🇸🇪 THE PROTAGONIST — MAGNUS SUNDSTRÖM
A REBOURS • COLD MEAT INDUSTRY • LITERATURE • INDUSTRIAL MUSIC • NEOCLASSICISM • THE BEAUTY WITHIN DARKNESS
ARCHIVE INTERVIEW — ORIGINALLY CONDUCTED 1999 • REPUBLISHED 2026
Interview by Gordon Lawrence Taylor
Infectious Unease Radio • Subterranean Zone Radio • Voice In The Void
REPUBLICATION NOTE — 2026
I originally conducted this interview with Magnus Sundström of The Protagonist in 1999 for my earlier Infectious Unease website. The interview itself carries the date 28 September 1999, while the surviving email in my archive shows Magnus returning the completed questions and answers to me on 24 November 1999.
More than a quarter of a century later, I have decided to republish it because it remains an interesting document from a very particular period in European industrial, dark ambient and neoclassical music. This is not a newly conducted retrospective interview. Magnus was speaking in 1999, while A Rebours was still the central The Protagonist release and before Interim, Songs of Experience, much of his work as Des Esseintes, later Fin de Siècle Media activity and his subsequent soundtrack work had entered the historical record.
For this republication I have not changed Magnus Sundström’s answers. His words, spelling, grammar, phrasing and opinions remain as he supplied them to me. I have only cleaned and reconstructed some of my original questions where the spelling or sentence structure was unclear, and where necessary I have made a question correspond more precisely with the answer Magnus actually gave.
I have also researched what happened afterward and updated the surrounding discography, release information and web references. Those updates are clearly separated from Magnus’s 1999 answers. Where modern sources disagree with each other—or even with information remembered in the original interview—I have noted those differences rather than rewriting history to make everything appear artificially tidy.
INTRODUCTION — THE PROTAGONIST AT THE END OF THE CENTURY
When I interviewed Magnus Sundström in 1999, The Protagonist occupied an unusual position within the darker European musical underground. There were connections with industrial music and dark ambient, certainly, but his work was moving far beyond the limitations of either description. Orchestral construction, electronics, martial percussion, cello, spoken voice, nineteenth-century literature, European Romanticism, Decadence, cinema and historical imagery all entered a musical language that could be simultaneously monumental and intimate.
Magnus told me that his own compositional history went back to 1987. His route towards The Protagonist passed through an early EBM-like project with Peter Nystrom of Megaptera, followed by T.W.A.T. and then third EYE, which he began in 1994. He described third EYE to me as old-school industrial with references to SPK, Skinny Puppy and Klinik. After discovering another act already using the Third Eye name, he changed the project to The Protagonist.
That development matters because The Protagonist was never simply a conventional neoclassical project appearing from nowhere. Its foundations were industrial. What changed was the scale of Magnus’s compositional language. The harsher electronic framework gradually opened into orchestration, dramatic strings, percussion, literary references and an increasingly cinematic understanding of musical space.
A REBOURS
At the centre of this interview is A Rebours, released through Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry in 1998. Its title immediately establishes the literary territory. Joris-Karl Huysmans published À rebours in 1884, and the novel became one of the defining works associated with European Decadence. The protagonist of Huysmans’ novel, Jean des Esseintes, would later also provide Magnus with the name of his parallel project Des Esseintes.
Musically, A Rebours contains eight compositions: “The Eternal Abjectness of Life,” “Kämpfende Pferde,” “Mutability,” “Zoroaster,” “Song of Innocence,” “The Puritan,” “Imitation” and “The End.” The recordings include contributions from Mark St. John Ellis, Peter Pettersson, Marcus Ohlsson, Mårten Kellerman, Izze and Caelou.
The record sits firmly within the extraordinary catalogue built around Cold Meat Industry, the Swedish label associated with Roger Karmanik. CMI became one of the central labels through which dark ambient, industrial, ritual, experimental and neoclassical forms circulated internationally.
What makes this 1999 conversation particularly interesting to me now is that Magnus was discussing a future that had not happened yet. When I asked about his next album, he predicted that it would probably be darker, less pleasant and more unpredictable, and that spoken word would remain part of the concept.
Six years later Interim and Songs of Experience appeared during 2005.
That is one reason I wanted to preserve this interview. I am not asking Magnus in 2026 to remember how 1999 felt. These are his words from 1999, while the history was still unfolding.
🇸🇪 THE PROTAGONIST — DISCOGRAPHY & RELEASE GUIDE
1994–1997 — 1997
A promotional/self-released cassette compilation titled 1994–1997 is documented in later discographies as an early collection of material preceding the first Cold Meat Industry album.
The Protagonist — Gothic & Industrial Music Archive
https://www.gothicmusicarchive.com/the-protagonist.html
A REBOURS — 1998
Artist: The Protagonist
Country: 🇸🇪 Sweden
Label: Cold Meat Industry
Original release: 1998
Reissue: Raubbau — RAUB-006 — 2012
Tracks: 8
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The Eternal Abjectness of Life
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Kämpfende Pferde
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Mutability
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Zoroaster
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Song of Innocence
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The Puritan
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Imitation
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The End
Raubbau Bandcamp — A Rebours
https://raubbau.bandcamp.com/album/a-rebours
Apple Music — A Rebours
https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-rebours/499445211
Amazon Music — A Rebours
https://music.amazon.co.uk/albums/B00AO3BXFY
Spotify — “Imitation” from A Rebours
https://open.spotify.com/track/34mYoemOKPwHEIOMNU9sDZ
Guts of Darkness — A Rebours
https://www.gutsofdarkness.com/god/music?objet=1829
Raubbau releases catalogue
https://www.raubbau.org/homepage/releases.html
INTERIM — 2005
Label: Cold Meat Industry
Catalogue: CMI145
Format: EP
Tracks: 4
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Strife
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Sacrifice
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Der Wahnsinn
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La fin de la journée (stripped)