TOWDATHABTE
Grabbed this on Bandcamp whilst watching it being played live at The Dome. Tears welled up as the final crescendo peaked and had it been the end of my cycle, I would have happily spontaneously combusted, I then realised it was only dawn and the first of the triptych, so I will soldier on, at least until dusk and endure another two stellar opus’s before I can embark on that final journey. Thank you Bell Witch!
pinkytheent
Spellbinding and spine-tingling. Bell Witch truly have a mastery at making 10 minutes of arrangement just fly by in a whispering trance and squeezing the maximum yearning emotional juice out of a chord. Together, a fantastic and labyrinthine work that did not feel like 83 minutes at all. If Mirror Reaper was a spectral haunting, this one is a grim trek up a blustering mountainside, replete with darkness and light as the sun breaks through the heavy clouds.
Double CD packaged in a gatefold jacket with 12-page booklet.
Includes unlimited streaming of Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.
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Streaming + Download
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Future's Shadow Part 1 ECO MIX Vinyl (Bandcamp Exclusive)
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: ECO MIX VINYL IS WHEN RANDOM RECYCLED COLOURS ARE MIXED TOGETHER SO WE DO NOT KNOW HOW THEY WILL COME OUT.
UPDATE: THE UPDATED PRODUCT PHOTO IS WHAT THEY FINALLY CAME OUT AS.
Double LP packaged in a gatefold jacket with black flood. Bandcamp exclusive colourway. Download card also included in addition to automatic Bandcamp download upon purchase.
Includes unlimited streaming of Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.
Sold Out
The Clandestine Gate TAPE Edition
Cassette + Digital Album
8-Panel Fold Out J-Card, White Cassette Shell.
Includes unlimited streaming of Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Reflected whisper of me, a drowned ruse
Shallow dug in a pulsing maze
Deafened foe
I see- glowing in a labyrinth of waves
The aired specter, deception of the light
That I follow
Sculpted emptiness of all things
Held in shade, cast by the spark
Returning veil
Hollow specter bleeding on the dark,
The fleeting breath in the returning light
That I follow
Incessant wheel of Time, Dawn’s bodies
Formless waves frozen in night
Immutable eyes
Stare infinite and squander sight
Gaze backwards but the waxing light,
That I follow
The moment’s hands eluded by that which time astrays
Scorch the flames of tomorrows to ashes by today,
A lifetime’s shadow
Under wingless wind to flight, unborn memory array
That echoes in forever, decay bloomed of the light
That I follow
The greatest weight, the breathed wind blown gone
What innumerable shudders of the recurring past
Open ahead
What matter of a flown moment shall spread last
In blooming decay under the climbing light
That I follow
The greatest weight, this recurring dawn
The greatest weight, falling glass the rising gate
Of a sightless phantom,
Sullen butcher, the fleeing horizon that forever escapes
Crashing wave of chariots, arrows of the light
That I follow
The moment, if ascent from the sinking blindness
Would remove the barbs from their hold
Emerging spring
A phantom forest rises in the dawn’s cold
Bleeding wounds pulse in the light
That I follow
If water could stand, prehensive stone sea
An arrow loosed at forever will soon crash
As blind waves
Climbing rain light throned, the wind shuts
Ten thousand gates- mirrored graves of dawn
Blinded foe
I hear- in walls ravens lead upon
Beneath the warless chariot of blinding light
That I follow
Unhallowed ubiquitous grasp
Hold everything to the light
That I follow
Dawn shrouding the void to pass
That when daylight comes- arrows of birth loose
And Death rains
In the imbrued dawn of springs wound
Worms pulse the breathless veins
Of permeation’s throne
Below and above the mountains reign
Enfleshing the spineless ribs of light
That I follow
No- but striking life, dawns phantom truth
Climbing to darkness shedding the light
That I follow
Death’s waking crown a blinding shore
Breaking waves reaching above
The beginning
Of the end of night it grew of
Stone organ, purging in the light
That I follow
Purging storm, clandestine gate, the glare escapes
Carving mountains, pulsing gale, the light reappears
The world’s worn
Skin pile folds, in the distance birth nears
In sinking blackness under waves of light
That I follow
An edge above time, heaven’s spire
The precipitous tip of Death’s sight, soon
Still air, unshadow the miser stone,
Time, wind into the world of dust
Falling, climbing
Hold untouched a fleeting breath’s cusp
Of recurring eternity, the rising light
That I follow
(Tooth of predation)
The Down-stroking rapacious eye of doom
In the diadem of waves through the light
That I follow
about
Nothing's bigger than life. All vastnesses -- expanding space, infinite time -- crouch inside of consciousness. On a historical scale, to say nothing of a cosmic one, the individual human life vanishes, and yet it's the only aperture any of us get into reality. It's barely there, and it's all there is.
That's 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's attention. Rather than seek catharsis, the duo's 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.
For their new album, The Clandestine Gate, bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer/vocalist Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch's bounds. Like 2017's 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's Shadow. "Eventually, the end of the last album will be looped around to the first to make a circle," says Desmond. "It 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."
Bell Witch began tracing the sequences that would form Future's 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.
While traces of organ and synthesizer hovered over Mirror Reaper and Bell Witch's 2020 collaboration with Aerial Ruin, Stygian Bough Volume 1, The Clandestine Gate drew those instruments closer to the center of its compositions. "We started experimenting with letting more of the elements shine on their own," 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's distortion-choked bass cleaves it open. Throughout their new material, Shreibman and Desmond also took the opportunity to implement new vocal strategies. "I wanted the vocals to be more active, rather than being on top of the soundscape," notes Shreibman. On The Clandestine Gate, Bell Witch's 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.
The expansive scale of Future's Shadow gave Bell Witch more leeway to plumb themes that have long percolated throughout their work. The concept of eternal return -- that time doesn't end and death doesn't punctuate life, but both go on forever in an infinite loop no one can remember -- inflected the development of The Clandestine Gate after Desmond encountered the idea in Nietzche's book The Gay Science. "I read the eternal return concept and was like, 'oh, yeah, all of our songs have been about this all the while," Desmond says. "Anything 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."
The films of 20th century Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky similarly supplied a framework for the movements of The Clandestine Gate and Future's Shadow as a whole. Tarkovsky's movies creep glacially, powered by the performances of his actors, which imbue his weathered landscapes with a tumultuous interiority. Simple actions -- carrying a candle across a room, tossing a metal nut into an overgrown field -- carry life-and-death weight, a strategy echoed in Bell Witch's suspension of minimal melodies across planetary expanses. "Tarkovsky's intention of poetry through visuals has a strong parallel to ours through sound," notes Desmond. "His drawn-out scenes are similar in execution to what we're doing musically, and his films are a big inspiration for this album and triptych."
The immense gravity of a work like The Clandestine Gate allows these ideas to simmer in a way that feels profoundly and somatically intuitive -- 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's Shadow triptych, The Clandestine Gate opens a new chapter in Bell Witch's macroscopic minimalism: the start of a yawning orbit around an increasingly massive core.
credits
released April 21, 2023
Engine-Eared by Billy Anderson at Avast Recording Studios.
Mixed by Billy Anderson at Flora.
Mastered by Justin Weis at Traxworx.
Artwork/Cover Painting by Jordi Diaz Alamà.
Design/layout by Chimere Noire.
For more than a decade, Bell Witch have sent tides surging over the seawalls of the song form, unraveling conventional
expectations about the ways music stations itself in time to absorb a listener's attention.
The Clandestine Gate pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future's Shadow....more
supported by 417 fans who also own “Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate”
What an impressive piece of black metal. This one-man hurricane is pure art. Sgah‘gahsowáh creates an haunting atmosphere. He puts so much soul in his music. Sælzer Bub
supported by 384 fans who also own “Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate”
Extremely well done. A spiritual successor to the heavier parts of Agalloch's first two LPs. However, don't be fooled - this goes beyond homage - it is a great work in itself that distinguishes itself from others in the black/folk genre. Eric