Beyond space and Sound: Blood Incantation, Parsifal and Philip K. Dick

'Absolutely Elsewhere’ is a masterpiece on which BLOOD INCANTATION boldly go beyond to where they did go before, further perfecting their blend of death metal and prog rock with ambient flavours. It's a trip through time and space, where myth and meaning collide.
Join us for a journey through the space-time continuum of cosmic metal with vistas of Parsifal and revelations of Philip K. Dick. Jump aboard!

There is music that, upon first encounter, feels strange to you—and remains so for quite some time. It’s music you don’t immediately embrace, yet find fascinating enough to want to listen to again and again. I think of Alban Berg's Wozzeck, the first opera I saw live in a theater. I think of Messiaen, particularly his Catalogue d'oiseaux for piano, with its intricate evocations of the natural world, suggesting a musical landscape both elusive and enchanting, but also of someone like Milton Babbitt, whose (in)famous essay Who Cares if You Listen? seems to reflect a complete disregard for his audience, yet his music invites a continued curiosity.
 
And then there is music that feels familiar, even from the first listen. Music in which all the elements you encounter evoke warm feelings of recognition and appreciation, yet whose mixture is so much more than the sum of its parts that it completely surprises you. The sonic world of Blood Incantation is such music—a music where the landscape unfolding before your ears feels familiar, offering moments of déjà vu, yet in which the contemporary mix of death metal, symphonic rock, prog rock, and ambient soundscapes transforms the landscape you know into something infinite. A wondrous experience.

Blood Incantation has often enriched their death metal with symphonic and ambient tones, venturing far beyond the genre’s typical boundaries. They did sail into ambient waters on Hidden History of the Human Race (2019) where the death became spaciousness. And on their album Timewave Zero (2022), not even a single death grunt or guitar riff can be heard. It is an ambient work that even yours truly, self declared sceptic of everything too soundscapish, finds engaging. The long, expansive sonic fields on Timewave Zero draw the listener slowly into their depths, much like the sands of an endless desert that stretch toward the horizon, while never letting their focus wane.

Blood Incantation draws its inspiration from a wide and eclectic array of sources, ranging—naturally—from metal to ambient and pop, with nods to acts as disparate as Klaus Schulze and, indeed, Tears for Fears (brrrr). Influences that remind us that even sources which might not immediately capture the imagination (to put it mildly) can achieve profound value when they lend themselves to the creation of something singular. For their latest endeavor, Absolutely Elsewhere, the band from Denver, Colorado collaborated with notable musicians like Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream and Hällas keyboardist Nicklas Malmqvist, who contributed rich piano, synth, and mellotron soundscapes. Additionally, Malte Gericke from Sijjin and Necros Christos provided death growls and German spoken-word vocals. The result hits the ball out of the park, straight into space. Here, the blasts of death dwell into ethereal realms with staggering musical substance. This collaboration has yielded a work that reaches a peculiar depth, with an unique sense of atmosphere. It’s as though Blood Incantation had merely uncovered another facet of a musical vision long latent within them. The interplay between gradual development and abrupt shifts becomes a central characteristic that here is shaped into perfection. Just as the listener becomes acclimated to this cosmic drift, there is a rupture. For instance, the transition between The Message (Tablet II) and The Message (Tablet III) is one of those serious eargasmic moments. With its nod to the melancholy of Pink Floyd (it even has a literally quote from Wish You Were Here), the music at the end of The Message (Tablet II) suddenly shifts—as the death metal from Tablet III crashes in, brutal and relentless. It is a moment akin to the mythic and divine forces embark in a cosmic cataclysm. One moment you are floating in the void; the next, the stars themselves are collapsing into a black hole.

Parsifal (Odilon Redon, 1891)

Coming from another era is that notion of an opera, a Bühnenweihfestspiel, where time itself seems stretched into a spatial experience, where time becomes space. In Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, the delicate balance between gradualism and upheaval reveils something more about the ways music can open our ears and mind. The opera unfolds slowly, hypnotically, its music stretching out in endless melody. The first act alone feels like a pilgrimage, a slow awakening into the mysterious landscape of time and grace. But in the measured unfolding of these solemn sounds, Wagner inserts a moment of revelation, where the carefully cultivated atmosphere is pierced by a transformative, shocking, event. The Grail is revealed. Time collapses, and what was eternal becomes immediate, pressing, like a divine force breaking through the mundane.

It is precisely this duality in Parsifal that fascinated the writer Philip K. Dick. In his novel Valis, Dick explores Wagner’s opera not merely as a religious or philosophical meditation but as a work that pierces the fabric of reality itself, a story where the gradual and the sudden coexist in an almost schizophrenic tension. Dick, whose own life was defined by sudden, revelatory experiences, saw in Parsifal something of his own search for truth—his search for a reality beyond the one we perceive. The story of Parsifal, with its gradual journey toward enlightenment and its sudden, transcendent moments of grace, mirrored Dick’s own experiences with what he called "anamnesis"—the sudden recovery of lost, hidden knowledge, the abrupt realization that the world is not what it seems.

In Valis, Dick’s protagonist, Horselover Fat, grapples with the shocking revelation that reality is not linear, not gradual, but layered with hidden dimensions that can break through at any moment. This breakthrough, for Dick, was akin to Wagner’s use of time in Parsifal. In the opera, time is stretched, elongated, as though Wagner himself sought to escape the bounds of ordinary temporality. But then, in key moments, time shatters. The divine irrupts into the mundane. Dick saw in this the perfect metaphor for his own visionary experiences: the slow, gradual unfolding of reality suddenly ruptured by moments of transcendent truth, or what he referred to as "the divine invasion." Parsifal’s quest was not merely for the Grail but for the true nature of reality, for that hidden layer beneath the surface of things where time and space are malleable, and where truth comes crashing through like a bolt of lightning.

Anamnesis (Image generated by Dall-E)

Both Parsifal and Dick's novel act as bridges between the enchantment of mythical lands in childhood and adults' search for meaning. The music of Blood Incantation and the images it evokes are like a tribute to those childhood fantasies of pyramids in mythical lands in which wonder is more important than factual history. Listening to it, it’s like traveling back to a mental temple built of all my old ideas, a salute to the mysteries I once concocted for myself. It draws me into visions of vast and shadowed halls, guarded by silent, timeless statues, and I feel the thrill of a child’s limitless imagination. It is a music, an art, that represents not just structured sound and silence but something from which the value cannot be overstated: providing a refuge from the untamed mysteries of the mind and its imagination.

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- Wouter de Moor