Next month Bell Witch hit the road in support of their new album Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate, available now via Profound Lore records. All shows this year will have a visual accompaniment created by photographer/director Bobby Cochran. This week, the band share a prelude of what audiences will experience with “The Clandestine Gate – Movement 2 (Official Visualizer).”
Bell Witch tell, “We knew that we wanted to present something visual alongside the music from ‘The Clandestine Gate’. We asked the incredibly talented Bobby Cochran to work on something surreal and dreamlike to evoke the themes inherent in the music. We’re ecstatic to be able to share this work with you as we tour through North America for the rest of the year.”
Cochran adds, “It was a super exciting and somewhat daunting project to put visuals to the music of ‘The Clandestine Gate’. I had a number of conversations with Jesse and Dylan about themes for the record and things they found visually inspiring in general. We came up with a theme that would run through this and future records, loosely tied to the mythology around the maiden/mother/crone archetypes. I wanted visuals that would support the depth and breadth of the music and would add another layer of complexity as well. This is my first time doing something of this magnitude and style, and I feel super grateful that it all ended up working so well together.”
In addition to the visual, and newly added West Coast December dates, last week Bell Witch released The Clandestine Gate and 2017’s acclaimed Mirror Reaper as four movements on all digital retailers. While both albums were written as single pieces, each to be listened to as continuous wholes, the movements provide an opportunity to listen to, and interact with, the music in smaller segments when the confines of time and schedules do not allow for longer form engagements. The movements follow the side breaks on vinyl and the full pieces remain available and intact for listening to the works as they are intended.
The Clandestine Gate is an epic 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.
Bell Witch Live Dates:
Tickets Available here.
Oct 11: Vancouver, BC – Rickshaw Theatre *
Oct 12: Calgary, AB – Dickens *
Oct 13: Edmonton, AB – The Starlite Room *
Oct 14: Saskatoon, SK – Louis’ *
Oct 15: Winnipeg, MN – Park Theatre *
Oct 17: St Paul, MN – Turf Club *
Oct 18: Milwaukee, WI – The Back Room at Colectivo *
Oct 19: Iowa City, IA – Gabe’s *
Oct 20: Chicago, IL – Sleeping Village *
Oct 21: Detroit, MI – Smalls *
Oct 22: Toronto, ON – Trinity St. Paul’s Church Sanctuary *
Oct 24: Montreal, QC – La Sala Rossa *
Oct 25: Portland, ME – SPACE *
Oct 26: Boston, MA – Sonia *
Oct 27: New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge *
Oct 28: Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church Sanctuary * (SOLD OUT)
Oct 29: Baltimore, MD – Ottobar *
Oct 31: Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle *
Nov 01: Atlanta, GA – Boggs Social & Supply *
Nov 02: New Orleans, LA – Santos *
Nov 03: Houston, TX – Black Magic Social Club *
Nov 04: Austin, TX – The Parish *
Nov 05: Dallas, TX – Texas Theatre *
Nov 07: Albuquerque, NM – Sister *
Nov 08: Denver, CO – Marquis *
Nov 09: Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge *
Nov 10: Boise, ID – El Korah Shrine *
Dec 06: Oakland, CA – Stork Club #
Dec 07: Fresno, CA – Strummers #
Dec 08: San Diego, CA – Brick By Brick #
Dec 09: Joshua Tree, CA – Joshua Tree Brewing #
Dec 10: Los Angeles, CA – Lodge Room #
Dec 12: Felton, CA – Felton Music Hall #
Dec 14: Eugene, OR – WOW Hall #
Dec 15: Portland, OR – Star Theater #
Dec 16: Seattle, WA – Neumos #
* w/ Spirit Possession
# w/ Otay:Onii
More from Bell Witch:
For more than a decade, the renowned Pacific Northwestern doom metal band 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. 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.
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 Dylan Desmond (vocals/bass) encountered the idea in Nietzche‘s book The Gay Science. The glacially paced 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. 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.
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.
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