Doom Metal: Bell Witch: Renitenzmusik

Slowness has the potential to be annoying. Anyone who eliminates as many forms of acceleration as possible from their own activities is actually of little use in terms of productivity or usability. In drone music, this rebelliousness finds a musical equivalent through slowing down. This also works particularly well because immersive low tones, which vary only minimally over long distances, largely exclude the world completely. Just because of the brutal volume. The autistic nature of this music is the attempt to put everything social and its demands on pause.

The slower styles of metal are in the same vein. The American doom metal band St. Vitus presented the prototypical genre anthem in the mid-80s. The then St. Vitus singer Wino Weinrich defined doom as a means of sneaking into a world beyond social normality. There’s nothing left to do with the lyrical subject. The lyrics of “Born Too Late” summed up the pop mythology of metal slowed down to the maximum. And of course the subject doesn’t want it any other way.

Slowness in metal is currently being perfectly developed by the duo Bell Witch and pushed into formally radical spheres. On the double album “Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate”, which was released at the end of last year, you can hear a single 83-minute piece, the first of a trilogy that will probably end up being around four and a half hours. »The Clandestine Gate« only minimally varies the basic musical idea that the band from Seattle has been pursuing since the first demo released in 2011, actually in the sense that it is stretched out more and more: a sound that is somehow built in the shape of a lava and it aims to tenderly crush its surroundings using sound pressure.

The music ebbs and flows up and down until someone steps on an effects pedal and you’re happily stuck to the nearest wall. The vocals alternate between a backwards mixed sacral tonality and death metal roars. The pace remains consistently slow. As on “Mirror Reaper” (two pieces each three quarters of an hour long), on “Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate” static monotony and many small details come together very nicely.

The folk horror-heavy “Stygian Bough Volume I” was released between the two albums. What applies to Bell Witch’s entire work is that music helps a lot to escape the demands and demands of the world, at least imaginatively and temporarily. What you find here is different than, for example, the harsh soundscapes of the much more abstract music of the related Sunn O))), simply because Bell Witch’s music with drums and vocals is closer to conventional song structures. The brutality here has nothing violent, but is a means of transport to unfold melodies and various degrees of distortion at a creeping speed.

Bell Witch: Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate (Profound Lore/Membran)