TTI: What do you think are the features that separate and distinguish Blood Incantation and Spectral Voice from other death metal bands, and from each other for that matter?
Paul Riedl: Personally, I can only guess that perhaps it's simply because these bands are real. These are not internet bands. They aren't art bands. Come see us on tour, we are friendly freaks whose lives are dedicated to filthy, rotten, cosmic, occult and heavy underground energies, not art school/internet weekend-warriors with short hair, fancy clothes and half-stacks. We record and manufacture our musical presentations as is necessary to physically participate in this amazing environment called underground metal. You like cool records in your record collection, right? Try adding one to it from your heart and soul instead of your wallet. It can be quite the process, but it's an indescribable feeling. Anyway man, we are not casual about this, and perhaps I come off as kind of intense about this stuff, simply because this is who we are and this is what we do. We are not hiding, we don't obfuscate our names on our records. People seem to think we don't have facebooks or websites because we're so obscure, but the reality is we just don't give a shit man. We don't have time for that. That's not what we're into this shit for, we are here to play metal. There's no props at our show, no makeup or capes or tough-guy voice between songs, just some bulletbelts, longhairs and huge amps. And you know, some pointy guitars (laughs). Man, I hate this whole internet crucifixion/millennial media world we live in, it's so superficial and fake. I get that technology is just an increasingly prevalent part of modern life, but people spend all this damn time on these screens bitching about and analyzing bands like they have any idea why one band did one thing and another band did something else. They're just not qualified! Simple as that. If you aren't in a band that can make a good song, then you have no business analyzing or publicly talking about someone else's song. That's the main problem with the internet, it gives everybody a voice. Anyway, we play the riffs we like to play because they sound like what we like to hear when we put records on. The records look the way they do because we like records that look like that. Our merch looks like the kind of merch we would actually buy from a band, which is to say that most bands' merch does not, at least to us. So there is the pattern. It is this transparency, this tangible reality and personal human touch that I think sets Spectral Voice and Blood Incantation apart from many other bands.
