Cloister Recordings is an American post-industrial label based in Denver, Colorado, and one of the most active death-industrial, power-electronics and dark-ambient imprints of recent times. I keep it at Tier II on the labels test, on two grounds: it is a connector-node of the contemporary post-industrial network, the principal American outlet for a largely European body of work, and it holds a distinct curatorial position that has given a generation of projects their US presence. The label is already woven into this archive through its releases for Trepaneringsritualen and Brighter Death Now.
The label has two lives. It was founded in Arizona by Justin Rodriguez, who ran it as a home for experimental metal, drone and avant-garde music until his death in June 2013, when he died while hiking in the Arizona desert. His friend Marcus LaBonte reopened the label in 2014 to continue Rodriguez's legacy, and relocated it to Denver in 2015; Cloister Recordings LLC was formed there in 2018. LaBonte has been candid that the label was not conceived with a set goal, but as a conduit for the energy of a period of void and hopelessness, and he credits sobriety as the lens through which the work came into focus. The result has been a remarkable burst of activity that, in his hands, reminds longtime observers of an earlier, pre-internet era of the underground.
The turn that defined the label came after the relocation. Working partly through the American artist Thomas Garrison, LaBonte began issuing the European death-industrial and power-electronics scene, giving those projects a degree of US exposure they had not previously had, and in the process making Cloister the American window onto a sprawling European post-industrial network. The catalogue, under the CRUS prefix, now runs to some hundred and fifteen releases and more · cassettes, vinyl, CDs and splits, frequently in small limited editions with a consistent, austere visual identity. The numbering arc, from CRUS-100 in 2018 to CRUS-138 in 2024, traces a label working at a sustained pace.
The roster is the case for the entry. Its clearest tie to the rest of this archive is the Trepaneringsritualen live LP One Hundred Year Storm, a recording with Sutekh Hexen issued as CRUS-100 in 2018 jointly with Pesanta Urfolk; Cloister also issued the US tape edition of Brighter Death Now's No Decency in 2019. Beyond those, the label has released Alfarmania + Proiekt Hat's Astral Slaktmask (CRUS-138, 2024), the bleak American death industrial of The Vomit Arsonist, and work by Sutekh Hexen, Skare, Moral Order, Subklinik, Michael Idehall, Amalthea and dB/Mz, among many others. The presence of Proiekt Hat, also documented in this archive through the Cold Meat Industry compilation Estheticks of Cruelty, is one of several threads connecting the label's contemporary roster back to the founding generation.
What rounds out the picture is the Dominion of Flesh festival, which LaBonte books around the roster, and whose 2019 fifth-anniversary edition included a pre-show in Stockholm at the experimental performance space Fylkingen · a clear measure of how far the label's centre of gravity reaches into Europe rather than its home city. I keep Cloister Recordings as a contemporary connector-node: a young label that, in barely a decade, became one of the most active and well-regarded in the post-industrial field, and the principal point through which a great deal of current European death industrial reaches an American audience. The entry is held open against a release schedule that continues.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene