Absolute Elsewhere

They warned us. Ambient and death metal happily exist on opposing sides of the sonic spectrum. Blood Incantation found the luminescent bridge. The connective tissue? Weird seventies prog rock. Recorded in the same studio as Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra (and featuring current Tangerine Dreamer Thorsten Quaeschning on a memorable section of “The Stargate”), fourth album Absolute Elsewhere combines the ambitious progressive death metal of Hidden History of the Human Race’s b-side, “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul),” with the Berlin School experimentation of Timewave Zero. Two twenty-minute songs result. Side one’s “The Stargate” blows open the possibilities of what death metal can do, stringing together vicious shredding with space-faring keyboard passages on a journey to the center of the universal hivemind. “The Message” shows what happens when Blood Incantation get to the dark side of the moon, fourth-dimensional hyperspace loops folding in on each other until they form a supermassive black hole of sheer riffage. It’s something else entirely.