Nothing\u0092s bigger than life. All vastnesses \u0097 expanding space, infinite time \u0097 crouch inside of consciousness. On a historical scale, to say nothing of a cosmic one, the individual human life vanishes, and yet it\u0092s the only aperture any of us get into reality. It\u0092s barely there, and it\u0092s all there is.<\/p>\n
That\u0092s the paradox Bell Witch drives at. For more than a decade, the Pacific Northwestern doom metal band has sent tides surging over the seawalls of the song form, unravelling conventional expectations about the ways music stations itself in time to absorb a listener\u0092s attention. Rather than seek catharsis, the duo\u0092s songs heave themselves through time at a glacial pace, staving off resolution in favor of a trancelike capsule eternity. Invoking both boundlessness and claustrophobia in the same charged gesture, Bell Witch cultivates a sense of time outside of time, an oasis inside an increasingly frenetic media culture.<\/p>\n
For their new album, The Clandestine Gate, bassist\/vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer\/vocalist Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch\u0092s bounds. Like 2017\u0092s lauded Mirror Reaper, The Clandestine Gate is a single 83-minute track – a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future\u0092s Shadow. \u0084Eventually, the end of the last album will be looped around to the first to make a circle,\u0093 says Desmond. \u0084It can be continuously looped, like a day cycle. This would be dawn. The next one would be noon. The following one would be sundown, with dawn and sundown both having something of night.\u0093<\/p>\n
Bell Witch began tracing the sequences that would form Future\u0092s Shadow in live performance while on tour with Neurosis and Mono. At first, Shreibman and Desmond planned to release each chapter in the sequence as they completed it, touring each album in between. Then, in early 2020, pandemic restrictions forced them to step back from that timeline. Locked out of their rehearsal space, they worked on what would become The Clandestine Gate at a slower burn than any of their previous projects. The album germinated over the course of more than two years, a pace that allowed their music to evolve organically to a state of more focused, grounded minimalism.<\/p>\n
While traces of organ and synthesizer hovered over Mirror Reaper and Bell Witch\u0092s 2020 collaboration with Aerial Ruin, Stygian Bough Volume 1, The Clandestine Gate drew those instruments closer to the center of its compositions. \u0084We started experimenting with letting more of the elements shine on their own,\u0093 says Shreibman. The band reunited with their longtime producer Billy Anderson as they began negotiating these new compositional weights. The record begins with an eight-minute organ passage that builds slowly, like the susurrations of dawn, before Desmond\u0092s distortion-choked bass cleaves it open. Throughout their new material, Shreibman and Desmond also took the opportunity to implement new vocal strategies. \u0084I wanted the vocals to be more active, rather than being on top of the soundscape,\u0093 notes Shreibman. On The Clandestine Gate, Bell Witch\u0092s twinned voices build off of the chantlike textures of previous records while steering toward more developed melodic lines, structured harmonies, and rhythmic death metal growls.<\/p>\n
The expansive scale of Future\u0092s Shadow gave Bell Witch more leeway to plumb themes that have long percolated throughout their work. The concept of eternal return \u0097 that time doesn\u0092t end and death doesn\u0092t punctuate life, but both go on forever in an infinite loop no one can remember \u0097 inflected the development of The Clandestine Gate after Desmond encountered the idea in Nietzche\u0092s book The Gay Science. \u0084I read the eternal return concept and was like, \u0082oh, yeah, all of our songs have been about this all the while,\u0093 Desmond says. \u0084Anything could be applied to a cyclical point of view. The sun comes up every morning. Spring comes every year, winter comes every year. Everything has a cycle: a life, a death, an existence, a non-existence.\u0093<\/p>\n
The films of 20th century Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky similarly supplied a framework for the movements of The Clandestine Gate and Future\u0092s Shadow as a whole. Tarkovsky\u0092s movies creep glacially, powered by the performances of his actors, which imbue his weathered landscapes with a tumultuous interiority. Simple actions \u0097 carrying a candle across a room, tossing a metal nut into an overgrown field \u0097 carry life-and-death weight, a strategy echoed in Bell Witch\u0092s suspension of minimal melodies across planetary expanses. \u0084Tarkovsky\u0092s intention of poetry through visuals has a strong parallel to ours through sound,\u0093 notes Desmond. \u0084His drawn-out scenes are similar in execution to what we\u0092re doing musically, and his films are a big inspiration for this album and triptych.\u0093<\/p>\n
The immense gravity of a work like The Clandestine Gate allows these ideas to simmer in a way that feels profoundly and somatically intuitive \u0097 not just a philosophical exercise, but an embodied truth. By slowing down both their creative process and the tempo of the music itself, Bell Witch digs even deeper into their long standing focus: the way life spills on inside its minuscule container, both eternal and fleeting, a chord that echoes without resolution. As both the beginning and end of the Future\u0092s Shadow triptych, The Clandestine Gate opens a new chapter in Bell Witch\u0092s macroscopic minimalism: the start of a yawning orbit around an increasingly massive core<\/p>\n
Tracks:<\/strong><\/p>\n Genres:<\/strong> Doom Metal<\/p>\n Label:<\/strong> Profound Lore Records<\/p>\n Erscheinungsjahr:<\/strong> 2023<\/p>\n K\u00fcnstler:<\/strong> BELL WITCH<\/p>\n Format:<\/strong> CD<\/p>\n EAN:<\/strong> 0843563162835<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nothing\u0092s bigger than life. All vastnesses \u0097 expanding space, infinite time \u0097 crouch inside of consciousness. On a historical scale, to say nothing of a cosmic one, the individual human life vanishes, and yet it\u0092s the only aperture any of us get into reality. It\u0092s barely there, and it\u0092s all there is. That\u0092s the paradox […]\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1742006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[449],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1742008","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-cd-b","7":"pa_band-bell-witch","8":"pa_productgenre-doom-metal","9":"pa_productlabel-profound-lore-records","11":"first","12":"instock","13":"taxable","14":"shipping-taxable","15":"purchasable","16":"product-type-simple"},"yoast_head":"\n\n
\nDisc2: The Clandestine Gate (part2)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n