Shall we take a trip? Nobody is expanding death metal’s horizons like Colorado’s cosmic voyagers Blood Incantation. Vocalist and guitarist Paul Riedl talks us through esoteric interests, synth obsessions and receiving lyrics from somewhere beyond…
Thirteen years after their formation, Blood Incantation have finally played a show in the town where they began. The band chose Boulder, a city frontman Paul Riedl describes as “the least metal town in the world”, as the place to launch their fourth studio album, Absolute Elsewhere.
As out-there as death metal gets, the record boldly goes way beyond terrestrial geography. “We wanted to make this esoteric, mystical, otherworldly music,” says Paul. “Epic, dissonant, prog metal. But we didn’t know how, and it’s taken almost 10 years for us to learn how to write music like that.”
A man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of underground metal, Paul was also exposed to New Age music at an early age – along with the cosmic concepts that inform Blood Incantation to this day.
“I’ve always been motivated by space, since I was a little kid,” he recalls. “In the ’90s everything had an alien on it, and my dad would watch documentaries like Cosmos: A Personal Voyage with Carl Sagan. For me, it’s always been about the psychedelic cosmic consciousness and esoteric philosophy.
"Also, I’m fascinated by the ancient world. I was talking with Renato [Gallina] from Disembowelment recently and he’s been trying to get me to do past life therapy regression so I can see why I’ve always been so motivated by Sumer, Mesopotamia, Egypt and so forth, even as a baby. But I don’t know yet – it’s very expensive!”
The intensity with which Paul discusses these concepts is mirrored by the dedication he and bandmates Isaac Faulk (drums), Morris Kolontyrsky (guitar) and Jeff Barrett (bass) have applied to their music from their earliest days.
“Athletes will come out to Colorado to train because of the lower oxygen levels in the air,” he explains of their home state’s mountainous regions. “So we were practicing quite relentlessly at elevation five or six days a week. And we do it full-bore, we rock out, so you get the battle conditions. Then when we dropped down to sea level on our first couple tours, we were just tearing it up. The local bands were getting eaten alive by these little tiny dudes playing super-fast stuff.”
Incredibly, Paul and his bandmates mapped out the first decade of Blood Incantation from the off, right down to album cover colour schemes. Their third full-length was always planned to be an ambient record, and so it came to pass with 2022’s Timewave Zero. An instrumental album featuring all four members playing vintage-sounding synthesizers, its atmospheric drift drew heavily from the likes of Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream. A year of improvising changed the way they communicated as musicians, while the meticulous composition of the finished pieces would inspire a new methodology. Not that everyone got it…
“The album release show for Timewave was tense,” remembers Paul. “You could feel people waiting before we played, like what is gonna happen, what is this death metal band doing, surrounded by crystals and salt lamps and incense and stacks of analogue synths?
“But at Roadburn this year, we played two sets, one was Timewave… and the other was metal. And the energy of that Timewave performance was one of the most profound experiences of our lives, because the audience was present, emotionally available, in this sensitive environment. It was amazing, it was really life-affirming – it was crazy, man!”
All of these experiences have fed into Absolute Elsewhere. A 44-minute album consisting of two longform pieces, it is the band’s most fearless concoction to date, mixing the chaotic churn of Morbid Angel or Gorguts with space-rock, prog and even jazz fusion. Recording in Berlin’s storied Hansa Studios even allowed them to tap an inspiration for some help when Thorsten Quaeschning, leader of Tangerine Dream since founder Edgar Froese’s death in 2015, stopped by to see what was up.
“He’s extremely stoic, a very German guy!” laughs Paul. “He was sitting there just listening, and I dared not look to see if he was interested or not. Everyone just sat kinda awkwardly for 44 minutes. When he left, we didn’t know if he liked it or hated it!”
Happily, a while later they received an invite to Thorsten’s studio. “He played what he’d done for us and it straight up sounded like [classic 1974 Tangerine Dream record] Phaedra! And then he turned around from the console and was like, ‘Oh, I hope you don’t mind, I used the Phaedra Mellotron.’ It was physically sampled from Edgar Froese’s actual Mellotron, and that’s why it sounds so crazy!”
If Absolute Elsewhere takes you to another place sonically, it’s entirely in keeping with the band’s lyrical preoccupations; its first half is titled The Stargate, another iteration of a concept they’ve been writing about since the first track on their first demo.
“You’re in a temple,” says Paul. “There’s some sort of ritual happening, you go through the gate, and your consciousness is floating through the universe. You come back from this other place, someplace absolutely elsewhere, and then the monolith reappears and it makes you go again, creating this cyclical narrative quality.”
If that hasn’t scrambled your head, Paul doesn’t even think he wrote the lyrics to the album’s second track.
“That’s why it’s called The Message, it felt like I received this from someplace outside myself. I did not write the message, I am not even the messenger, I am simply the cartographer of the message.”
And while couched in the very BI language of transcendence and the cosmic, at heart this song is a very necessary plea for positivity, Paul singing, ‘Fight the tide of greed… Sow peace through deeds.’ This is all part of the band coming to terms with their increasing prominence.
“Shit, maybe now we are at the precipice of a greater responsibility than we had really been aware of before,” says Paul. “That mantle of stewardship of the collective consciousness that we are treading in, maybe we should take it seriously. We are all about this expansive, collaborative, inclusive, growing energy.
“Currently we are some place absolutely elsewhere, we don’t know where it’s gonna go next. But we are fans of this music above all else, and as it unfurls and becomes greater than the sum of its parts, we too grow.”
Blood Incantation's album Absolute Elsewhere is out now via Century Media.
Read this next:
