raison d’être’s ‘Requiem for Abandoned Souls’ gets its first vinyl pressing
raison d’être’s 2003 album “Requiem for Abandoned Souls” is out now as a double-LP reissue on Cyclic Law, its first vinyl pressing, with four bonus tracks.
raison d’être’s 2003 album “Requiem for Abandoned Souls” is out now as a double-LP reissue on Cyclic Law, marking the album’s first appearance on vinyl. The expanded edition pairs the original nine-track album with four bonus tracks, spread across two LPs with a running time of 74 minutes and 9 seconds.
raison d’être is the dark ambient project of Swedish musician Peter Andersson. “Requiem for Abandoned Souls” moves through church bells, reverberating drones, metallic textures, discordant chimes, choral passages and sub-orchestral movements. Sacral and arcane religious undertones run through the album, and its nine track titles can be read individually or together as a poem tracing a landscape of abandoned souls. The artwork uses photography by Henk van Rensbergen.
Cyclic Law is pressing the reissue in two vinyl editions: a standard edition of 200 copies in a matte laminated gatefold sleeve on black vinyl, and a special edition of 100 copies on cloudy, crystal-clear-and-silver vinyl, also in a matte laminated gatefold sleeve.
About raison d’être
raison d’être is the dark ambient project of Swedish musician Peter Andersson, active since 1991. Its debut release, the cassette “Après nous le Déluge,” appeared in 1992, followed by the CD “Prospectus I” in 1993. Andersson built the project’s catalogue through the 1990s and 2000s on Cold Meat Industry, including “In Sadness, Silence and Solitude” in 1997 and “Requiem for Abandoned Souls” in 2003, the latter later expanded into a 2xCD edition in 2014. More recent albums include “The Stains of the Embodied Sacrifice” (2009), “Mise En Abyme” (2014), “Alchymeia” (2018) and “Daemonum” (2021). Andersson also records industrial noise as Stratvm Terror and ambient material under several other names, and collaborates with Johanna Rosenqvist as Cataclyst.
Side-Line has tracked raison d’être’s reissue campaigns closely: the first two albums reached double vinyl in 2018, “Prospectus I” returned as a 30th-anniversary 4CD boxset in 2023, and “Within the Depths of Silence and Phormations” was reissued for its own 30th anniversary in 2025. “Requiem for Abandoned Souls” now joins that catalogue on vinyl for the first time, via Cyclic Law.
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Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
