Mystical visions, magic mushrooms, space-rock freak-outs – all part of Blood Incantation’s DNA. As the death metal visionaries hit the UK on the back of their mind-bending Absolute Elsewhere album, they take Kerrang! into their weird universe, and explain how music can unlock your consciousness…
“We’re weird, mystical guys,” says Paul Riedl. “We want to make mystical music for mystical people.”
Blood Incantation’s frontman has been talking, along with drummer Isaac Faulk, for the thick end of two hours. It’s a conversation that’s taken in wild visions, LSD and magic mushrooms, the occult, the curious nature of serendipity and coincidence, detailed deconstructions of music and the creative process, and no end of references to other metal and prog bands. At the end of it all, though, it’s this simple remark that so perfectly sums up their universe.
The pair and their band do, indeed, make mystical music. Their fourth album, Absolute Elsewhere, was one of 2024’s most astonishing records. Split into two ‘tablets’ named The Stargate and The Message, it is a vast, creative endeavour that vibrantly bridges the worlds of death metal, cosmic prog, and spaced-out synth music, with as many moments of lush, Pink Floyd-y psychedelia as there are Morbid Angel-ish bursts of aggression.
Blood Incantation’s name was already a well respected one, thanks to two albums of death metal that sounded like it was coming from space. It was with 2022’s all-synth voyage Timewave Zero that they showed quite how limitless things truly were. With Absolute Elsewhere, the band – Paul and Isaac, plus guitarist Morris Kolontyrsky and bassist Jeff Barrett – revealed themselves as one of the finest and most important metal acts of their time, and found ears far beyond the heavy underground they normally call home.
“There’s been this joyous acceptance of this crazy thing,” says Isaac. “There’s a pool of people that are getting interested in this music. Maybe they came for the prog elements, maybe they came for the metal, maybe they came for something completely different. We had people coming to the shows saying that this was their first metal show ever. That resonated with me, because it’s translated into something more universal than just a death metal record.”
And if people also think you’re out-of-your-mind, space-death-metal eccentrics?
“This is just who we are,” laughs Paul. “We met as friends because we like psychedelics, black metal, sci-fi, ambient, prog-rock…
“Like I say, we’re kind of weird.”
Even at 10 o’clock on a bright morning in their Denver home city, you can quickly get pulled in by the gravity that swirls around Blood Incantation. Paul gives the impression of a friendly magician who still hasn’t made it home from Woodstock. Isaac, sporting a shirt of British prog legends Yes, that of a cool record store employee.
Paul admits that his conversation can quickly and often go on long diversions. Isaac, meanwhile, is happy to chat in minute detail about music, of any sort, or simply listen as his bandmate, at length, unpacks whatever universe is in front of him.
Example: asked about the roots of the band, Paul explains – via a long story he promises has a point – that they stretch back to a 2009 trip he took to the Yucatán. Here, in the ancient Mayan settlement of Coba he “experienced a metaphysical vision on top of a pyramid”.
From his vantage point above the treeline (and, he says, sober as a judge), Paul watched as the surrounding jungle grew and pulsed in fast-forward, “like something off Planet Earth”.
“I was watching all this stuff coming and going, different civilisations rising and falling, and the sky was this huge mosaic of galaxies and rivers,” he reveals. “It was crazy, dude. It was a profound, transcendental experience. And then, in the sky, I shit you not, man, I saw the face of this old woman I’d never met. I was like, ‘Maybe this is my grandma or something.’ I figured that must be it.”
And that was that. Until Paul got home to Salem, Oregon and went to a lecture by author Michael Pollan at the local community college, only to find the woman from the sky selling books outside.
“Because I’m an insane person, I walked right up to her and I said, ‘Hey, I think we’re supposed to know each other. I think our lives have something to do with each other.’”
Which she might have found freaky, were she not the proprietor of a local bookshop dealing in works of mysticism, spirituality and the occult. Soon, she offered Paul a job. Downstairs in the store were books that added to Paul’s occult library. Upstairs, they offered “psychic fairs, metaphysical workshops, Reiki healing, astral projection”.
The customers were as you’d expect. One, Paul fondly recalls as “one of the strangest people I’ve ever met in my life”. A Cold War defector, pastor and seasoned traveller of India, conversations with him were worth keeping track of.
“He would come in and spout off the most unhinged metaphysical rants possible, and I would record it with this little tape deck behind the counter,” Paul remembers. “Once he found out that I was recording him, he didn’t freak out. He actually brought me hundreds of cassette tapes of the Prabhupada, the guy who started the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. I have literally hundreds of tapes of unreleased lectures of that kind of stuff. I would sample them in bands, or I would just sit and listen to them on mushrooms.”
Anyway, being a groovy sort, Paul’s boss allowed him time off to go on tour with his then-band Velnias, based in Colorado. And the point of this wild story emerges: this is where he met Isaac, playing in funeral doom outfit Stoic Dissention. At the same time, by coincidence the shop went out of business, so Paul upped sticks and moved state to start a band with Isaac. By 2016, with the line-up solidified by Morris and Jeff, and with the release of Starspawn, Blood Incantation were A Thing.
“Sorry,” he chuckles. “That was a lot of story…”
That’s quite the intricate version of Sliding Doors, there.
“There’s a lot of serendipity in the Blood Incantation saga,” he grins. “There’s a lot of auspiciousness, a lot of right place, right time. There’s a lot of once-in-a-lifetime things that just keep happening. I think that it inspires us.”
Stuff like this is Very Blood Incantation. On the subject of psychedelics, there’s a similarly ‘but of course’ set of tales involved.
“I first ate mushrooms when I was about 15,” says Paul. “We all come from psychedelic, hippie, proggy, whatever, very musical, creative backgrounds.”
Indeed. Jeff’s father apparently looked like he played in legendary U.S. hippie band The Allman Brothers, and whose first musical gift to his son was Biblical prog epic 666 by Aphrodite’s Child. The first time Morris ever did acid was with his folks, for his own good. Isaac has a similar psych origin story.
“My first time doing mushrooms was with my dad when I was 15,” he says. “He was doing sound at a show, this total hippie jam, World Music type of stuff. This guy in a top hat and weird clothes comes up to me and goes, ‘Hey, you want some mushrooms, man?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sounds sick.’ My dad went, ‘Give them to me…’ A few days later he went, ‘Come on, we’re going to take these up in the mountains.’”
As intrinsic to Blood Incantation’s vibe as all this is – “Oh yeah, we’re great weed music,” nods Paul, “it’s part of the DNA of how we all met” – both insist that it’s not the be-all. In fact, he says, “This is the first band I’ve ever been in where it’s possible to be too high.”
It’s about coming together to feel something, and to push your mind, but they’ve realised they’re so in tune that outside influence isn’t required anymore.
“It’s not so much that we’re on something,” explains Isaac. “Psychedelics are that type of thing where it tethers you, and it lets you go out into the portal to start exploring, and it keeps you from detaching too much. This is still very much a physical experience of a drug. But for us, it’s about that experience and what you learn from it. Really, what you can get from it is something that exists within every single person. We each have the ability to experience and to explore our own consciousness, and we should have that freedom to do so.
“Blood Incantation is about speaking to the person, the listener, and to ourselves, and saying, ‘Hey, this is up to you.’ However far you want to take yourself is up to you, and it doesn’t require drugs.”
“You don’t need to have drugs to take a trip with our music,” agrees Paul. “But if you do, it’ll be even crazier…”
Blood Incantation are about taking the listener, and themselves, beyond the final frontier. Particularly after Timewave Zero, they realised “the sky’s the limit”, so went into Absolute Elsewhere with an attitude that no idea was too far-out. Actually, notes Isaac, “We ended up doing a lot of ideas and then not including them, because we had such a free approach to it.”
The band are also hugely proud that Absolute Elsewhere and Timewave Zero are the results of collaboration: four musicians on an equal footing, feeling ideas out together.
“That would maybe cause problems for other bands,” says Paul. “But for us, it seems to have only bolstered our respective songwriting, which allowed us to write The Stargate and The Message respectively, which are, I think, our best and most accomplished compositions.”
“There’s just something so cool about the collaborative aspect of a band working together,” adds Isaac. “Think of The Beatles, or Pink Floyd, where everybody’s putting it in. It’s not just one person.”
Where this leads is anyone’s guess. But, in such uncharted territory, that’s actually very exciting for Blood Incantation.
“I think three years from this record, we will really begin to see just how far the tentacles are reaching,” muses Paul. “Some people try to criticise us by saying we’re a ‘gateway’ band now, but that’s great! For extreme music, I’d say that’s probably one of the best launching pads you could ask for.”
As for the immediate future, such as their appearance at London’s Incineration Festival this spring, they promise an experience. And bigger venues like the Roundhouse mean they’re already thinking about the grandest ideas their imaginations can throw up.
“There is no ceiling,” says Isaac. “We never thought of our music as one thing. We’ve got ideas, like timpanis, that just aren’t practical, but who knows? We never thought we’d do half the things we have.”
“One day,” winks Paul, “you’ll get an hour-long song called Blood Incantation, from the album Blood Incantation, presented live on Broadway. We should be careful what we joke about, though. The universe is malleable. You’ve got to be careful what you wish for.”
Right…
“I think people can see we’re just weird guys, and that’s why we make weird music,” he says again. “So, if you’re a weird person, you’re probably going to like it.”
Blood Incantation play Incineration Festival this month. This interview originally appeared in the spring 2025 issue of Kerrang!.
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