Raison D'Être - Industrial-ambient from Sweden

Although active for years under countless monikers and side projects, Swedish composer Peter Andersson established himself within just a few years as one of the new masters of ambient music thanks to Raison D'Être, his most important and best-known project.

A leading figure of the rich Scandinavian industrial-ambient school tied to the Swedish label Cold Meat Industry (among the many talents to emerge from the Cmi stable and follow in Andersson's footsteps, at least Johan Levin — head of the Desiderii Marginis project — and Ulf Soderbergh, the one-man band behind Sephiroth, deserve mention), Andersson is a multifaceted artist capable of ranging from the most contemplative ambient and new age to the most extreme industrial noise. He began dabbling in electronic music back in the Eighties (his first project went by the name D:Combe, documented on various tapes and compilations), before coining Raison D'Être in 1991.

His first album, released only on cassette by Sound Source (a satellite label of Cmi) in 1992, is Après Nous Le Déluge, a work still largely centred on rhythm, in which the identity and direction Andersson wanted to give his music remained uncertain. The title track, split into two parts, nonetheless strikes the right balance between industrial foundations and the gothic-ambient explorations to come.

The following year Raison D'Être made its official debut with the CD Prospectus I (Cmi), an eclectic and evocative work that stands as the first building block of Andersson's artistic maturity. Tracks like the opening "Katharsis" still feature obsessive, heavy percussion, but the music is now centred not on rhythm but on atmosphere: Andersson brings to the fore a backdrop of vocal samples and deep, solemn electronic spirals, painting scenes of genuine desolation, loneliness and existential dread. The logical evolution of his music would thus be to eliminate rhythm altogether: hence tracks like "Mourning", steeped in a "spatial" suspense, "Ordeal In Chapel", a collage of religious choirs, bells and synthesizer vortices, and above all the celestial melody of "Mesmerized In Sorrow": three masterpieces that already clearly display the elements that would come to define Raison D'Être's music and its greatness.

All of Andersson's ambitions, his full stature as a "subliminal" composer, all his skill as a "collector" and manipulator of the most disparate sound sources, come together on the second album Enthraled By The Wind Of Loneliness (Cmi, 1994), arguably his unsurpassed masterpiece, and one of the most evocative and intense records in the Nineties landscape of electronic, ambient, new age music — call it what you will. "The Awakening" is the metaphysical overture to this intense journey through a nocturnal, desolate world constantly on the brink of catastrophe; percussion returns to the fore on the most apocalyptic track, "Spire Of Withhold", and above all on the lengthy "The Narrow Gate": the scope of this piece, its spasmodic, subterranean tension, and its slow, moving final fade-out all testify to Andersson's unmatched evocative talent. The brief "Sophrosyne", another memorable episode, strays unhesitatingly into Dead Can Dance gothic territory; and the sixteen minutes of "Spiraal" are pure contemplation, a starry night crossed by premonitory signs, suspended in the expectation of some immense event that seems about to happen at any moment yet never arrives. Perhaps simply because it has already happened, and we are wandering amid the ruins it left behind. "Pathaway", another eleven minutes of heavy electronic clouds, slowly leads towards the end (the exit?) of this long and anguished journey.

By now Andersson has a clear sense of his true calling: Within The Depths Of Silence And Phormations (Cmi, 1995) is thus the album of definitive maturity, perhaps also the most mannered and least spontaneous, though still rich with highly evocative ideas. "Sephiroth" is one of his darkest, most esoteric openings; "Ascent Of The Blessed" is a brilliant demonstration of Andersson's ability to keep the listener pinned to their chair while using the bare minimum of resources; the lengthy "In Absence", ten minutes of spectral trance, and "Inner Depths Of Sadness" showcase his ever more assured craft as a sonic "painter", a worthy heir — in a "dark" vein — to the inventor of ambient music, Brian Eno. But the Raison D'Être sound now also introduces acoustic elements, such as the guitar loop accompanying the Gregorian chant and the gentle keyboards of "Euphrosyne". The closing "Dream's Essence" is one of his warmest, darkest, most moving electronic vortexes.

In the meantime Andersson also released several collections of material dating back to his earliest years of activity, on the cassettes Conspectus and Semblance.

If Within The Depths was in some ways his relatively more accessible record, the fourth CD In Sadness, Silence and Solitude (Cmi, 1997) is a forbidding, unfathomable work, shut away in total darkness and isolation. "Reflecting In Shadows" is one of his most extreme tracks: for its full eight minutes, the backdrop is nothing but a mass of terrifying noises left to simmer at low volume, over which a new ecclesiastical choir looms: the effect is chilling. This time Andersson lets the scene be almost entirely dominated by that bottomless dread which in his previous albums had only ever been one element among others: so much so that even the celestial calm of "In Abscence Of Light" becomes a source of tension.

Black masses like "Deep Enshrouded" and "Falling Twilight" delve even deeper into the "dark" programme Andersson seems to have set out to achieve: "Passing Inner Shields", a long closing suite (13 minutes), even opens with a brief, hypnotic Middle Eastern dance before plunging back into its carpet of infernal noise. The only moment of relative respite from all this tension is the extraordinary "The Well of Sadness", perhaps the single most beautiful composition Andersson has ever created.

At this point, however, his career seems to reach a kind of standstill: between remixes of old unreleased material (the collection Reflections From The Time Of Opening, 1997) and the double anthology Collective Archives (1999), Andersson appears to put Raison D'Être temporarily in mothballs. This, then, is a good moment to briefly touch on some of his many side projects.

Peter Andersson, a multifaceted artist as noted: the dark ambient of Raison D'Être is only one, albeit the most important, of his incarnations: Stratvm Terror is the other face of his art. Launched in 1992 together with Tobias Larsson, under this name Andersson released two cassettes (later collected on the 2001 CD The Only True Septic Whore: among the tracks, "Expulsion" is the most noteworthy) and two CDs, Pariah Demise and Pain Implantations, again marked by extremely heavy death-industrial sounds (close, for instance, to those put forward by other Cmi acts such as Deutsch Nepal and Brighter Death Now, the latter known as the musical project of Roger Karmanik, founder and owner of the Swedish label). In the same genre, Andersson has also been behind the project Bocksholm, an impromptu collaboration with Deutsch Nepal (a moniker belonging to another Peter Andersson).

Closer to the sound of Raison D'Être is Necrophorus, an alias used for several records released between 1996 and 2001. And then there's Atomine Elektrine, under which Peter Andersson has released various albums of music straddling new age and Seventies "cosmic" echoes, while Cataclyst is an apocalyptic folk project launched in 1992 together with singer Johanna Rosenqvist. As if to bring some order to such a sprawling body of work, Peter Andersson would later gather one track from each of his projects on the album Perception Multiplied, Multiplicity Unified (Cmi, 2001).

Raison D'Être returned to the scene in 2000 with the album The Empty Hollow Unfolds (Cmi): the record consists of just five tracks, which add little or nothing to the Swedish artist's previous output. This time the emphasis falls mostly on vocal samples, which don't stray far from the usual medieval choirs: the result is, as ever, extremely evocative, with the impact of every single sound calculated with meticulous care. "The Slow Ascent", after a rather unremarkable start, hits its mark with a final crescendo punctuated by voices that seem to vanish into the infinite reaches of the cosmos. On the whole, however, the album does little more than unimaginatively recycle what have by now become the stereotypes of the Raison D'Être sound. "End of A Cycle", "Wasteland" and the monumental twenty-minute "The Eternal Return And The Infinity Horizon" drift along elegantly but without much impact. Only "The Hidden Hallows" nails a classic Raison-D'Être-style crescendo worthy of his masterpieces, climbing through majestic electronic spirals laden with that sense of loneliness and anticipation that has by now become his trademark.

Another compilation, Lost Fragments (CMI, 2002), precedes the new album Requiem For Abandoned Souls (Cmi, 2003), a concept record that musically differs very little from its predecessor. Raison D'Être no longer seems to have much left to say, even if he continues to say it with absolutely unmatched class and mastery of his technical means.

Another three-year gap passes before Metamorphyses arrives in 2006, a return to the pure dark-ambient sounds of In Sadness, Silence & Solitude. A cosmic sensation pervades the spatial explorations of "Part I", the most absolute desolation marks the intergalactic strolls of "II", silence held in stasis defines "III", and a lunar drone closes out "IV". A nearly inaudible melodic precept isolates the quarter-hour of "Part V", while a fading pulse brings the work to a close in "Part VI". A kind of missing link between Zero Kama and Steve Roach, and dotted with echoes reminiscent of kraut, Metamorphyses once again amounts to nothing much, a work that adds little to the career of an artist who by now is able to produce records that are solid in craft but always anchored to well-worn clichés.

Two years later Andersson performs live in Enschede: the show is released on record under the title The Luminous Experience, collecting a live set of improvisations, unreleased material, and excerpts from the recent The Empty Hollow Unfolds and Metamorphyses. The live dimension manages to lend the tracks real atmosphere, bringing back the dark sensibility of his best years and once again demonstrating Andersson's enormous technical potential, without, of course, contributing anything to fill the compositional void (though that can hardly be expected from a live album of already-released material). That void is partly filled, in the same year, by The Stains Of The Embodied Sacrifice, which could be summed up as an update to a more modern sound of the ideas first explored on Entrahaled By The Winds Of Loneliness. There are industrial regurgitations, though now transformed into pure field recordings, as in "If It Bears Thorns It Ends To Be Burned"; concrete sound sculptures, part of a single whole with ambient ecstasy in "Without The Shedding There Is No Forgiveness", or the absolute protagonists of "Whisthand The Fire", which now come across as noise catharsis not unlike the more recent Steve Roach or scenes like glitch and contemporary electronic avant-garde (Fennesz, Philip Jeck, Matmos); nor are there any shortage of pure ambient openings, silent and cosmic in memory on "The Spirit Will Not Share The Guilt", ancestral and melodic in the concluding catharsis of "The Temple Is Eternal Sacred", where one seems to hear Troum performing a Kevin Braheny composition. To date, The Stains Of The Embodied Sacrifice is the last work released under the name Raison D'Être, currently a fitting conclusion to a fundamental saga. Less than a month later Live Archive is released, a collection of live performances that adds little to the already excellent The Luminous Experience.

Over the following two years Andersson takes part in a series of fully improvised concerts, the best results of which are gathered on an album released in 2012 by Cold Meat Industry, When The Earth Dissolves In Ahses. In these performances we find everything and nothing more of the "usual" Raison D'Être, in all its various facets. His metallic-noisy side is present, though not overwhelmingly so, mystified among the cutting blades of "The Everlasting Fire", the acid drizzle of its follow-up, and the pronounced languor of "Reconstructing The Void". What surfaces instead, almost everywhere, is his soul straddling industrial, avant-garde and desolation, whether it adapts to the lunar catwalk of "Shedding", the universal ecstasy of "Darken My Soul", the Chris-Watson-style glitch-noise of Chris Watson on "Disowned Before The Angels Of God", or takes over the scene in the cosmic pessimism of "The Dark Age Will Come", or again violates the decadent silence of "The Water Of Cleansing". Nor is the ambient component missing, hidden in the apocalyptic, ancestral synthetic choir of "My Soul Is Darkened" or surfacing in the warm, seductive drone surfaces of "Sharing The Guilt" and "Unclean Spirit", potential meeting points between the ethereal neo-cosmic composers (from Kevin Braheny to Thom Brennan, via Max Corbacho and Rudy Adrian) and the pioneers of ambient tied to the glitch revolution (Troum, Helios, Eluvium, Loscil). The total absence of anything that hasn't already been heard ends up forcefully fueling the impression that Andersson's time is up, and with it his evolution as an artist. What remains is a musician capable of conjuring suggestions that are never predictable and always stratospherically effective, especially when paired with visuals (as was presumably the case in the performances in question) and in a live setting. But while a period of creative stagnation could be forgiven, with an album like Entrahaled By The Wind Of Loneliness there to pick up the pieces and start over just as strongly, an entire tour of live sets built exclusively on retracing past sounds starts to feel a bit too tight a fit not to raise the aforementioned suspicions.

A certain dryness of inspiration does not, however, diminish what Peter Andersson managed to create in the Nineties: through his works and his personality, Raison D'Être has become, today, more than just a musical project — a genuine institution and an essential point of reference for the entire world of new gothic and ambient music.

The new album Alchymeia is released by Cyclic Law and aims, essentially, to be an inner journey into the darkest moment of despair, an ever-deeper descent into the unconscious in search of the "reason for being" that would gradually transform into a form of spiritual illumination.

The album, inspired by alchemical esotericism and the thought of Carl Gustav Jung, consists of four lengthy compositions, for a total running time of around seventy minutes. The titles refer to the four stages of the alchemical Great Work, which was meant to culminate in the creation of the legendary philosopher's stone, a tool for converting base metals into gold.

Nothing new under the sun, but there is no doubt that Alchymeia is an inspired work, dense with symbolism, that clearly showcases the various elements of Peter Andersson's classic dark ambient sound.

Contributions by Marco De Baptistis ("Alchymeia")

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