Bell Witch announces new album and Tour Dates
Bell Witch’s acclaimed new album Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate sees its physical release in stores worldwide via Profound Lore (CD, cassette and vinyl). 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.
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 Desmond 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.
Bell Witch also share an extended version of “Making of The Clandestine Gate” in which Bobby Cochran beautifully captures intimate behind the scenes footage and interviews with members Jesse Shreibman and Dylan Desmond during the recording of the album. Watch below.
Purchase your copy of Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate here.
This Fall, Bell Witch head out a headlining North American tour. Tickets are available now and see below for a full list of dates.
Bell Witch North American Tour Dates w/ Spirit Possession
10/11/23: Vancouver, BC – Rickshaw Theatre 10/12/23: Calgary, AB – Dickens 10/13/23: Edmonton, AB – The Starlite Room 10/14/23: Saskatoon, SK – Louis’ 10/15/23: Winnipeg, MN – Park Theatre 10/17/23: St Paul, MN – Turf Club 10/18/23: Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall 10/19/23: Iowa City, IA – Gabe’s 10/20/23: Chicago, IL – Sleeping Village 10/21/23: Detroit, MI – Smalls 10/22/23: Toronto, ON – Trinity St. Paul’s Church Sanctuary 10/24/23: Montreal, QC – La Sala Rossa 10/25/23: Portland, ME – SPACE 10/26/23: Boston, MA – Sonia 10/27/23: New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge 10/28/23: Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church Sanctuary 10/29/23: Baltimore, MD – Ottobar 10/31/23: Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle 11/1/23: Atlanta, GA – Boggs Social & Supply 11/2/23: New Orleans, LA – Santos 11/3/23: Houston, TX – Black Magic Social Club 11/4/23: Austin, TX – The Parish 11/5/23: Dallas, TX – Texas Theatre 11/7/23: Albuquerque, NM – Sister 11/8/23: Denver, CO – Marquis 11/9/23: Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge 11/10/23: Boise, ID – El Korah Shrine
Bell Witch is Bassist Dylan Desmond (L) and Drummer Jesse Shreibman (R).
