On the album cover of Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere, two magma-red pyramids sit alone on a desolate planet, surrounded by pits of lava and mountains as the outer-space sky looms above it, richly coloured with deep purples and incandescent stars. The sky itself is home to a couple of vacant planets and, of course, the barely legible Blood Incantation logo resting at the top in a mustard yellow. The hand-painted artwork is as dense as the music within it: vast journeys that make Homer’s epics seem quaint by contrast; intricate arrangements that rival those of symphonic orchestras; blast-beats and shredding so intense you can envisage the calluses and blisters forming in real time. This is all to say that the visual artist behind the record’s cover is as much a visionary as the Colorado death metal band behind the record itself.
Steve Dodd is not an easy man to get in touch with. His home, a small town in Tennessee with a population of around 2,000, is where he has lived and worked for all 79 years of his life. He has no computer, no internet access, no cell phone, and no landline. He communicates exclusively via handwritten snail mail, even with his own family, who also live in town. Miraculously, Blood Incantation vocalist and guitarist Paul Riedl found a way to get in touch with Dodd’s sister, who then acted as an intermediary between the two parties. At first, when Riedl wrote to Dodd in early 2023, he wanted to commission a piece for their single “Luminescent Bridge.” Dodd was unavailable at the time, but he agreed to license some paintings of his from 2018 and 2019 for the front and back of the physical release. This gave him the time he needed to paint what would become the striking original cover for Absolute Elsewhere.
As Riedl tells me over Zoom, Dodd retired a decade ago, and he hasn’t stopped painting since. He quit painting for approximately 30 years until his retirement, which freed up his schedule to focus on his art more than he’s ever been able to. “He’s the most prolific he has ever been,” Riedl says. “He started exactly where he stopped. He did not try to incorporate modern technology. He did not try to reevaluate his technique. He didn’t do anything except keep painting.” The group knew that Dodd was the right fit because none of his paintings includes humanoid figures, which was the single caveat they gave Dodd when they outlined their initial hopes for what the cover would look like.
From a narrative standpoint, the cover for Absolute Elsewhere continues the story of Blood Incantation’s visual universe. For their full-length debut, 2016’s Starspawn, astronomical artist Don Dixon portrays a planet freshly struck by a meteor, smoke rising from the ground; a sense of mystery permeates the cover, which is partially answered by Bruce Pennington’s artwork for its follow-up, 2019’s Hidden History Of The Human Race. Although it does include a humanoid, alien figure, “it’s such an iconic, classic image that you can’t really argue with its accuracy of portraying what that music and album represent,” Riedl says. It’s the same cover used for the 1957 science fiction novel Space, Time and Nathaniel by Brian Aldiss. Otherwise, “we don’t want little green men; we don’t want astronauts; we don’t want human civilization to be a part of the Blood Incantation aesthetic dialogue.”
So, why is there such a steadfast refusal to include people on Blood Incantation LP covers? “We want to deal with something so far in the future that it transcends the limitations of the measly planet Earth,” Riedl explains. “And we also want to inspire the person from wherever they might be. So if a reptilian looks at our album cover, they’re not ostracized, or if a humanoid sees the album cover, they’re not intimidated by seeing a Pleiadian. We want to have no types of figures to exclude any person’s experience of where they’re going to be taken on this journey of the music.” Riedl illustrated some preliminary sketches of pyramids and planets to give Dodd a rough idea of what he envisioned, and, aside from these fairly minimal guidelines, Dodd had free creative rein.
Dodd replied with an epistolary description of what the final cover would become: The sky will be dark and full of stars above; the pyramids will be a nebula shade of blue with violet hues; the crescent moons will be orange with some red on their left sides; toward the left of the cover will be a giant, red decaying sun that will cast a reddish glow on the sides of the pyramids; the landscape in general will be painted in browns, reds, and ochre; the two crevices in front of the pyramids will glow red from the lava within them; and purple snow will drift around the edges of those crevices. “What do they say today,” Riedl asks shortly before answering himself with the punchline. “He understood the assignment.”
The band had no notes or revisions for Dodd. All four members loved his painting the instant they got a first glimpse. Dodd’s cover contains elements from all of Blood Incantation’s previous works, from the planetscapes and lava to the pyramids and obelisks. In the music video for last year’s “Luminescent Bridge,” the single’s artwork becomes fully animated into a three-dimensional terrain, which transports the viewer through the portal gracing its two-dimensional cover. Once you’re through the gate, you end up in another world, which is the place depicted in Absolute Elsewhere. As a result, Dodd is not just someone who lent his artistic talents to a death metal band. He is an active participant and collaborator within Blood Incantation’s immersive world-building. Despite being so averse to technology, Dodd’s staunch adherence to purely analog modes of creation is wildly futuristic.
When I ask Riedl whether he’d like to work with Dodd again, he says that “it’s more of a question of what we’ll do next.” He continues: “It’s part of creating this consistent narrative in the aesthetic.” That’s a field in which Dodd has unequivocally proven himself, as he’s able to weave Blood Incantation’s extant visual hallmarks into his own sci-fi painting style. Corresponding only through handwritten letters certainly took a long time, but Blood Incantation’s patience paid off. “It’s easy to get frustrated in this digital age of instant gratification and point-click satisfaction,” Riedl says. “But we are not in a hurry. We’re not in a rush to make something impressive.” As both Blood Incantation’s music and Dodd’s painting demonstrate, impressive art will come with time.
