“I never thought I’d underestimate how big we needed obelisks to be”: On the road in Blood Incantation’s ever-expanding universe

Ever walked all the way up to the gods at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire? Until a couple of hours ago, Paul Riedl hadn’t. Which is why the moustachioed Blood Incantation frontman has elected to meet K! up here.

“Our tour manager was like, ‘Are you sure you wanna go to the top?’ Yeah, I want this guy from Kerrang! to walk to the very top floor,” he laughs. “We’ve never had anything like this before, man. Our tour manager asked me, ‘Did you ever think you'd be playing a venue with this many stairs?’ No, I absolutely never did, ever.”

It’s quite the view. Even empty at 12:30 in the afternoon, hours before Blood Incantation hit the stage far below for their biggest headline gig to date on these shores, the Empire's theatrical surrounds and multi-level grandeur as fine an illustration as any of the band’s changing fortunes since their fourth album, Absolute Elsewhere, was released a year ago. Already a good and respected name, known for high-level expertise in death metal, as well as an otherworldly oddness and a wide creative canvas, as seen on 2022’s all ambient synth outing Timewave Zero, it’s seen them voyaging into an even more colossal universe than anyone could have predicted.

This evening’s show is packed. At Manchester’s Albert Hall a couple of nights ago, a venue chosen partly for its staggering architecture, almost 2,000 people turned out. Surveying the stage being set now, high up in “this glorious building”, Paul observes with a lingering sense of disbelief that the movements of the past year have been “enlivening”. So much so that, impressive at the two light-up obelisks that flank the stage are, with venues growing in size, he says with the driest of humour that their original imposingness now seems “pitiful”.

“I mean, look at how far away we are from the stage,” he points out. “We thought those things were the biggest possible obelis you could possibly have ever made. They’re 12-feet tall, three metres, and now we’ve played dozens of stages already where they look like a fucking vocal monitor. They look so tiny on these stages!”

Again, outgrowing the scenery is a good illustration of how things are going.

“We were like, ‘Clearly these obelisks are so huge that we can use them forever…’ When we had them built last year they were solid pieces, so they took up an insane amount of space in the trailer. They were very difficult to deal with, and the bottom pieces didn't even fit through a lot of standard doors. The guy who built them flew out and chopped them up into these modular pieces so we could pack them in. Then we put them in a sarcophagus-sized shipping crate, like something straight out of The Mummy – you had to crack it open with a crowbar. Then he built a second pair for us back in the States. Technically, we have four of them, but the ones at the back would look pitiful. So, we need to have bigger ones on one side to create that forced perspective.

“But, honestly, I never thought I’d ever be in a position where we’d underestimated how big we needed ancient obelisks to be. It’s fucking crazy, man.”

Until two years ago, Blood Incantation toured in a van. This European leg of the Absolute Elsetour is only the third time the band have had their own nightliner. In keeping with the “steep learning curve” that Paul says they’ve had on every jaunt over the past year that have increased both crew and band members, now including live synths, the logistics of such a vehicle is something that never much occurred to them before. Having done a drop and go in West London, necessity means it’s parked at literally the opposite end of the city, by The O2 in Greenwich.

“It’s like they say: more money, more problems,” he smiles. “I’ve been on tour since 2007, and my first record came out in 2006. It took me 40 tours to get even my own bandwagon – like an RV thing – and it took me 41 tours to get an actual bus of our own. I'm currently on my 43rd tour, and the learning curve keeps going up. We’re like, ‘Okay, well, we made it to the bus, so we figured this out, we’ve got this on lock.’ Then we get to the next tour and already the stakes are higher. The learning curve has continued to go up.”

So, though, has the potential. Blood Incantation are a band who want to create something immersive, something out-there, that pulls you in and creates a world of its own. When Paul says the columns look pitiful now – and, it should be noted, they’re actually not, they look brilliant – it’s with humourous exasperation that their ideas weren’t big enough to keep up.

“We bought a drum riser last year,” he says, by way of example. “They are not cheap. I had to pay for the riser on my own personal credit card because the band had no income. We were like, ‘This is surely a big enough thing, right?’ Technically, no! But as we're able to afford to expand the production and the presentation, the capacity for us to present our ideas becomes more viable. It’s amazing. Honestly, it’s the greatest thing.

“Imagine if the drum riser looked like some sort of ziggurat, steps like at a temple, and the drum front, the monitors in the front were covered with a rock-looking structure, so we're in this ruined temple,” he continues, excitedly. “And then the backdrop, instead of being a logo, is like looking out from the top of a temple to some alien planet. Then we want to get foliage and have some plants to bring some greenery and some kind of organic look to the stuff, like this ruinous alien temple landscape.

“We want it so the suspension of disbelief is enhanced by the dissolution of this strict audience-barrier-venue-band stage look. There's smells, like incense burning, lights, sound, physical sensations, vibrations. We're trying to create a holistic, fully immersive experience for people.”

This stretches to every part of the tour. The music between bands, and curation of supports, is meticulous. In the UK, it’s Finnish psych black metal oddities Oranssi Pazuzu and cavernous death metallers Sijjin. Elswehere, Pallbearer have been on board, as have legendary Birmingham funeral doom outfit Esoteric. It’s to show many sides of where Blood Incantation have come from, what inspires them, and what makes them who they are.

“This is one of the few bands that can make something like this happen,” nods Paul. “I think Absolute Elsewhere is an extremely brutal prog album, but via the lens of death metal and Krautrock and experimental electronic music. I just love this idea of putting everything in the pot, like death metal, speed metal, black metal, funeral doom, heavy metal, and then swirling, cosmic atmospherics, epic synths, soundscape, sound design, textural stuff, cinematic stuff. Bands have done it better than we have, but we're still trying our best to make an effective combo of these different palettes, you know. And people seem to like it…”

As with Blood Incantation’s acidy musical universe, what the frontman finds so exciting about all this is the potential and possibility. After decades spent on the road in plenty of bands, it’s brilliant that dedicated lifers such as these are able to reap some fruits. But the creative possibilities and doors it opens is just as important. Impressive and mighty as the show is tonight, navigating their way through all of Absolute Elsewhere before an encore of older cuts, it really does feel like space is the limit.

“I'm 38 now,” Paul reflects. “Would you have told 18-year-old Paul that he’d be able to play a venue like this, I would have been like, ‘No way?! In London? Why would I do that?’ We have stupid props and all this stuff on the stage already, but it's amazing to think that we're only just getting started. We’re having to adjust to this touring, but we've finally been granted the bandwidth to attempt our ambition.”

The Stargate is still yet to fully open. Brace yourself for when it does.

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