The scope and purpose of judicial office was one of the defining rhetorical battlegrounds of seventeenth century England. From the reign of James I until the end of James II’s kingship, a range of interlocutors, such as MPs, priests, and pamphleteers, declared upon the comportment appropriate to judicial officeholders. Throughout this period, a defence deployed by common lawyers to assert the independence of judicial office from the crown was that the common law was based principally upon precedent. Confronted with a case, judges had recourse to the lex scripta – statute law created by king or parliament – and also to the far larger corpus of the lex non scripta – the unwritten common laws of England. The origins of the lex non scripta supposedly stretched back ‘before time of memory’, and its contours could be determined through studying previous judgments, a task which itself required extensive training in the Inns of Court, the specialist educational institutions of the common law.
Edward Coke, the early seventeenth century MP and Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, the highest common law court, argued that a common lawyer required ‘experience in particular cases’. Such experience would ensure that any judgments he gave were rooted in ‘judiciall President’, or, as we would spell it today, ‘precedent’. Common lawyers must ground their judgments, that is, in the existing law. Coke’s injunctions were sustained by later common lawyers, most notably Matthew Hale, who was mentored by Coke, and himself served as King’s Bench Chief Justice from 1671 until his retirement in 1675.
During his tenure on King’s Bench, Hale encountered an unpublished version of Thomas Hobbes’s A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, which contended that judicial office had no scope of independence from the king. In response, Hale contended that there was no place for the king in the common law, as the common lawyers operated primarily on the basis of those ‘laws and rules and methods of administration of Comon Justice’ that the ‘wiser Sort of the world have in all ages agreed upon’. These rules could be found in existing case law, the study of which required extensive training. Indeed, to work in the common law required ‘habituateing and accustomeing and Excercising that [reasoning] Faculty by readeing, Study and observation’; a training no king possessed.
Just as these early modern common lawyers venerated the importance of looking to their discipline’s history when formulating laws, so, in my view, must death metal bands continue to pay reverence to the genre’s history. Of course, this is not to say the genre must stagnate. The common lawyers never thought that the law could not progress, but that it must do so always with a firm grasp of its history, which it ought never attempt to entirely eschew. Without this relationship to history, only delirium can prevail. For clear evidence of the importance of maintaining a connection to old school death metal, for example, consider Pyrrhon’s new album What Passes for Survival. This is a death metal album that has no memory of the genre’s history. And it’s fucking unlistenable.
In contrast, Blood Incantation’s epic, brutal Starspawn, released in late 2016, is an album that remembers the fucking late 80s and early 90s. This is an album fucking steeped in all the fucking rotten darkness of old school death metal. At the same time, though, Starspawn builds on these crushing foundations; it is an advance in what a death metal band can do, but one that maintains a reverence for what has gone before. This is fucking elite death metal, and these cunts are about to bring the fucking Stargate to Australia. Embrace it and meet your oblivion/liberation.
<$6.66: Hails mate, could you start by introducing yourself and your role in Blood Incantation?
BI: Hey mate, my name’s Paul, I play guitar and do vocals for the band. Morris also plays guitar, Jeff plays bass, and Isaac plays drums.
<$6.66: The basic history I can work out is that Blood Incantation has been a band for six years now, one year longer than your sibling-band Spectral Voice, which currently contains three members of Blood Incantation. You guys have released six records, so far. Two demos in 2013, the Astral Spells demo in 2014, which consisted of some re-worked songs and some new material, the Interdimensional Extinction EP in 2015, which consisted of re-recordings of much of this earlier material, and a split with Spectral Voice in 2015 of another re-recorded older song. In 2016, you released the totally mental full-length Starspawn, which consists of entirely new material. You’ve retained a stable line-up through this period, with the most notable addition being Jeff Barrett, who joined as bassist in 2015. Throughout this last year, especially, you’ve being touring like fucking mad. Are there any key elements missing from that history, or that need to be clarified or expanded upon?
BI: Haha, sort of… We have released only three records: the Interdimensional Extinction EP; the split 7″ with Spectral Voice; and Starspawn. We have only one official demo tape which was the Astral Spells promo in 2014. All other tapes are merely rehearsal tapes, certainly not a “record” or official release. Our rehearsal tapes were made to find a fretless bass player, but no one was interested so Damon from StarGazer offered to fill in for the session. This was all 2011-2013 period. We didn’t re-record and re-record songs, the recording session (July 2013) for the split, promo tape, and the EP are the same songs, same session; one’s just mixed, one’s not. Astral Spells was just a promo for the EP since the release was delayed over two years due to endless mixing. By the time it was ready we were planning our first tour and still had no bassist, so Jeff from Spectral Voice came over since he already played fretless in that band. We had already been in multiple bands with Jeff for years, so our playing styles blended very naturally. All of the writing for Starspawn was completed before Interdimensional Extinction even came out, so people needn’t be surprised that the EP and LP were released only a year apart – we had two long years of waiting for the recordings to surface. But yeah, we have been very busy since then. We’ve done three US tours and one European tour since Starspawn came out in August 2016, and we are confirmed for Australia in September as well as another European tour (with Spectral Voice) in October. As for Spectral Voice, we are just all in multiple bands juggling tours and jobs and life’s chaos, but we’re not quitting anytime soon.
<$6.66: Starspawn is a huge record. It’s diverse and ambitious, spanning soaring melodies and churning dissonance, an acoustic interlude, and some proper fucking shredding guitar solos. And it’s epic, despite coming in at only 35 minutes, it feels like a much more vast record, perhaps because of the diversity, but also because of the sheer number of riffs in the album, and the longer song-lengths; opener ‘Vitrification of Blood (Part I)’ is almost 14 minutes long. In short, the record sounds as if it’s the culmination of years of writing, but it was released a year after you put out two records. How long were you guys working on Starspawn?
BI: Thanks man! We just tried to make it sick, mate, we wanted it to be fucking mental. As I said there were two years of writing for the album before the EP was even released, so you are right it is certainly the culmination. There is still older material that we have yet to record, one of which we have been playing live on these last two tours, so keep your ears open! Maybe we’ll play it down under??
<$6.66: I think this is a follow up question. How do you see the relationship between Starspawn and the rest of the Blood Incantation canon thus far? I realise there are material differences, between analogue and digital recording, most notably. What do you see as the threads that unite Starspawn and previous records, and where do you see it advancing or breaking with earlier incarnations of Blood Incantation?
BI: I think it sounds like the Blood Incantation album to me, I’m not really sure what you’re asking. It’s what I would have expected as a listener, or at least it’s as crazy as I might have hoped they would have gone. Between the EP and the LP I see a very natural expansion of previously established concepts; everything is just “more” on the album. More space, more chaos, more brutal, more melody, more atmospheric, more psychedelic, more tech, more doom, etc. The EP was recorded totally digital on our shitty gear at the time, and the album was recorded totally analogue on our actual gear we’ve been touring on and dialling-in for years, and their respective productions reflect this. The chronology from oldest to newest material goes like this: ‘Mephitic Effluvia’ (from the split), ‘Obfuscating the Linear Threshold’, ‘Hovering Lifeless’, ‘Subterranean Aeon’, “The Vth Tablet (Of Enûma Eliš)’ (from the EP), ‘Hidden Species (Vitrification of Blood Part 2)’, ‘Vitrification of Blood (Part 1)’, ‘Chaoplasm’, ‘Starspawn’, ‘Meticulous Soul Devourment’ (from the LP). So you can see our writing style has only ever gotten crazier, so people had fair warning the album was going to be ridiculous, haha. We’re very happy with the album, so to anyone interested, we will continue this writing style with our next release.
<$6.66: For me, one of the most notable parts of Blood Incantation’s sound is how dark it is, and this is something present on all the records. The main difference I can see, here, is that the earlier material generates a lot of the tension via the use of turgid chugging dissonance, and while Starspawn sustains this, it also seems to generate much of its atmosphere from the lead work. Some of the later leads on ‘Vitrification of Blood (Part I)’, wouldn’t feel out of place on a Mournful Congregation record, for example. How conscious are you guys of trying to produce that atmosphere, and if it’s explicit, how do you work to curate that? More generally, how important is it for you guys not just to write riffs, but to write riffs that convey a particular atmosphere?
BI: Thanks man! I think the early material had more tremolo picking and the newer material is actually more chugging, but the atmosphere on Starspawn is definitely more melodic and epic. The EP songs are sharper, colder, and more dissonant, whereas the album’s style is more amorphous, warmer (AKA LAVA), and more melodic. We’re also all drastically better players than we were in 2013. I think the EP is dark because of how cold and mechanical it is, and the album is dark because of how menacing and diabolical it is. As for the riffs and atmosphere, this is just what we’re going for man, we just make the music this way because we think it’s sick. It doesn’t matter to us if people think one part’s too funeral doom or one part’s too melodic; we made it how we wanted it because this is what we like, haha! People seem so keen to question our motives about riffs, but nobody seems to accept that dude, we just like heavy fuckin’ riffs!! We like riffs with brutality, riffs with melody, riffs with noise, riffs with atmosphere, just fuckin’ riffs mate it’s not some conspiracy! But if you want to talk conspiracy, read our lyrics…
<$6.66: I want to stick with some of the topics touched on in the previous question. We’re in the middle of a revival of old school death metal at the moment, and you guys are very much a part of this. It isn’t a novel point now to suggest that old school death metal is seeing a revival, or that Dark Descent, your label, is especially significant in this. What I’m interested in, though, is that this revival hasn’t just brought a focus on certain types of riff writing, but it’s also brought back darkness to death metal. There’s a kind of reductive genealogy of death metal you could construct where the early European bands like Demilich or Grave, and the US East Coast bands like Morbid Angel, Incantation, and Immolation, produced really dark death metal, which in some cases was explicitly satanic. By the late 90s and early 00s, this style was on the decline and we saw the rise of death metal bands that focused on brutality (Dying Fetus) or technicality (Necrophagist) above all else. That’s all very schematic, but with the revival of old school death metal we’ve seen a significant return to a focus on darkness as central to a death metal sound. In Europe, bands like Phrenelith, Dead Congregation, Undergang, in the US, bands like yours, Necrot, Ascended Dead, and in Australia bands like Contaminated, Sewercide, Coffin Lust all create death metal indebted to the dark. What do you make of this resurgence and Blood Incantation’s place in it? Given that it privileges atmosphere over simply a style of riffing, do you think it has the potential to last longer than other trends in death metal? Moreover, as a band that’s toured Europe and the US, what do you make of the comparative scenes in those countries?
BI: Ah we don’t care about all that mess mate, we’re all just too young to have participated in the 80s/90s scenes, so we just want to contribute as best we can despite being a bunch of young shitheads. Dark Descent is the sickest and most legit Death Metal label around, it’s an honor to work with him and also that so many of our friends’ sick bands are our labelmates. For our own efforts, we’d be playing the same riffs twenty years ago if we’d been able, as this is just how we like to play. I wasn’t moved by the Swe-death revival, simply because not even Entombed were as heavy as Nihilist, so no fuckin’ way some 2000s band is gonna be able to do it. Plus, I prefer more gloomy or intense death metal, which for Sweden is either death/doom like Eternal Darkness or riffy shit like Grotesque or Crematory. With the exception of sunny Florida, American death metal has always been more visceral and fucked up than the Euro styles, simply because it’s fucking stacked against any band not playing Top 40 music here, and in Scandinavia the government would seriously pay youth centers to record bands or let them practice – so every band got a head start. So when US bands started they were more raw and out for blood, not as concerned with the verse/chorus mentality of Europe. Even today, metal is SO much bigger in Europe. The tours are bigger, venues are bigger/better, there’s more vans, more nightliners, actual catering, places to sleep, hella record stores that ONLY sell metal, just everything man. We were playing sold out shows in Europe to hundreds of people with huge stages and all these amenities and nice gear, and came back to the States and were right back on the floor without a soundcheck (not that we mind), no food, and two drink tickets, haha! It’s fucking mental mate, the US doesn’t give a fuck about anything, let alone bands. Hopefully Australia is chill??
<$6.66: Where death metal has gone through trends of brutality and technicality over atmosphere, black metal has unrelentingly been dedicated to darkness, and this focus on atmosphere has often been considered paramount to technicality or riff writing. The boundaries between death and black metal have variously been flexible and strictly policed at different times, but we’re seeing a lot of cross-pollination between genres at the moment. Dead Congregation are on a black metal label. Portal, Impetuous Ritual, and Consummation all sit somewhere between these genres, as do Qrixkuour, who you guys just toured the US with. More specifically, members of Blood Incantation have personal involvement in black metal. All of you except Morris have been in Velnias, and Morris is in the fucking amazing Stillborn Fawn. Paul runs the mysterious Woodsmoke, and was in Leech. How do you guys see the genres relating, both in general, and in particular, in Blood Incantation’s sound? For me, some of the more melodic trem-picking over blast-beats on Starspawn, in particular, could sit comfortably on a black metal record.
BI: I mean, our band isn’t a black metal band, so you can’t just analyze one specific riff out of context to try and supplant it into another genre and expect a linear explanation. For example, Emperor had countless death metal riffs, pinch harmonics, etc, Order From Chaos had more in common with Bathory than Suffocation, 80s Morbid Angel was like Slayer on crack, and early Vader was just Morbid Angel played by Slayer, so… Specific genres exist because they’re each trying to express a specific idea. The crossover genres exist because some ideas can be mutually expressed through differing methods, is all. I listen to all types of metal, play all types of metal, and the same goes for riffs. Funeral doom riffs can be black metal if trem-picked, an acoustic folk guitar part can be grim AF if played distorted, some brutal death riffs sound weak until you throw a punk beat on them and it turns into cro-magnon bludgeon, you know? The riff itself is most important. It’s just riffs mate, people get too caught up in analysis and rhetoric of metal and lose sight of what’s actually enjoyable about bands, which is simply the music itself.
<$6.66: I’ve got one more question about the leads. The diversity of Starspawn makes it a challenging listen, and the leads are particularly prominent here. At first I didn’t know how to make sense of them, whether they revealed a psychedelic influence or something else. I started to get somewhere in digging into it, though, after reading an interview with Paul where he extolled his passion for Morbid Angel, and in particular, for the underrated Formulas Fatal to the Flesh, and for Trey’s leadwork there. There’s a clear relationship between some of Trey’s leads, particular in ‘Prayer of Hatred’, and some of the crazier leads on Starspawn. While Trey used these leads to break up or emphasise sections, though, you’ve turned them into a style of riffing on Starspawn. How do you go about writing the guitar parts, and in particular, constructing the leadwork on the album?
BI: Haha, thanks!! I think you are maybe overanalyzing things. We definitely LOVE Morbid Angel, and especially Formulas, but honestly mate we just go about writing music in the natural mode of playing riffs, improvising together, playing guitar at home, humming melodies, etc. Just normal riff hunting, haha. We’ll never be as sick as Morbid Angel, so we’re content to just try as hard as we can, haha. We know what we want, so we get to a part that needs a shred solo and we put a shred solo there. Another part needs a melting solo, so we’re gonna put a melting solo. Sometimes we need a melodic, written solo, so we just write the solo with melody instead of chaos. It’s just riffs man, that’s what our band is about.
<$6.66: Turning to the lyrical themes of Starspawn, and Blood Incantation more generally, the lyrics might be described as dealing with subjects relating to cosmic horror; of interdimensional transition and, indeed, interdimensional death. Lyrics dealing with space have a history in death metal, but what I’m particularly interested in is that you have described your lyrics as not only dealing with the interdimensional, but as dealing with the occult. Given this, I was drawn to the first line of Starspawn (“Falling… Falling through the stargate within”), and the last lines (“No death as known… Only doorways… You are the stargate”). These lyrics seem to get at a notion of self-discovery and learning through a form of self-destruction. Reading these lyrics, I was reminded of themes that arise in some Satanic bands, that focus on, I suppose, processes of violence as a means to growth and understanding (Ignis Gehenna lyrics seem to suggest this, for example). Can you talk about the specifically occult and mystical elements of your lyrics? Have you got any specific lyrical influences, or are you reading anything in particular when writing them?
BI: We’re not a Satanic band at all, mate. Satanists are literally just Christians – the reality is that they believe in The System, they are reacting to The System, and their worldview is built up (by The System) around their Ego, which is a culturally-induced hallucination needing to be destroyed before they can experience anything transcendental. Ultimately Starspawn is just a microcosm, carved out of the Field by the macrocosm. The differences between our Esoteric/Metaphysical Death Metal band and Satanic Black/Death Metal bands are as vast as the differences between Zen and Scientology, respectively. True occultism is that which has been Hidden, it is not reactionary. You are right the lyrics deal with interdimensional horror and astral death, but there is also the aspect of self-awareness, which is the water droplet realizing it is the ocean, and transcendentally recognizing that ocean isn’t even real, but material illusion. Your soul has never been born, never died, and is trapped in the material dimensions of hell (aka physical incarnation as you know it) endlessly reincarnating across this matrix/grid of our perceived holographic reality, which is being held in place by Off World entities. Your entire life means as much to anything as any leaf on any tree has ever meant to the entire biological ecosystem of earth – so, don’t get too excited. Human bodies are just batteries, mate, and as explained in our lyrics as well as mystical texts dating back over 6,000 years into the Vedas and mystery schools of Kemet, Sumer, etc, these otherworldly beings corrupt human DNA to imprison infinite consciousness in finite material forms over and over again, instead of re-merging with the source field of quantum nothingness. Surely you don’t think the Dreamtime is mere symbolism? Are you not moved by the world’s ancient megaliths? All religion, all world cultures, all industrial societies, all economies, everything is a joke, just here to entertain your meaningless existence while interdimensional Off World entities eat the fucking life out of you before you get recycled back into their matrix, sorry.
<$6.66: For me, Blood Incantation manages to nail song-writing that matches the lyrics. As dark and otherworldly as the lyrics are, the songs are equally coated in evil and mystery. How much of that is intentional? How closely do you see the relationship between lyrics and music and, indeed, between lyrics, music, and artwork, for the artwork seems to clearly evoke the same themes?
BI: Thanks man! I mean, we don’t do it by accident, haha. Everything is intentional, we want to make it very specific so people have the chance to really dig into the themes, symbolism, imagery etc. We just want to spark their mind. Also, aesthetically, I just dislike shitty layouts, fonts, shirts, etc. I can’t even buy shirts from most of the bands I like because their art is so fuckin’ wack now. But again, that’s just personal. So we try to make the releases and merch look like something we’d actually want to buy, wear, listen to, etc. We just want to make it sick, mate, we just want to make something we can personally enjoy. When people dig it, that’s tight, but ultimately we just like this music, this art, these lyrics, etc, so we put it all together in this way because it is most natural for our interests.
<$6.66: Finally, we’re going to be lucky enough to catch you cunts in mid-September when you come out to Australia supporting Arcturus. What other plans do you guys have for the rest of 2017 and beyond?
BI: Ah it’s gonna be mad!! We can’t wait. We’ll be back in Europe after Australia, doing a month-long tour with Spectral Voice, whose debut album Eroded Corridors of Unbeing will be released while we’re on the road. After that, Blood Incantation are confirmed for Maryland Deathfest, but we will shift gears into Spectral Voice to prepare for US tours and beyond in support of that album. Blood Incantation won’t do another release until it’s a full length, or at the least a dark ambient/neoclassical EP (haha!), so people can catch us on tour or enjoy the existing releases for the time being.
<$6.66: Last words?
BI: Everything is connected!! His-Story is a lie, Cult-ure is not your friend, and there is more going on here than you are being told. OPEN YOUR MIND!!! Dive deep into life’s obscurities and mysticism. YOU ARE THE STARGATE.
<$6.66 
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