Therefore, the term kosmische Musik more narrowly relates to the specific direction of musicians who, as a medium, realize life’s molecular processes directly through their instrument of electronic vibrations. The music of cells is a song of flashes organically superimposed over each other, whose moments are eternities and whose eternities are moments.
– Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, liner notes to the Ohr sampler Kosmische Musik (1972)
The gatekeepers and metal purists have had a rough few years. Deafheaven, who were already dancing at the edges of acceptability, released Infinite Granite, which had singing on it. Iconoclastic label the Flenser has put out album after album of esoteric thunder: Agriculture’s ecstatic debut hit you with a saxophone breakdown less than a minute and a half into the first track; Midwife and Vyva Melinkolya’s Orbweaving poured “heaven metal” and shoegaze into a cement mixer and dared listeners to say that the outcome wasn’t hard as hell. Liturgy have subjected the concept of “genre” to repeated blasts of sunfire annihilation. The boundaries have shifted; the rules have changed. “Metal”, especially that which once went by “black metal”, stopped fitting into the card catalogue, and we’re all so much better off for it.
In some respects, death metal has been a little slower to find its watershed moment. Maybe this makes sense in the context of a subgenre that is literally named after the band that invented it (imagine if the everyday name for fusion was “Hancock jazz”). But in 2019, right at the cusp of metal’s new wave of genre experiments, Blood Incantation did the unthinkable, something that certain fans of the broader genre still haven’t forgiven them for: they released Hidden History of the Human Race, a death metal with widespread appeal.
No longer was it necessary to labor through the punishing stylings of Necrot and Gorguts to find your feet in the death metal scene—Blood Incantation discovered just the right combination of blazing riffs, crusty palm mutes, and space-cadet zone-outs to welcome a broad audience into the fold. Then they doubled down on idiosyncrasy by following Hidden History with Timewave Zero, a dark ambient interstellar voyage that remains a daring, if occasionally tedious, experiment.
After Timewave Zero came the Luminescent Bridge EP—a two-song odyssey that signaled to fans that guitars were back—and I had a revelation halfway through the nine-minute music video for the title track. The band members were carting their instruments around over sand dunes strewn with ancient ruins; ringed planets, colorful moons, and meteor showers sparkled in the uncanny blue daytime sky. A wide shot revealed a group member raising a mallet high over his head, then bringing it down with a crash onto a four-foot gong silhouetted gracefully against a backdrop of falling stars.
I realized this while watching this video: Blood Incantation don’t owe their popular appeal to sci-fi themes or album covers that won’t make your eyes bleed. It’s not about synthesizers or double bass pedals or ancient astronauts. No, Blood Incantation are beloved amongst music fans of all stripes and persuasions because they are having more fun playing death metal than any other band alive, and there is something purely irresistible about unadulterated joy. On Absolute Elsewhere, their most recent opus, they produce an homage to the delights that come with following your inclination wherever it leads you, saying “yes” to every impulse—a collage of genres that sonically embodies the creative principle: “The only bad idea is the one we haven’t had yet.” On paper, it’s a mess. On your most expensive headphones or your best living room speakers, it’s a joyride.
Like Luminescent Bridge, Absolute Elsewhere has just two songs; unlike its predecessor, each of these tracks is split into three movements, which the band calls “tablets”. Calling back to the opening moments of their first EP, Interdimensional Extinction, Blood Incantation open with a short synthesizer flourish before a manic double-bass barrage that chases the lead guitar line up and down the fretboard. Ominous chords that drone in the background show what they mean by calling their sound “atmospheric death metal”.
The first proggy spaceout starts about two minutes into the track, with soft synthesizer tones humming over arpeggios that eventually resolve into rhythmic chords over a sturdy marching beat. The moment a Niklas Malmqvist from Hällas, the Swedish space-rock group, hits his huge synth lead line, trading solos with Morris Kolontyrsky’s guitar, will be the moment when listeners learn whether or not this album is for them—do you hear the goofy tones of space opera camp or the cosmic song that vibrates inside the mathematical structure of the rings of Saturn?
“Tablet II” of “The Stargate” features Tangerine Dream’s Thorsten Quaeschning with a pulsing synthesizer line that shimmers off into an acoustic dreamscape that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Yes album, providing another moment that will alienate some people for the same reason that it draws others in. Hansa Tonstudio, where Blood Incantation tracked the LP, was also the birthing ward for space age albums by Brian Eno, David Bowie, and—yes—Tangerine Dream, and the influence of Hansa alumni would be obvious even if one of them weren’t playing on the record.
As avatars of light and dark, kosmische Musik and cosmic metal shouldn’t work together; however, Blood Incantation’s new krautrock stylings feel at home in their long history of reverb-laden interludes. Incidentally, the film dialogue quoted in this otherwise instrumental track is from Luigi Cozzi’s 1980 film Contamination, which features a score by the Italian horror-prog heroes in Goblin, best known for the haunting scores that accompany Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso and Suspiria.
The dissonance at the end of “Tablet II” bleeds into a moshable breakdown at the beginning of “Tablet III”, in which Paul Riedl growls about “eternal rest in mists of dead stars”. Riedl’s vocals are crystal clear on this record, at least by death metal standards, and the washes of echo and reverb make the lyrics easier to follow. The philosophy Riedl expounds upon in the lyrics makes a lot of esoteric statements about consciousness transcending death and flying around in space, which sometimes sounds vaguely Buddhist but is more of a New Age amalgamation of various mystical traditions. In a show of the contradictions embodied by the whole album, Blood Incantation reserve both their first moment of clean singing and their mightiest sonic onslaught for the closing minutes of “Tablet III”.
Relatively bright, shimmering chords open “Tablet I” of “The Message”, which vacillates between clean arpeggios and colossal waves of distortion as Riedl straightforwardly poses the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Through its obsession with flesh, meat, sinew, and mortality, death metal has arguably been posing versions of this question ever since Scream Bloody Gore, like the horror movies from which it traditionally draws so much inspiration. It is a little jarring to hear Riedl pose this question so starkly and simply here, almost as if someone forgot to wrap death metal’s philosophical quandaries up in their traditional bloodstained robes and gory capes.
Riedl and Kolontyrsky trade guitar heroics for roughly the first half of the second “Tablet II”, which features an epic canyon of plainsong-style vocals that invite the listener to “hear the voices calling your name from someplace behind the soul of Time”. Like similar climactic moments in cinematic sci-fi epics, this moment might be ridiculous and it might be profound; it might be a little of both. At the end of the track, binaural reminders to “wake up” are superseded by a thrashworthy series of palm-muted chugs, which opens “Tablet III” of “The Message”, Absolute Elsewhere’s big 11-minute finish.
When was the last time a death metal band encouraged listeners to “recognize one’s place within the dance” over the wistful hum of Mellotron flutes? Never, that’s when. As the proggy breakdown gradually escalates into a transcendent wall of sound that, speaking with complete frankness, sounds a little bit like a black metal rhythm line, Blood Incantation throw off the shackles of genre and tradition to find new wide open spaces between the stars.
Death metal will always have to reckon with macho fans who repudiate any record that doesn’t both reference and sound like a cannibal’s chainsaw, and it’s true that Absolute Elsewhere casts a gentler shadow than other death metal nightmares. There is a time and a place to have a guy named Corpsegrinder yelling at you about “seas of gore as far as the eye can see”, but in a scene as diverse as death metal can and should be, there’s also room to be invited on an intergalactic journey of self-discovery, where the only death is ego death. “All life is temporary,” Riedl reminds us. “What lasts is consciousness.”
Nevertheless, with these expansive and possibly even progressive goals in mind, Blood Incantation’s thematic choices leave some questions unanswered. The name Absolute Elsewhere comes from a group that musically interpreted the work of Swiss pseudoscience promoter Erich von Däniken, one of the originators of the Eurocentric “ancient aliens” theory, and—as colorfully as sci-fi painter Steven Dodd’s work shines—the obelisks and pyramids of the album suggest some tropes that call for critique. Dr. Stuart Tyson Smith, who worked as the on-set Egyptologist for Roland Emmerich’s Stargate film, reminds us that von Däniken’s theories “served colonial and racist agendas by explaining away the accomplishments of peoples that were coming under colonial rule by white European and American empires”, assuming that ancient visitations from extraterrestrials are more probable explanations for the existence of the pyramids than any technical prowess on the part of ancient North African peoples.
In an interview with Antichrist Magazine’s Stanley Hatt, Riedl made a pretty clear statement about von Däniken that will probably put many people’s concerns about this to rest: “The album does not draw on Erich von Däniken’s ideas, and our band is not influenced by them – our record is merely named after the band Absolute Elsewhere, who’s 1978 album In Search of Ancient Gods does draw from those ideas, but for us is just a great album title.”
That’s good news, and it is indeed the case that precious little of the lyrical content has anything to do with myths about ancient aliens. However, it remains the case that the album title, art, and even the song name “The Stargate” (assuming it is drawn from Emmerich’s film, with its Lawrence of Arabia themes) are all connected to this pseudoscientific historiography in ways that are going to be evident to people who never read that interview. With this background in mind, while there are a number of boundary-pushing sonic moments on Absolute Elsewhere that hit perfectly, the acoustic section in the middle of Tablet III of “The Stargate” shares some corny sonic tropes with the loosely “Eastern” music that often plays over the desert biome of a video game or Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Dune.
Absolute Elsewhere doesn’t have to be a perfect album to be a breathtaking achievement. While certain aesthetic choices may raise tricky questions for critically conscious listeners, the record also offers a uniquely heartfelt and positive take on what death metal can be, along with a boldly auteurist vision for the genre’s future. In all caps, the lyric sheet for “The Message” encourages the listener “TO BE! TO CREATE! / TO KNOW THYSELF! TO GIVE!” It’s easy to accept such an exhortation from a group of people so gloriously dedicated to taking their own advice and blazing their own trail across the stars.
CITATIONS
Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies by Ulrich Adelt. University of Michigan Press, 2016.
Egypt and Stargate by Stuart Tyson Smith. Digital Hammurabi, 2021.
Interview with Paul Riedl by Stanley Hatt. Antichrist Magazine, August 19, 2024.