NXO25 – From Pathomechanical Sessions to Grey Album

The Grey Album is the culmination point of multiple years of recordings featuring electric guitar, electric bass guitar, vocals, various effects, and electronic beats and sounds. The entire process took place in multiple countries, multiple cities, and various spaces. As such, it reflected the Nexialist Organization's coda as a transdisciplinary platform connecting architecture, music, and visual design through shared creative methods and theoretical inquiry.

An evolution of Fragment King’s hybrid sound, Grey Album fused treated bass, digital rhythm, and voice into a dense, cinematic soundscape that defined the project’s mature phase.

Cover of the 2005 Grey Album CD-r version, Invasion Wreck Chords

The cover is the part of the album that was created first. It shows a segment of one of Donald Judd's aluminum boxes exhibited in Marfa, Texas, one of 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, created between 1982–1986. I happened to be there in 1999 when I took the photo.

In 1999 I also recorded what became the beats for "Brutalitarian", one of the titles on the album. I recorded the beats with an AKAI S-2000 sampler in Munich, also in 1999.

In 2001 my friend Babak drove me to one of the music instrument stores on Route 17 in New Jersey, where I bought about a thousand dollars worth of gear in cash. It was a big affair, no one had seen that amount of paper money before. The store manager nearly lost his mind. With the guitar and bass guitar and effects, I started working on ideas. The result were the "Pathomechanical Studies". In 2002 I had six to eight titles that I intended to release as NEX007 in the Halforganic Series, but I decided to postpone the release. The tracks were good, but I felt I needed to develop them further.

In 2004 I recorded material extensively. At the time I was back in Europe and commuting to Munich from the Bavarian countryside. The sessions went a decisive step further than before in their use of splintered, real-time deconstructed audio. The same applied to the lyrics and the vocal treatment. I named the sprawling mass of recordings "Anatomic Music Sessions". They included completely new material in different iterations, ranging from "Electronicisms" to "Ultracore Versions". I recorded the bass guitar, electronics and vocal elements in a place I called "White Furnace Lodge". But even this was not yet the album I had in mind.

In 2005 I moved to Weimar with my entire gear, into a former military barracks complex, a real architectural fortress. This is where I started re-recording select titles from both aforementioned sessions with an aim in mind: Play these songs as if you played them live. That eventually became the "Grey Album", released either in late 2005 or early 2006 by Invasion Wreck Chords.

And then, in 2007, Boris May from Klangstabil and his friend Torben Wendt created a romantic wave electro version of "Slugbreeder" that caused quite a stir in the Dark Music scene. It is a fantastic remix that reminds me of a rougher version of Depeche Mode.

Now sold out, the album captures Fragment King at full intensity after emerging from purely electronic origins. The record’s core concept remained the fusion of guitar texture with electronic rhythm — inspired by Big Black and Godflesh, but also by the cinematic scope of Autechre. The lyrics, personal and abstract, were processed into layered vocal atmospheres that merge with the instrumentals, forming a triptych of beats, chords, and voice. The album artwork underscores its aesthetic unity. Grey Album was widely praised for its sonic depth and conceptual coherence.

What did reviewers have to say?

Orkus: 

(Fragment King) could be described as a mix of power electronics and drone doom with aggressive backgrounds, produced by Kammerbauer in an enormously dense and fat manner. Godflesh on even more drugs? More than that – Grey Album makes you sweat, evokes anger, releases force, in the controlled songs with slower pace as well as in the angry, fast noise machines, in which the Fragment King incorporated almost insane energy eruptions in a pretty defragmented way.

Chain D.L.K.: 

Do you remember the early Godflesh or Scorn releases, where guitars were roaring and throats were bleeding? Well, Mark Kammerbauer dug a lot the innovation of those two bands because some years after that explosion of rage he took that spirit, melting it with some elements of power noise and breakcore just to form his project Fragment King. (...) I don't know how Fragment King was sounding on his early releases but the ten tracks of GREY ALBUM convinced me immediately with the dark grinding guitars and with that treated voice that seems starving for more razorblades. The first track "Scape [a]" is a industrial chaotic fragmented manifesto, while the other ones, starting from "Brutalitarian", sound granitic and compact. The guitar sound forms a wall of noise while rhythms are clear and powerful. On the twelve minutes long track, "Emperor slug", after seven minutes of "in your face" music everything falls apart just to leave space to the ambient industrialism of digital crashes. After this pause the sound starts again with its guitar/digital assault arriving to the closing "Scape [b]", a sort of eight minutes long revisitation of the opening track which has a long ambient metal coda after the fragmented noises. Try it! 

I'm adding select streams of each successive session that led to the final Grey Album here and beyond, in addition to a live performance recorded in Prague: 

This is a special NXO25 – 25th Anniversary of the Nexialist Organization post.