Time will be the ultimate judge of whether Absolute Elsewhere, Blood Incantation’s latest and most audacious work of cosmic death metal, will be an all-time genre classic, but in the here and now, some six months after its release, it feels like it is on that trajectory, revealing more of itself with each spin.
This protean union of death metal, krautrock and prog has been years in the making, an evolutionary pathway that can be traced back to the musical progressivism secreted in the primordial old-school death metal sludge of the Denver, Colorado quartet’s 2016 debut album, Starspawn.
That opened with a crushing 13-minute epic titled Vitrification Of Blood (Part I), hardly the work of a band whose creative ambitions extended to reanimating early ‘90s Dismember or Incantation for today’s audience.
Frontman/guitarist Paul Riedl says the reception to Absolute Elsewhere’s progressive rock outreach highlighted this. That passages of languid ambience and meditative krautrock share as much airtime as high-voltage extreme metal is distorting people’s perceptions of their earlier works; in other words, Starspawn was already pretty damn prog.
“We are in complete understanding that Blood Incantation is not a death metal band. We get it,” says Riedl. “The music retains many elements of death metal. But even then, it is almost galvanising our old works to be perceived as more metal than they were when they originally dropped.
“Because there are Pink Floyd parts on the first song of our first record. There are instrumental acoustic songs. There are synthesizers, counterpoint melodies to guitar solos, interludes, all these atmospheric components – from our very first record.”
Starspawn’s follow-up, Hidden History Of The Human Race is a work of quicksilver death metal replete with some explicit call-outs to Morbid Angel – not least the slime green logo a la Domination – and it took those provocations one step further.
Blood Incantation deliberately chose the instrumental Inner Paths (To Outer Space) chosen as the lead single to “really push to people this idea that something different is happening here”.
After the state-of-the-art brutality of Hidden History… the Timewave Zero EP opened the air-lock with a wholly ambient work of minimalist space music. The expansion of their musical vocabulary allowed Absolute Elsewhere to be altogether something different again.
“We are not a puritanical band. We don’t believe there is only one right way to make a band, or to write a song, or to make a record,” says Riedl. “We are so unencumbered and unbothered by these externally imposed rules or other people’s ideas for what music should be or should not be. And we think it’s great if they don’t want to mix ‘70s prog with death metal – but we have to do it.
“All we want to hear is parts that combine Morbid Angel, Lykathea Aflame, Opeth, Death, Gorguts, Pink Floyd, funeral doom, black metal, all these sounds, because we just love music, man.”
“People are like, ‘I can’t believe you’re mixing these two styles,’ but we are not the first band to do that,” says guitarist Morris Kolontyrsky. “We’re just doing it in a way that we see fit. Like we say, Pandaemonium was doing all sorts of crazy prog styles in extreme metal.”
Given that Blood Incantation’s thematic preoccupations take them beyond the solar system in search of metaphysical epiphanies, it is only fitting that the arrangements follow suit – as though they’re using the medium of stargazing prog and the cleansing fire of death metal as the James Webb Space Telescope, the means to see further.
It was the craziest summer ever. I’ve never had a more extreme recording experience than that
Paul Riedl
Hansa Studios, in Berlin, would be the launch site for Absolute Elsewhere. The legendary studios where Brian Eno worked with David Bowie, Tangerine Dream’s home turf. All Blood Incantation had to do for a summer – one whole summer of nothing else – was make the biggest record of their lives, and it was intense.
“It was the craziest summer ever. I’ve never had a more extreme recording experience than that,” says Riedl. “We literally had nothing we even could do, even if we wanted to, besides wake up, record, and go to bed, wake up, record, and go to bed. Every single second of every day we had to focus on the task at hand.”
Enabling all this was underground metal’s über producer Arthur Rizk and Hansa’s use-anything policy to its vintage gear. Everything was at their disposal. If they wanted to use the piano that David Bowie used, they could; same for all the old Tangerine Dream gear that was lying around.
They took the latter to its logical conclusion and actually got Tangerine Dream’s Thorsten Quaeschning to deliver a guest spot on synths/organ.
Absolute Elsewhere has their usual complement of BC Rich Ironbirds – Kolontyrsky using one on its most Gilmour-esque solo – but there’s a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson acoustic guitar too. Rizk encouraged them to experiment with electric guitar tones.
“Arthur calls it ‘scene change’ like a movie, and every time we do a scene change he wants a different tone,” says Riedl. “And the guitar tones, even though there is a uniform [Peavey] 5150 track underneath everything, it’s peppered with different sections on top of it that makes it a very dynamic guitar tone throughout the album.”
The keys of the piano actually sounded terrible, like a honky-tonk saloon piano, but having the sustain pedal held down creates this dark ambient swell in the background of everything
Paul Riedl
That tone search saw them constantly switching up guitar amps. Rizk used his contact book to borrow Kreator frontman/guitarist Mille Petrozza’s modded ‘Block Letter’ Peavey 5150 head, which was used for all of the leads (Rizk had produced Kreator’s Hate Über Alles at Hansa Studios in 2022). Mille Riedl and Kolontyrski also had regular 5105 II and 6505+ heads. A Roland Jazz Chorus and a Fender Twin were bi-amped for the clean tones.
Rizk would track each guitar via three sources, either a trio of recording microphones or two mics and DI going straight to the desk, allowing him to pull together a sound that was huge, more saturated, but retained its clarity. “One of those mics is maybe a bit drier, one’s got the DI going underneath it just to add a little definition per string,” says Riedl. “So it was a much more scrutinising process for the guitars.”
Albums like this need ideas, even the crazy ones. Rizk would entertain them all. And if they didn’t work, he’d keep that take on file just in case it would became useful later. He would find a place for those sounds.
“Arthur is a very open guy. He’ll get the best take out of you,” says Kolontyrsky. “But when he is behind the board he is not afraid to let you move around knobs and touch things.
“I’ve been in studios where it’s like, ‘You stay back here. You can’t touch any of that stuff.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, man, just fuck with it. I’m doing the same thing you are.’ Here’s creating. He’s being an artist.”
Rizk had some crazy ideas of his own. Throughout Absolute Elsewhere there is the sound of a piano that has its strings mic’d up with a $20,000 Neumann U-57 from the ‘50s. The Neumann would pick up a “rumbling ambience” as tracking took place.
“The keys of the piano actually sounded terrible, like a honky-tonk saloon piano, but having the sustain pedal held down creates this dark ambient swell in the background of everything,” says Riedl. “It is imperceptible but it adds this crazy glue behind everything, where the room feels moving and textural because the strings are actually moving from the vibration of the drums and our amps and stuff, even though the guitar amps and cabs themselves are in an isolated room.
“Just little things like that, which are trivial, they serve to imperceptibly enhance the listening experience, and Arthur is full of ideas like that.”
Arguably Rizk’s best idea was to make sure Kian Moghaddamzadeh was on-hand as assistant engineer. Rizk had worked with Moghaddamzadeh when he was tracking with Kreator and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Hansa Studios patch bay was essential. Not only that, but he saved the sessions. He saved the studios too.
“There was a point when one of the units broke down in the area that helps all the outboard equipment cool so the board can keep running,” says Kolontyrsky. “He jerry-rigged this insane swamp cooler system before the AC company could go fix it. It was causing him a lot of stress because the board could have easily overheated and we would have lost everything.”
“We would not just have lost our stuff but they would have lost a third of the studio’s,” adds Riedl. “It was almost a week without this stuff, and he kept on inventing this Frankenstein tubing. He is like Data from Star Trek. He was fixing the engineering problem every day, there at 6am, freaking out until the end of the day when it finally cooled back down – and still patching everything and helping Arthur. It was really crazy.”
The story of Absolute Elsewhere is a little close to the maxim that says to create something first you must destroy. It’s like that scene in Oppenheimer – the chances of destroying Hansa Studios in the making of the record were not zero.
“Yeah, they were not zero,” says Riedl. “They also had to upgrade their Pro Tools for the first time since the late ‘90s because we actually maxed out the number of individual voices that can sound at the same time. We had so many tracks.”
Kolontyrsky: “Now when you record at Hansa you have more tracks—”
Riedl: “—because of Blood Incantation. We have helped the world.”
The Berlin heatwave can also claim a credit for the album’s outro. Even with air-con, it can get hot up on the fifth floor as the sun is pouring in the window.
Riedl had the windows open as he was tracking vocals in the afternoon. “Once the sun goes on the other side of the building in the latter half of the day, you can open the windows,” he says. “There’s parts in the shade. You get the breeze flowing through. It’s very, very nice there.”
He had some effects on his mic and its signal was running to a Roland Space Echo and the desk. But then a storm came. It was too loud to do more takes, too hot to shut the window. Riedl sat the storm out but his mic was still hot and it was recording everything.
They also had to upgrade their Pro Tools for the first time since the late ‘90s because we actually maxed out the number of individual voices that can sound at the same time
Paul Riedl
“People are talking about how it is stock sounds from the ocean and it’s these waves and stuff. It’s completely not stock sounds at all, nor are they oceans and waves. It’s a torrential downpour in the summer storm season in Berlin,” he says. “We just let the tape run and recorded the storm going through the Space Echo and the mic on the reverb, which created this crazy ambient soundscape.
“We recorded maybe a half-an-hour of it. There are three or four minutes of it at the end of the record. You can hear the storm. You can hear the wind, the rain. You can hear the thunder. You can hear children running in the streets and playing in the rain. It kind of adds this nostalgic, almost bucolic energy.”
Riedl this sound – a strange, restrained euphoria of remembrance – signifies the ascending to a higher yet familiar plane, returning to a place you’ve been long removed from. There is not a word for it in English but that right there is your metaphysical epiphany, a cosmic revelation in the midst of the storm.
- Absolute Elsewhere is out now via Century Media.
- Blood Incantation are on tour across Europe and play Incineration Fest in London on 3 May. See Incineration Festival 2025 for ticket details. See Blood Incantation for all tour dates.
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