The UK death metal group Ageless Summoning are in this week’s Meet The Band spotlight. They just released their debut album Corrupting The Entempled Plane. Vocalist Ali Lauder introduces us to Ageless Summoning.
Chad Bowar: Give us a brief history of Ageless Summoning.
Ali Lauder: We formed at Netherlands Death Fest 2016, spending the time between watching bands discussing our mutual appreciation for sludgy and discordant otherworldly death metal like Tuckerian Morbid Angel or Immolation at their most muddy and anguished. We’ve played in bands together before and wanted to do something that was brutal, immersive, and discordant. We self-released a digital demo in 2018 that was later released on tape by Crown and Throne and 12″ by Ancient Entity Records, before we contacted Dark Descent to release our debut full length, Corrupting The Entempled Plane.
Describe the songwriting process for Corrupting The Entempled Plane.
We sent each other basic home demos, kept reviewing and editing until they took shape, and then agreed a running order for an album. I listened to the demos until lyrical themes and concepts emerged and then wrote the lyrics which gave further direction to the songwriting. Guitar leads were largely improvised during recording.
What will be your strongest memory of the recording of the album?
Learning the discipline of patience.
What were the biggest challenges in making this record?
Aside from various frustrating setbacks and demoralizing delays which everyone experienced in some form or other during the last few years, the main challenge was working remotely without a full lineup.
How would you characterize its style/sound?
There’s the obvious stylistic influences and plenty more we could point out but we’re also trying to create our own style and mythos from that base: an ancient and tormented outer dimensional hellscape. Weighty and violent sounding drums, raw single tracked vocals, molten guitar riffs, rumbling bass, and demented leads wailing in the distance. It’s not clinical and precise, it’s not cavernous and ghostly, it’s not rotten and scuzzy…maybe it’s simpler to just say it sounds exactly how the cover looks!
What lyrical topics do you cover?
Eschatology, immortality, hierarchy, self-realisation, strength and weakness, conquest and failure, multiplicities of experience and consciousness, shared cultural and spiritual understanding of space and time, death, deities, deification, historiography, hagiography, and stuff that’s brutal.
How did you come to sign with Dark Descent?
We got in touch after we released our demo and Dark Descent agreed to release a full length. The demo was well received and was getting good coverage at that time while Gregg and Matt had met before so there was an existing connection.
What are your goals and expectations for the album?
The main goal is just to release it. Writing was pretty much finished in 2019, recording in 2020, so after all this time just to have it out there is the priority for us. There’s so much death metal out there at the moment that we’re all spoiled for choice but I expect Corrupting The Entempled Plane will find its audience.
What has been your most memorable Ageless Summoning live show?
We haven’t played many shows but the most memorable is our first. It was in Edinburgh with Vacivus, Penny Coffin, and Tymvos in 2022. We played the Wee Red Bar which is inside the Edinburgh College of Art. We’d only managed to practise for a few hours beforehand – the first time we’d all been together in the same room – but it was a great show.
What are your upcoming show/tour plans?
We’ll be playing the Sonic Dissonance festival in Edinburgh in September 2023, an underground extreme metal festival headlined by Abyssal. We hope to get a short tour arranged for the winter, probably in the UK but it would be great to get over to mainland Europe.
With everybody also in other bands, can scheduling things for Ageless Summoning be difficult?
Yes, very. We have busy schedules and various commitments but we never stop doing whatever we can to keep things going.
What are some of your non-musical interests and hobbies?
Film, reading, writing, and drawing.
What was the best thing you binge-watched lately?
Miami Vice.
What’s currently in your heavy musical rotation?
The new Church of Misery, Penny Coffin, and Gateways slowed to 33rpm.
Anything else you’d like to mention or promote?
Thank you so much for taking the time to interview us, it’s much appreciated! You can pick up the album on vinyl, CD, cassette, and download, and we have shirts and patches on our Bandcamp. Support the underground, support your local scene, never stop, never quit, hail and kill.
(interview published July 22, 2023)
Listen To Ageless Summoning – “Epoch Of Souls”
