Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin: Stygian Bough

Bell Witch FacebookBell Witch TwitterBell Witch InstagramGenuine collaborations between two sets of artists are rare. For their new album, Stygian Bough Volume I, the members—Dylan Desmond (bass/vocals) and Jesse Shreibman (drums/vocals)—of doom duo Bell Witch didn’t just team up (again) with dark folk elegist Erik Moggridge (guitars/vocals) of Aerial Ruin, they fully integrated the two outfits. While Moggridge has been a part of Bell Witch’s sonic fingerprint on all their prior records, perhaps most notably for his vocals on their previous full-length, Mirror Reaper, he’s now part of the very fabric that makes up the five hauntingly beautiful, strikingly heavy songs that comprise Stygian Bough Volume I.“We started working on collaboration material together sometime in 2019,” says Bell Witch’s Dylan Desmond. “But there was writing going on as far back as 2018. The original approach was going to be doing a split record in which we each covered specific songs from each other’s catalog.”“It started in early 2018, I think,” Aerial Ruin’s Erik Moggridge adds. “By late autumn 2018, we were all three jamming and going through the ideas and writing lots of new ones. We then had to shift gears to rehearse for the Mirror Reaper (in its entirety) European tour in December 2018, but soon picked back up with writing in early 2019, which continued off and on right up until we entered the studio.”