Morthound is the early death-ambient project of the Swedish musician Benny Nilsen, later much better known under the name BJNilsen. The Bureau files it at Tier II for documentary necessity and tradition-internal centrality: Morthound belongs to the formative period of the Cold Meat Industry catalogue, the early-1990s window in which the Swedish death-industrial and dark-ambient cluster this archive documents was first taking shape, and it is an early entry from before the label's mid-1990s expansion.
The project began in the winter of 1990, originally spelled Morthond. Nilsen conceived it, in his own gloss, as visual music without any moving pictures, with coincidence as a main inspiration · a description that captures the eerie, drifting, associative character of the work. He created it while still young and while playing guitar and bass in local bands; the move into electronic and tape-based composition was the start of a long career that would carry him a long way from these beginnings.
The début was Death Time, a cassette released in 1991 on Sound Source, the short-lived debut-only tape sub-label that Cold Meat Industry ran to issue limited cassette editions of new artists. The tape became sought-after and was not available on CD until the much later Mortology box collected it. The parent label then issued The Crying Game the same year. In 1992 Nilsen changed the spelling to Morthound, and the first release under the new name was Spindrift (CMI.15). A third album, The Goddess Who Could Make The Ugly World Beautiful, followed in 1994.
The sound across these records is the eerie, haunting, ritual-tinged industrial-ambient of the early Cold Meat Industry catalogue: obsessive percussion, cold atmospheres, a drifting and associative structure rather than the harsh wall-of-noise approach of the power-electronics end of the field. It is closer in spirit to the atmospheric and ritual records on the label than to the confrontational ones. The whole catalogue, together with previously-unreleased material in a similar early-period vein, was later gathered on the Mortology box set, which functions as the project's definitive document.
What gives Morthound a particular interest in retrospect is what Nilsen did next. Under the name BJNilsen he became a widely-respected field-recording and drone artist with a long association with the Touch label, working with environmental sound in a way that the coincidence-driven, atmospheric Morthound material already gestured toward. He has also collaborated with Deutsch Nepal's Peter Andersson in the Janitor project. The Morthound name belongs firmly to the early-1990s Cold Meat Industry period and its catalogue is closed; the Bureau files it as one of the formative-period entries that the larger CMI account rests on.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Renaissance · last revised c. the Bronze Age