Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. Yes, that’s an audacious, possibly hyperbolic claim, but few can claim a sonic watershed as readily as this Denver, Colorado quartet. Hovering at nearly 45 minutes, their longest recording thus far, the two sprawling yet exacting compositions that make up this album are as confounding as they are engaging. It’s an architecture of music at odds with itself: an acceleration through a Kubrickian stargate into a realm of aural ideas in harmonious opposition, uniting unlikely binaries of aural heavens and hells. For inspiration, the group looked to the mid-'70s progressive rock collective, Absolute Elsewhere (best known as a celestial stopover for King Crimson drummer, Bill Bruford) as the album’s namesake. For the uninitiated, Absolute Elsewhere’s landmark 1976 album, In Search of Ancient Gods, was constructed as a musical accompaniment to the works of Chariots of the Gods author, Erich Von Daniken, and his theories of non-terrestrial humanoid prompts towards mankind’s evolution. The subject matter of which should serve as no surprise to anyone familiar with Blood Incantation’s prior LPs and cosmically philosophical leanings. But make no mistake, the four musicians working under the BI banner for the past decade – guitarist and vocalist Paul Riedl, drummer Isaac Faulk, guitarist Morris Kolontyrsky, and bassist Jeff Barrett – have successfully left the microgravity of genre behind and are re-writing the Rosetta Stone of extreme music with a new language entirely.
The analogue-tape-induced star maps that have archived Blood Incantation’s journey thus far are ones of future and past histories in collision: Anno 2011, dog-eared Science Fiction paperbacks, psychedelic future shocks, and theoretical cosmic postulation melded together with a love for the extremes atmospheres and possibilities of outsider Death Metal. Sumerian creation myths interspersed with the spirit of '70s Progressive Rock to yield creative ignition made manifest in the form of 2015’s Interdimensional Extinction demo EP, itself recorded in 2013. From there, Blood Incantation unleashed the scene-shattering Starspawn (2016) before traversing folds of musical space on a three-year touring mission across the globe, finally arriving at the landmark of Hidden History of the Human Race (2019)… Wherein four monumental, tome-like exaltations of aural intellect crystalized their course and provided hieroglyphic-hewn star maps pointing towards new destinations, revealing a distinctive strain of Death Metal at its most progressive, philosophical, and transcendental.
Ever pushing forward, Blood Incantation expanded the scene’s collective consciousness with their love for the 1973-1993 continuum: tunneling deeper into the realms of Prog and Krautrock with the wordless, cinematic & pulsating Timewave Zero EP (2022). An exploration further illuminating the shared musical space between progenitors like Popol Vuh and where Tangerine Dream’s Conrad Schnitzler intersected with Euronymous on the intro to Mayhem’s “Deathcrush”. An unexpected, though mercilessly canon tribute to Kosmische Musik/Ambient/Krautrock via the ominous & atmospheric BI lens, Timewave Zero not only bestowed license upon Blood Incantation to perpetually explore deeper horizons, but also proved why they were far more than merely adroit death-dealers on a Decibel Tour with Cannibal Corpse. Demonstrations like BI’s February 26, 2022, Denver, CO all-synth show or 2024’s Roadburn Festival appearance where they played back-to-back death metal and ambient explorations made it clear: Blood Incantation have honed their abilities to go boldly where few bands have gone before, and reveal no signs of slowing down.
Decamping to the celebrated Hansa Studios in Berlin, Germany in Summer 2023 with wünderkid producer Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Spectral Voice, Kreator, Wayfarer, Sumerlands, etc) wasn’t merely a choice for Blood Incantation but an absolute necessity. For the band to capture the many writhing twists & turns, celestial psychedelia, and utter extremity of Absolute Elsewhere, Blood Incantation turned to the legendary pre-Weimar-built recording complex where many of their most progressive influences - including Tangerine Dream, Eloy, and Brian Eno - converged to create classic albums. Unmistakably, Hansa and Berlin became part of the underlying atmospheric character of the album. The city’s rich history as an epicenter of countercultural spirit permeated the sessions and yielded the unyielding eclecticism which rests resolutely at the core of Absolute Elsewhere. Sessions found the band locked in so creatively with one another to the point of playing through the entirety of the monumental B-Side suite, “The Message”, from start to finish. The album itself, wrapped in artwork by the iconic Sci-Fi/fantasy painter, Steve R. Dodd, illuminates their innate message and spirit more clearly than ever before: Contemplating the mystery of flesh, the human spirit and the hidden history of Nature and universal creation. For simply, we, as a species, are the Blood Incantation.
