Saturday, April 11 at 9 pm
Director: Claudio Marino / Sweden / 2024 / 105'
Soul in Flames is a feature documentary that traces the rise and fall of the cult Swedish underground record label Cold Meat Industry. The film is told from the perspective of CMI's enigmatic founder, Roger Karmanik, a perennial outsider and artist whose work across multiple music scenes continues to spark worldwide interest decades later.
In 1987, Karmanik, a veteran of the Swedish industrial music scene, founded the Cold Meat Industry label. Over the following decade, it grew from a bedroom project into a globally recognised name. “Cold Meat Industry” became an umbrella term for the artists associated with the label, who, despite their diverse approaches, shared a distinct aesthetic and sensibility. Even as the label expanded rapidly, Karmanik’s underground ethos and working methods remained unchanged.
However, with the arrival of the 2000s, many artists who had started out with CMI began to leave. Weighed down by personal and professional struggles, as well as declining mental health, Roger Karmanik eventually reached a breaking point. CMI was declared bankrupt in 2011. But in 2017, as fans from more than 40 countries gathered in Stockholm to mark the label’s thirtieth anniversary, something unexpected happened.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Swedish musicians Peter Andersson (raison d’être) and Johan Levin (Desiderii Marginis), both of whom have been associated with the Cold Meat Industry label since the early 1990s. The conversation will be moderated by Miljenko Rajković, aka DJ Mary.
We are bringing the screening in collaboration with the TeHÔM project as an introduction to the concert taking place on Saturday, 11 April at KIC as part of Ambientalika, an evening dedicated to live ambient music.