic voice straight out of "Hellraiser"; "Cats Can Roil", on the other hand, is built structurally from a dark matrix of perlitic ambient, or a raw ship's engine room in the style of Zoviet France's "Mohnomishe".

The prelude to Iconclastar's monumental work is a glacial, icy isolationism.

Composed in a single year, Iconclastar is a voluminous, enveloping work, resistant to high temperatures: a kind of ceramic mould of the sort used in small-scale investment casting for the aeronautical and aerospace fields, into which the molten alloy is poured. Eleven icons to destroy, for eleven tracks of eleven minutes each, split across two CDs (with different cover colours and labels). There's a connecting thread running through the journey: the Cranioclast split the last icon of the first volume in half, then carry it on unchanged into the second ("Onezerooneone"). And in both parts – Green and Blue alike – the presence of the bleak sci-fi scenarios conjured by the mind of J.G. Ballard is strongly felt.

A long, cavernous drone opens the work ("Condom"): the gateway to advanced metaphysical and paranormal states. Traces of noble metals such as cobalt and vanadium arrange themselves along preferential lines, lending toughness and hardness to the steel sheets. Pulsing doses of gamma radiation leak out of microscopic particles of iridium-192 isotope ("Radar Bowl", "Antibody"), and ferociously violent bursts of industrial/noise frequencies create, within the alloy, acicular, amorphous structures caused by sudden, abrupt cooling: a sort of induction hardening, immersed in a bath of liquid nitrogen.

Photoluminescent field recordings and sintered drones merge with nitrided scrap metal in an electromagnetic atmosphere saturated with atoms of pure carbon ("Astronaut"), thereby case-hardening the surface layer.

Cranioclast's last long-form work is steeped in austerity, in spectral, sidereal dark-ambient: could it have been them – rather than Lustmord, as is often claimed – who influenced their fellow countrymen Inade, giving them their sonic bearings?

Alloy impurities: sulphur and silicon

In the smelting of a binary iron-carbon alloy, it's almost impossible to find only those two elements. In very small quantities, careful chemical and quantometric analysis often turns up impure, unstable elements that can compromise the mechanical properties of the finished alloy. Among the many metals, the guilty parties are sulphur and silicon, most often found in the form of silicates and carbides.

Beware: in metallurgy those two compounds are dangerous, so this relationship can't really apply within the Cranioclast discography, to the point of being an entirely unexpected and disorienting element.

The duo's unsettling, sulphurous arrival on the cult Italian label ADN (Auf Dem Nil) comes in 1987 with the cassette Cris Con Tala. The use of Latin for the two long tracks ("Somnii Palus", "Vanorum Mare") heightens the universal, solemn atmosphere – see the parallels with the Autopsia collective – of this small, dark gem. Primordial dark-ambient, pagan rites and the macabre ritualism of Zero Kama wrap around this blasphemous medieval manuscript written in Gothic script.

Templar knights, desecrated churches, the shriek of blood-soaked blades – anyone who remembers Last Few Days' "Blind Knives" will understand – scraping noise that seems to come from a battered theremin, and celestial echoes mixed with demonic thunderbolts, accompany the damned souls toward the worst circle of Dante's hell, imagined as a long journey across the turbulent, blood-red waters of the Styx.

An essential record: one of the few dark-ambient milestones that can genuinely lay claim to that title.

If sulphur is the impure element in Cris Con Tala, silicon is the impurity running through all the other small albums released afterward: A Con Cristal, Can I Talk Or…, L.K.A. Sonar Kit and Carl's On Acit.

Silicon, or silica, is usually associated with the abrasive quality of sand, which can be more or less harsh depending on the grain size. A Con Cristal came out the same year as Cris Con Tala; presumably, during those months, the German duo wanted to experiment with new sounds. So in an instant we move from dark-ambient's murky tones to tribal and industrial ones – in other words, the feel of a rough mechanical workshop, pneumatic chisels and hysterical feline yowls ("Breakthrough"), while the clattering din of metalwork and gates under construction throws open the electronic doors to the control room of an alien spaceship ("Beachcombers").

Ten years later – under the name Kranioklast – they release Can I Talk Or… for the small Polish label Sonaria. Minimal electroacoustic abrasion, electronic manipulations that feel like a drill to the temporal lobe: a pulsating, corrosive water torture (“Honey For The Bees”), with room even for psych-folk sonorities tinged with Maghrebi colors (“No Caveman Bites The Dog”).

L.K.A. Sonar Kit (Drone Records) already sounds almost too modern. Austerity, industrial lashings (“De Zeester”) and sidereal, astral electroacoustics (“The Anemone”) bring them close to the territory of Nocturnal Emissions' "Autonomia", which had come out just a few years earlier.

Carl's On Acit is officially the last official Cranioclast release, dated anno domini 2003. In reality, it consists of tracks composed around 1990 but never released.

It's the German label Auf Abwegen that secures the rights to it.

Carl's On Acit likewise explores the desolate wastelands of electroacoustics, doing so through a sound that is old and obsolete, yet cleaned up and heavily digitized. Silicon carbides return, along with acidic, sharp, cutting sonorities (“Biosemiotic Experiments”), while cyclical, intermittent drips from a sterile IV line, rarefaction, and pulses like a pneumatic compressor build an impassable wall of sound.

Also worth mentioning and well worth a listen are all the tracks contributed to the numerous compilations – "Nature Morte", "Dry Lungs" and "Journey Into Pain", to name a few – alongside various artists from the best industrial/noise/avant-garde scene of the era worldwide; so much so that, put together, they would amount to another thoroughly respectable album in their own right.

From both members, running parallel to Cranioclast, two separate projects were born: one called Core, which ploughed the fields of a dense dark-ambient/industrial sound in the vein of Contrastate, and a solo one (Michael Anacker) called Kallabris, distinguished by its pronounced electroacoustic and experimental shades, derived from the use of instruments not traditionally associated with these musical scenes. A project still active today: Anacker's latest work – between philosophy lectures at the University of Bochum – dates back to 2010, but that's another story.

In 2018, after 15 years of silence, the ever-enigmatic duo from Hagen resurfaces, again on Aufabwegen, releasing Cract On Sail, a vinyl record containing two long suites whose movements are titled once again using anagrams of the project's name. The sound, though composed in the present, picks up from the past to weave a shifting tapestry that alternates minimal techno, rhythmic patterns with tribal echoes, and passages of raw electroacoustics, under the banner of a dark-ambient still streaked with noise attitude and industrial leanings, yet more accessible than before.

Starting instead from a recording made in the Nineties, the following Arctic Salon was released in late 2023, again on the same German label. A double album made up of four sprawling drifts that recount an Arctic voyage, drawing on an ambient-drone fabric with an alien atmosphere, punctuated by skeletal melodic scores, aquatic field recordings, and those dark modulations that are the trademark of the Cranioclast sound. A journey that is at once majestic and disorienting, deeply evocative.

Just a few months later, the duo lands at the court of Italy's own Silentes, who handle the CD reissue of the seminal Kolik San Art as well as another disc collecting two EPs – A Con Cristal and Rats Can Coil – Cats Can Roil – plus the previously unreleased three-part Accidental Encounter Of Rats And Cats On A Turntable.

It's precisely Stefano Gentile's label that promotes and releases Cold Star: A Noise Inc. (2025), a collaborative work with Deison put together through a constant exchange of material starting in 2019. The result is an album of seven sinister-toned sound structures built on cyclical redundancy. Titled, in perfect Cranioclast style, using nothing but anagrams of the name that signs the record, the various environments shaped here unfold along circular trajectories defined by the use of three-dimensional effects (“Sonic Declarations”), rigid rhythmic patterns (“Disconnect Solaria”) and looped atmospheric stagnations (“Loss Draconic Tenia”). What stands out above all is the ability to create atmospheres heavy with a tension that never rises in intensity, let alone explodes, allowing only sporadic openings (“Acid Necrosis Tonal”) before flowing into a numbing electroacoustic landscape that alone takes up more than two-thirds of the record's entire running time (“Nico Closed Sinatra”). And it is precisely this oblique, potentially boundless atmospheric drift that marks the most convincing point of an artistic intersection played out entirely on ground perfectly familiar to its creators, and to those who have followed their trail over the years.

Contribution by Peppe Trotta (“Cract On Sail”, “Arctic Salon”, “A Con Cristal / Rats Can Coil – Cats Can Roil / Accidental Encounter Of Rats and Cats on A Turntable”, “Cold Star: A Noise Inc.”)

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