Blood Incantation isn’t a regular death metal band. In fact, they’re not even close. Lyrically, there’s no Cannibal Corpse-style torture killings, no zombie apocalypses, no morbid dissertations on rotting flesh. They forgo Satan worship, necromancy, and demonology in favor of ancient aliens, sci-fi exploration and a powerful reassessment of mankind that looks to both the cosmos and inner self. Â
Sure, the Denver foursome have a completely indecipherable logo, and—yeah—vocalist/guitarist Paul Riedl approaches the mic with the kind of guttural inflection that innocent bystanders (i.e. non-metal fans) associate with Cookie Monster. But the music they make pushes and pulls. It breathes and unfurls. It’s death metal, but it’s also prog and doom; it’s black metal and thrash; it’s math rock and acoustic passages.Â
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“Blood Incantation is a very open concept,†Riedl says. “There are very few kinds of riffs that we won’t play—speed metal, funeral doom, black metal, heavy metal, technical death metal, dad riffs, ambient stuff, acoustic stuff, space music—what matters is how we put it all together.â€Â
Most significantly, Blood Incantation’s music is steeped in mind-bending psychedelia.
“We’re psychedelic as fuck,†Riedl deadpans. “We’ve written songs on mushrooms, and we’ve eaten them before we play shows many times. But we’ve been so high for so long that we don’t need to go back into that space to create under that umbrella. We want to take people into that psychedelic state of mind with the music. We wanna make the songs the trip.â€Â
Blood Incantation’s third and latest full-length, Absolute Elsewhere, is their most compelling trip to date. With just under 44 minutes of music split into two tracks—“The Stargate†and “The Messageâ€â€”they take the listener through death metal peaks and space-prog valleys on a lysergic journey through the cosmos and hidden recesses of the mind. It’s the apotheosis of the band’s sound thus far. “I hear this music as sort of like a manifesto of the ultimate Blood Incantation-style song,†Riedl says, “with all of the previous existing ingredients condensed into one big, epic presentation.â€Â
What he means is this: In addition to the traditional death metal instruments, all four members of the band—Riedl, drummer Isaac Faulk, guitarist Morris Kolontyrsky, and bassist Jeff Barrett—play synthesizers. Past albums, like their 2016 full-length debut Starspawn and 2019’s Hidden History of the Human Race, include deep-space instrumentals that showcase this aspect of Blood Incantation.Â
Then, in a move that stunned (or at least mildly disrupted) factions of the metal world in 2022, Blood Incantation released the all-synth ambient record Timewave Zero. Part Tangerine Dream, part John Carpenter, it plays like an ominous primordial space opera—like Star Wars meets the monolith sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. For Blood Incantation, Timewave was a crucial steppingstone in the band’s evolution.Â
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“We would not have been able to make Absolute Elsewhere without making Timewave Zero and without what we went through in the year preceding the writing period of Timewave Zero,†Riedl says. “During Covid, we improvised for a year, practicing three to six days a week, four to eight hours a day. We were improvising so much, we had to unlearn and figure out a new way to communicate with each other because it’s such supple music, so unobtrusive—no volume, no distortion, no live drums. We had no gear like that in the practice space for almost a year. We had to learn to listen to the other players in a very new way.â€
Blood Incantation’s 2023 maxi-single Luminescent Bridge completed the transition. The music within became, well, a bridge—literally and figuratively—between Timewave and Absolute Elsewhere. “Before Luminescent Bridge, the metal parts and ambient parts were essentially separated,†Riedl points out. “We had ambient passages that you could skip to [on the track listing]. After Luminescent Bridge, it’s completely integrated. The ambient and the metal and the prog are all happening simultaneously.â€Â
Blood Incantation drummer Isaac Faulk takes the long view. “We like to play with expectations, not play to them,†he says. “That’s what’s fun about a discography. Bands like Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath, they’re going to different places on different albums. Why not utilize that arc to enhance the experience for the listener and for us as artists? When we got to that point, we felt we were finally free to do this. We could go into the writing process for Absolute Elsewhere completely unfettered.â€Â
Recorded at iconic Hansa Studios in Berlin, Absolute Elsewhere was tracked in the same rooms as revered works by David Bowie, Killing Joke, Depeche Mode and Tangerine Dream. Because of the dual significance in both place and creation, Blood Incantation brought in a video crew to capture the album’s recording process for the upcoming documentary All Gates Open: In Search of Absolute Elsewhere.Â
“The album is larger than life, and the story of the album is so big that we would have to do interviews every day for years just to convey what is essentially conveyed in an hour and some-odd minutes in this documentary,†Riedl says. “It’s a journey worth sharing, in my opinion. If I was a fan of the band, which I am—we write this music because we want to hear it that way—I’d want to see it.â€Â
As if that weren’t enough, Blood Incantation also created a separate soundtrack for the documentary. During the pre-production period for Timewave Zero, Riedl estimates that the band recorded 40 to 50 hours of music that wasn’t released. Some of that will now appear as the All Gates Open soundtrack.Â
“We didn’t want to license other people’s music for the soundtrack, and we didn’t want to use our own music from previous albums,†he explains. “But I do think the music we used creates a specific state. It’s very calm, very pastoral, and that lends itself to how we were feeling in Berlin.â€Â
Like Absolute Elsewhere, it’s yet another facet of an already multifaceted band. “It shows a different side of the Timewave coin for us,†Riedl says. “People might be surprised that we made it.â€
