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, 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.
For their new album, The Clandestine Gate, bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer 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.
Portland’s Spirit Possession play an authentic form of black metal that is as refreshing in its erratic nature as it is triumphant in its old-school roots. There are shades of many old masters in Spirit Possession’s sound—Darkthrone, Craft, Master’s Hammer, Aura Noir, Bathory—but the music has a genuine sense of mania to it.
The members of Spirit Possession—guitarist/vocalist S. Peacock (Ulthar, Pandiscordin Necrogenesis) and A. Spungin (Ormus, Taurus) playing drums and homemade synths—bring a distinctive style to the band. Peacock’s vocals are shrieking and scalding, the guitars are a spiral that gets ever-more dizzying and the frantic drumming lends a sense of urgency to the chaos.
Mystic Cross is the guitarist, vocalist, and keyboardist Claire Nunez of the extreme metal band DRYAD, as well as a multifaceted songwriter and classically trained pianist/flutist. Her fantastical synthesizer compositions are brief snapshots of life through a distorted lens – moody, ruminating soundtracks to accompany her own surrealistic daydreams and immersive nightmares.