All Gates Open (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Witness the recording of ‘Absolute Elsewhere’ from Blood Incantation with ‘All Gates Open (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)’. The band reveals a light, beautiful and holistic side of their musical lexicon, serving as the pastoral "yang energy" to the dark atmosphere of ‘Timewave Zero’. The soundtrack and documentary originally appeared only in the limited edition Artbook of  ‘Absolute Elsewhere’. This marks the first standalone release for both, including the first-ever vinyl pressing of the soundtrack.

Now on home video, the included 73-minute documentary takes you inside the legendary Hansa Tonstudios. Go behind the scenes as the band rehearses and records with appearances by members of Tangerine Dream, Hällas and Sijjin, fully immersing themselves in Berlin’s multifaceted culture. Mixed and mastered by Arthur Rizk and featuring retro-futuristic cover art by Jodie Day.

This definitive collection is available as a Gatefold 180g 2LP & Blu-Ray featuring an etching on Side D (with limited vinyl variants also including an A2 poster), as well as a Ltd. CD + Blu-Ray Edition which includes an exclusive poster booklet or as a Digital Album. Both Blu-Ray versions feature the documentary in Full HD alongside the official music videos for ‘Obliquity of the Ecliptic’, ‘Luminescent Bridge’ and ‘The Stargate’.

From the very beginning, Denver, Colorado’s Blood Incantation have upended orthodoxy and expectation with inexhaustible forward thought and ample amounts of audacity. Their iconoclastic attitude and tendency towards the daring started with them being a Morbid Angel-inspired death metal band that exercised the gall to open their 2013 demo with singing bowls and has led to them sharing the stage with Opeth at the ancient ruins of Pompei’s Anfiteatro Degli Scaviin later this summer. Along the way there have been worldwide sold-out tours, enormous festival gigs, genre defying and defining albums and an explosive expansion of the boundaries of what extreme music is and the potential of what it could be.

Fall 2024 saw the release of the band’s third album, Absolute Elsewhere, two lengthy songs that corralled ambient, prog and Komische Musik with ‘90s death metal and hurled the melange towards a universe coloured by ‘70s sci-fi. The deliberate, delicate architecture and logistical heavy lifting that went into four dudes from the Mile High City (and one Swedish keyboardist) decamping to Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studios for a month to capture the 44-minute behemoth was captured in All Gates Open, a 73-minute documentary directed by Niklas Tschaikowsky and Tammo Dehn. The film originally appeared in the limited edition, three CD/Blu-ray Artbook release of Absolute Elsewhere and was an in-depth look at the band as they rehearsed, recorded and cavorted around the city. In another unprecedented move — a move that follows such outlying outlandishness as a death metal band recording an ambient album, having VHS cassettes for sale on their merch table, tracking down and coaxing legendary sci-fi artist Steve R. Dodd out of retirement — Blood Incantation now present All Gates Open - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, four tracks of bucolic ambience that originally accompanied Dehn’s edits, establishing shots and scenes of the band’s time spent in the German capital.

“It’s not the next album or follow-up to Absolute Elsewhere,” asserts guitarist/vocalist Paul Riedl. “It’s the soundtrack to the documentary about making the album with songs that are from before."

Herein lies the curious and fascinating thing about All Gates Open - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Not only does it demonstrate Blood Incantation’s diverse capability (“It’s a light, beautiful and more holistic type of sound and shows a different side of the Blood Incantation musical lexicon”), but the material comprising it was written throughout 2020 and 2021. This means that All Gates Open - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was written and recorded before 2022’s ambient masterstroke Timewave Zero was recorded, but after the Timewave Zero material was written. And at least three years before the release of Absolute Elsewhere.

“We had a pretty rigorous practice schedule,” says Riedl about the process, “where what we would typically do is play the set and the songs we were writing and working on. Then, we’d take a break for lunch, come back and do some improvisation, then do the set again. And we got pretty good at improvising on our individual keyboard stations with mixers, a MIDI interface, multi-tracking, recording direct in. And some of the material ended up being useful.”

The four songs of All Gates Open - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack highlight a more pastoral Blood Incantation captured via banks of synths, modulators, acoustic instruments and even a drum machine helping to steer the ominously pleasant “Flight” towards a more upbeat art rock/uplifting space pop vibe. “Balance” floats on atmospheric air with gentle psychedelic squelches creating a comfortably jarring melodic pattern. “Dawn” employs a phalanx of airy backwards swells through the lens of late ‘60s and ‘70s classic rock. “Rain” is floaty combination of acoustic guitar arpeggios and uranological keyboard aquatics and echo-y drums booming in a distant cuddly bombast and when the aforementioned “Flight” was originally completed five years ago, the band knew they were onto something and began looking for a home for it.

“It was so good that we were thinking we should use ‘Flight’ as a bonus track for something,” enthuses Riedl. “We really like that song; it was such a cool idea and so different. Then, we thought we needed to do a completely separate release that was the yang energy to the dark, brooding and spooky Timewave Zero material. So we went through the two years of recordings. When we found recordings that were light and more in the spiritual essence of calm, placid new age energy, we wanted to release it. While we were recording and doing the documentary, it came up that we needed music for the movie and we said, ‘We should use this.’ It was right in front of our faces. It’s different sounding and a big part of the documentary. The combination of the music, the editing and the colour grading helps create a very specific experience in the documentary that we wanted to preserve as its own standalone thing. We were like, ‘This has to come out!’”

With a ‘70s style retro-futuristic aesthetic cover art design executed by London-based analog collage artist, Jodie Day and mixing and mastering handled by long time behind-the-desk collaborator (and Absolute Elsewhere producer) Arthur Rizk, All Gates Open - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is poised to be an important document in the Blood Incantation discography. It’s a significant signpost on the path the band have blazed since the COVID pandemic curtailed their touring plans for 2019’s Hidden History of the Human Race album and forced them to alter their work process and creative lives, leading towards a half-decade creative outburst.

“I’ve been going back and forth with the artist for six years — even before we had the recordings, actually — and the cover art helps to create a continuity of the creative arc of this three-to-five year time period where we were working on Timewave Zero, [2023 maxi-single] Luminescent Bridge and Absolute Elsewhere. The soundtrack completes that, despite predating those other recordings.

“The YouTube version of the documentary isn’t real,” he sternly points out. “The documentary deserves to be experienced, not just as content for the internet. As such, the soundtrack is also not just an after thought. It’s something that captures the very first seed of what led to Absolute Elsewhere. It’s the encapsulation of what initiated that whole process and is from an extremely fertile time period that completes a whole circle. And that’s what most exciting to me: that we’re tying up the loose ends before moving forward from a record like Absolute Elsewhere. This is where that era started.”

Tracklist

LP1:
 Side A
 1. Balance

 
Side B
 2. Flight

LP2:
 Side C
 1. Dawn
 2. Rain

 
Side D
Etching

 Blu-ray:
 1. All Gates Open: In Search of Absolute Elsewhere (Documentary)