Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin

On Stygian Bough Volume II, the collaboration between Bell Witch (Dylan Desmond, Jesse Shreibman) and Aerial Ruin (Erik Moggridge) enlivens its unbodied presence resembling both collaborating projects as a conduit in its own separate entity. In the course of an hour, four musical pieces set themselves apart from the catalogs of both individual bands and branch into new territory all the while threaded to the original encounter.

Over the album a cyclical world unfolds in which different perspectives of how various forms of worship empower, eclipse, destroy and feed on each other is explored.

“Waves Became The Sky,” the opening track on Volume II, recalls “Rows (Of Endless Waves)” from Bell Witch’s debut album Longing. It was here that Bell Witch and Aerial Ruin had initial contact, while “King Of The Wood,” quickly lurks into an abyss death-doom fans of Thergothon and My Dying Bride will find familiarity in. Track three, “From Dominion,” opens to the power trio resembling the elements of Aerial Ruin’s dark folk temperaments. With a voice one can imagine emerging from some forgotten dimension in ancient Albion, Moggridge pulls thread as much enchantment as song. “The Told And The Leadened,” the album’s closer and longest track clocking in at just over nineteen minutes, is about the cycles of power and how they eclipse and prop each other up.

The result is a commanding four songs steeped in mysticism, legend, and the examination of the connective threads that shape and influence the culture, mythology, and customs of all human societies throughout time in unique, localized ways.