Nine years separate “Echoes of The End” from its predecessor “Kopfkino”, and in this Side-Line interview Lars Henrik Madsen of Kant Kino explains why. Work on the 24-track album began years earlier and was expected to wrap up quickly, but a pandemic, health problems, jobs, family commitments and long stretches of creative fatigue slowed it down, and the duo more than once considered dropping it. Meanwhile, he says, the world began to resemble the songs: material about anxiety, alienation and absurdity moved from speculation toward observation, so the finished record feels more like a field recording than a forecast. The scale arose naturally, as the tracks formed a set of viewpoints on one landscape, and a compact 35-minute album would have seemed too well-behaved.
Madsen sees humour as a tool for describing the darkness truthfully rather than escaping it, because real decline tends to play out in supermarket queues, online arguments and forgotten passwords instead of cinematic drama. He adds that the duo care less about the moment of collapse than about the long period afterwards, when people adapt and normalise it, which he finds more unsettling. “Rodney,” the first signal of this phase and the centrepiece of the EP “Rodney: End-State Variations”, keeps its meaning deliberately closed: it could be a person, a cautionary tale, a gag or a drinker at the far end of a bar, and the band is happy to let listeners decide. Musically, the pair aim for the zone between a blow and a recollection, valuing EBM’s physical impact and melody equally and admitting they probably miss in both directions.
On genre, Madsen says Norway’s distance from the usual Belgian-German centre of EBM history lets the duo act as fans instead of caretakers, respecting the tradition without keeping it in a display case. He is wary of scenes that slide into retro-worship, trend-chasing or repetition tailored to algorithms, and believes that trying to sound modern is the quickest way to sound dated. Kenneth Fredstie adds that technical skill is valuable until it starts to strip out personality, and that knowing when to stop refining is the hard part. Looking ahead, Madsen finds the idea of becoming completely unreasonable appealing and says the band has no map for what follows, beyond the fact that it will still sound like Kant Kino.
About Kant Kino
Kant Kino is an electronic duo from Oslo made up of Lars Henrik Madsen and Kenneth Fredstie. A tribute track for the ElektroStat festival launched the partnership, and a Bunkertracks compilation appearance opened the door to Alfa Matrix. Their albums run from “We Are Kant Kino – You Are Not” (2010) and “Father Worked In Industry” (2013) to “Kopfkino”, which Alfa Matrix released on 13 January 2017.
The label’s first Matrix:Reb00ted volume, built around Kant Kino remixes, followed in May 2017, and the pair kept busy with the 2018 EP “Silent Morning” with Coldkill, a 2019 Depeche Mode cover and remixes for other acts. After the February 2026 comeback EP “Rodney: End-State Variations”, “Echoes of The End” is their first new album in nine years; our release report has the details.
Read the full interview on Side-Line
“Echoes of The End” is available now on the Alfa Matrix store as a 2CD, and the digital deluxe edition can be streamed on Bandcamp.