Runes Order

*100 copies limited edition* “No Future” wasn’t the first work I listened to by Runes Order (known until shortly before as Order 1968), but it was certainly the one that most deeply disturbed my mind. It appeared as a cassette release, limited to 30 copies (the charm of bygone times…), in September 1993: a work that, as I mentioned, puzzled even the most devoted followers of the Genoese project. A project that, until then, had trodden the path of ritual industrial music, with a keen eye on our ancestral past and pagan myths. Hypnotic and circular music had always been the hallmark of the sound born from Claudio’s soul, but with “No Future” a change of course took place.

“No Future” remains the first foray into music of a clearly cosmic origin. A foray that would be further developed and refined in the continuation of the project’s career, but which, in that late 1993, marked the starting point. As a baptism of this new path, the concept chosen for the work was a theme familiar to past times (those of the just-concluded Cold War) but returned to prominence in recent years: the nuclear nightmare. A theme that still terrifies, and one that Claudio wanted to capture from a “day after” perspective. Like a camera wandering and rummaging through the rubble of a now-vanished civilization, the musical suites that compose “No Future” roam through smoky scenarios (“Floating Frames”, “Ruins Theme”), in a raw and intense crescendo (“Nightmare is Coming” and the title track), in which the devastation and complete collapse of a world shattered by nuclear destruction is clearly evident.

Listening to “No Future”, even many years later, is still something that shocks, unsettles, and frightens: a fear, however, that can and must have a cathartic value in exorcising a nightmare not yet overcome in the human imagination. That is why, after so many years, this work by Runes Order, reaffirming the enormous scope of its message, has become a forerunner, a precursor, as well as a musical (and beyond) reference point for many industrial works whose main pillar is post-apocalyptic themes." - Ottavio Chiodo