Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. Yes, that’s an audacious, possibly hyperbolic claim, but few can claim a sonic watershed as readily as this Denver, Colorado quartet. Hovering at nearly 45 minutes, their longest recording thus far, the two sprawling-yetexacting compositions that make up this album are as confounding as they are engaging. It’s an architecture of music at odds with itself: an acceleration through a Kubrickian stargate into a realm of aural ideas in harmonious opposition, uniting unlikely binaries of aural heavens and hells. For inspiration, the group looked to the mid-70’s progressive rock collective, Absolute Elsewhere (best known as a celestial stopover for King Crimson drummer, Bill Bruford) as the album’s namesake. For the uninitiated, Absolute Elsewhere’s landmark 1976 album, In Search of Ancient Gods, was constructed as a musical accompaniment to the works of Chariots of the Gods author, Erich Von Daniken, and his theories of non-terrestrial humanoid prompts towards mankind’s evolution. The subject matter of which should serve as no surprise to anyone familiar with Blood Incantation’s prior LPs and cosmically philosophical leanings. But make no mistake, the four musicians working under the BI banner for the past decade – guitarist and vocalist Paul Riedl, drummer Isaac Faulk, guitarist Morris Kolontyrsky and bassist Jeff Barrett – have successfully left the microgravity of genre behind and are re-writing the Rosetta Stone of extreme music with a new language entirely.

Madeline Johnston is a self taught multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer, currently based in Southern Colorado by way of Denver, where she spent the last decade+ developing her sound and focusing on her artistic community. Midwife began while Madeline was a resident of the beloved DIY space Rhinoceropolis in 2014. She has released four albums with The Flenser, most recently, No Depression In Heaven (2024), which received National and International acclaim. On stage, Johnston is known for her sparse, emotionally charged experimental pop music that can silence a room. On record, she produces intricate and lush sonic environments in her own little corner of the heavy music scene. She describes her sound as "Heaven Metal," AKA emotional music about devastation: catharsis. Johnston writes primarily about grief, and the many faces it can inhabit.