Interview mit Paul Riedl von Blood Incantation (Teil 2/2)

You mentioned bringing in other people for more creative energy. Obviously you also did that on “Absolute Elsewhere”, which features Nicklas Malmqvist (Hällas), Malte Gerricke (Sijjin) and Thorsten Quaeschning (Tangerine Dream), what was it like to work with these artists?
This collaborative energy is extremely inspiring. It’s very motivating for us. The last five years have been really an evolutionary period for the band internally, not just with bigger shows and good record sales and whatnot. One of the things we learned is that sometimes the best person for a job is not you, and that doesn’t mean that you can’t do the job. Doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t do a great job at it, it just means that if each person is doing less through delegation, the total product is raised, and its end result. So we knew we had to bring these guys in.

We met Nicklas, we had met him before because since 2018 Hällas and BI have played several festivals together. We always punish them, because they’re just the only great band. They’re the best band that started this century, bar none. The guitar players are incredible. The guitar tone is incredible, the arrangements, the synths, the mixing, is just top, top, top tier. This band deserves to be in a stadium.

So we’re in Denver, and we all approach him, and he has a great anecdote for this event in the deluxe edition of “Absolute Elsewhere”. He talks about these four quirky looking guys who approached him. We gave him a tape of some pre production for “Absolute Elsewhere” and he was so overwhelmed, because he’s Swedish, he’s typically a quite reserved, quiet guy. He was just like, “Who are these fucking guys?” I just put my phone number on the tape, and I was like, “won’t you come to Berlin on these dates?” As he says in the book, once someone says, “won’t you come to Berlin” you do.

So he came, and at first he was really uncertain about what in the hell he was doing there. He was like “I’m gonna play mellotron flutes on a death metal record. This doesn’t make any sense. Certainly, you guys are insane.” He actually even said- there’s this one part, we call it “the gnome in the grass” because it sounds like a gnome in the grass back in the medieval times. And he literally said, “This is not allowed. You will be crucified for this!” And we’re like, “Play that! That’s the melody.” It’s a little too saccharine, a little too much ear candy. And we knew, this had to be it, so we told him: “You have to play it like that.” And he’s like, “this is insane. This sounds like hippie.” And I told him “it must be more hippie. It must be super crazy!”

He was uncertain at first, but then kind of ingratiated himself, or we ingratiated ourselves into his mannerism. On the third day of him being there, we overwhelmed him, and it came to a bit of an impasse. In the documentary it shows parts of us trying ideas, which did not make it onto the album. We included these in the documentary specifically to illustrate how the creative energy was such that we were trying crazy stuff, and if it didn’t work, it was no harm, no foul. There was no pressure of “Hey guys, we’re burning tape here, time is money.” There was none of that energy at all and that’s credit to Arthur Rizk himself. But one of these days we had reached a bit of a creative impasse with Nicklas, where he was just overwhelmed. We were trying so many crazy ideas. And he’s asking himself, “what are we doing here?”

So how did you end up solving that?
Arthur, to his credit, one of his greatest assets as a producer is tact, he knows just what to say to get the right take out of the right person. And sometimes people can become stressed in the studio, a lot of pressure, it can be overwhelming. So he basically says, “We’re gonna stop, we’re not gonna go down this path any further, and we’re just gonna jam. You guys are gonna just play for free. You’re gonna improvise, you’re gonna switch instruments, you’re gonna do whatever. We’re gonna record it but it doesn’t matter.” We love to jam. Sometimes we play reggae, sometimes we play death metal, sometimes we play post rock, sometimes we play dub, sometimes we play punk, all these different riffs. Sometimes it’s noise, we don’t care. We just like to play.

So Nicklas is over here playing the Hammond being like, “What the fuck are we doing here? What’s going on? Sounds like garbage.” And Arthur would come out periodically with the “Oblique Strategies” cards, which is the Brian Eno Oracle deck that we use to make all our albums. And he would just put a different card on everybody’s little station, and then go back to his control room, come back 10 minutes later, do it again. We ended up doing this for three or four hours. And by that third or fourth hour, we were really cooking with gas. And Nicklas was doing crazy solos. It was not metal. It was it was just crazy music.

Once we kind of got everybody back onto this communal level, after that, we kind of cracked open Nicklas‘ scandinavianness, and he was much more open to understanding that you’re in a safe place. This is okay, play a wrong note, play a too hippie note, play a too sickly sweet note, play the ABBA melody. Who cares? You’re free here. After that, we really nailed it. That’s when he did the minimoog solo on “The Stargate” part one. That’s when he’d opened up and really made a tremendous impact. All of this is to say that this aura of collaboration and creative openness was critical to the development and eventual result that “Absolute Elsewhere” is today.

How do you think creating “Absolute Elsewhere” has changed your way of making music? If at all?
The process for “Absolute Elsewhere” specifically started four years ago with “Timewave Zero”. It’s been a very long process where, even though the songs were maybe written before that or during that time, their final form could not have happened without all of this other stuff. And that’s something that moving forward now- we never lose interest in making music, but sometimes it is hard. And typically, when we finish an album, we’re so spent, we don’t start writing a new song for a couple years. That’s why our albums are three or four years apart, because we really do immerse ourselves to the brink of exhaustion in the product at hand.

Remarkably, after “Absolute Elsewhere”, we immediately started having ideas. We already have ideas for what’s next. The next release is the “All Gates Open: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack”, which is an hour of unreleased ambient music, which is the soundtrack to the documentary. But after that, we already have really crazy ideas for both metal and non metal combinations that is as different as “Luminescent Bridge” was from “Absolute Elsewhere”, this new stuff goes even further into this strange, collaborative, expansive, melodic, progressive, loud, quiet, light, dark, integration of this stuff. Suffice to say, we are only just getting started, also with the “Absolute Elsewhere” tour cycle, which has three legs booked thus far into early 2026, but I do think we’ll see more metal from BI before that it finishes up.

When I first listened to “Absolute Elsewhere”, I was completely blown away. And my first thought was, “This is completely new, they’ve never done anything like this before” but I listened back to your older stuff, and I don’t feel like that’s entirely true, because you’ve always had that really experimental vibe, and you’ve always gone Above and Beyond, as far as I can tell. And I feel like “Absolute Elsewhere” also makes perfect sense within your discography. If you listen to your albums in order, it just it fits, like, like a puzzle piece,
I would agree absolutely.

I think it’s totally fascinating. How have your previous albums influence this new one. You’ve talked about “Timewave Zero”, but let’s say “Starspawn” or “Hidden History”.
Well, something Isaac will often say is that we’re becoming increasingly influenced by our own past repertoire. And so personally, I think a lot of the riffing on “Absolute Elsewhere” kind of has the low sludginess of “Starspawn” and then the higher needley aggressive technicality of “Hidden History”, and they’re almost mixed, but in the mixing, they’re a little also dialed back to the aforementioned streamlining process to make some of these riffs a little clearer.

I’ve seen people say that the death metal on “Absolute Elsewhere” is their least favourite of our death metal. And that’s understandable, because it’s maybe the least death metal, some of it is certainly the most brutal. But there’s also more black metal, there’s more speed metal, there’s more heavy metal in addition to the prog and the kraut rock and the ambient stuff like that. But there’s also some that is just extreme metal, like you can’t really call anything, besides.

It’s just technical progressive extreme metal, I guess is what you would call it, but a band like Septicflesh or Behemoth that’s not black metal, not death metal, it’s just these guys. And that’s actually something we’re really trying to do. We don’t want to be a death metal band. We don’t want to be a prog band. We don’t want to be a metal band. We just want to be BLOOD INCANTATION. We just want to make a band like Opeth or even like Tool or Iron Maiden. These bands don’t really necessarily play genres anymore. They just play their genre. That’s what I mean when Isaac’s saying we’re increasingly influenced by our past works.

People have picked up on a few cues on “Absolute Elsewhere” that is more or less a stylized version of a riff we already did, or a slightly rearranged version of a riff we already did. And that’s deliberate, because we liked that riff the first time, but maybe that first time, the riff was less BLOOD INCANTATION and more something else. We asked ourselves “what was the BI essence underlying that riff?” That’s new stuff I was describing a minute ago. We always joke that we have yet to reach our final form. I think “Absolute Elsewhere” is certainly the nearest. But we are not done.

Another thing I think is critical for people to understand about how BLOOD INCANTATION operates is that we are fans, first and foremost, above everything, we are victims, as much as any other fan, of where BLOOD INCANTATION’s music is taking us. We are along for its ride. We are not in control of where it is taking us. We are very eager to find out. We would like to know. And yet, each new era, when it says, “now it’s time for this”, we go. We don’t have to argue with it. And it’s driving. We’re just on the boat. Where it’s going now, “Absolute Elsewhere” is the closest approximation thus far of where we will end up, but as of yet, we are not there yet, and it will be as crazy as “Absolute Elsewhere” was to “Hidden History”. “Hidden History” was even crazier than “Starspawn”. And like you said, there’s this kind of telescoping, linear narrative across our albums, which we think is very natural.

And to be honest, we feel the same about “Timewave”. It makes perfect sense for a space band to make a space music, but that’s because people get upset when they’re like, “but you’re a death metal band”, and the truth is though, “no, actually, you want us to be a death metal band. Your ego pretends that it has to be this way. You want this thing which is out of your control to be under your control.” All of this is a fallacy of the intellect and what’s actually happening is that BLOOD INCANTATION is music unfurling at its own pace, of its own directive, in accordance to its own goals, which we are not even privy to. We are a long for the ride. Actually, it’s one of the things Robert Fripp talks about in the King Crimson Documentary. People coming to the shows being like “the King Crimson of this year and that album, why don’t you do this?” Truth is, that King Crimson doesn’t exist. It’s not that. It was then and we moved. It kept moving. We are moving with King Crimson. The music is where it’s taking us. And when we were watching that we looked at each other like, “holy shit, is this guy on “Timewave Zero”? What’s going on here?” And so that’s critical to the understanding of what BLOOD INCANTATION’s music is both searching for and where it has been.

There will always be death metal in our music in the same sense that there has always been prog music in our music. There’s always been clean guitars, there will always be distorted guitars, there has always been acoustic instruments. There’s always been synthesizers. What we are trying to do is just make music that we want to hear, and it lets us know when it’s done, whether that’s a four minute song or a 20 minute song. We are not the ones being like, here’s what it is. To that point when Isaac did try to write a five minute song for “Obliquity” for a seven inch not only the universe didn’t allow it to happen with the contracts being too restrictive, but as soon as the music was set free, that’s when “Obliquity” truly became the song which is on the single now.

I think in metal, it’s very specific, you know, in metal, it’s very liminal. We were very narrow subsect. Despite the inherent creativity, which gave birth to metal, all sub genres of extreme metal came from the people at the time pushing it. Death Metal was decried upon its arrival as being barbaric and primitive. Black Metal, when it came on the scene, was decried as being too lofi and abstract immediately progressive death metal starts happening in 1991. 1990 if you talk by Atrocity in Germany. The first ten black metal records started already incorporating keyboards, clean vocals, long songs, linear songwriting, diverting from the adverse chorus arrangements. Extreme Metal has always thrived most when it’s pushing.

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Publiziert am 11. Dezember 2024 von Helen Lindenmann