Scarlet Aeon: Thirty Years Later

Some indie/small bands leave behind a long trail of clubs, flyers, demos, and fading press clippings. Scarlet Aeon left something stranger: a brief, incandescent history that seemed to burn itself into memory of a few that was out of all proportion to its actual span. Formed in the charged spiritual and emotional milieu of the early 1990s, the band lived fast, changed shape quickly, moved from Austin to Dallas, and played only one public concert—an appearance in Deep Ellum that produced a sonic moment between sheer performance and intimate ritual. Now, as two of the surviving members revisit the recordings for the first time in decades, songwriter Bishop and keyboardist-vocalist Isabella look back on the band’s improbable beginning, its single night onstage, the losses that followed, and the complicated force that still lives inside the music.

What follows is drawn from a conversation between them in late March 2026, edited lightly for clarity but preserved in the spirit in which it unfolded: reflective, affectionate, and unfinished in places.

 

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Origin, Rise, and Fall of Scarlet Aeon

Bella: We were so young. That’s the first thing that hits me now. Not in the patronizing sense. Just… we were young enough that everything felt enormous. A rehearsal felt enormous. A glance felt enormous. A delayed phone call felt enormous. Nobody in this band knew how to do anything halfway.

Bishop: Especially not the beginning.

Bella: No. Definitely not the beginning. [laughs]

Bishop: That whole early-90s pagan festival world where you and I first crossed paths in, what?, Beltane 1992, still lives in my head like some half-invented country. It was both enchanted and faintly ridiculous at the same time, which is probably why it felt real to me. There were bonfires and dancing and ritual and people trying very hard to become mythic in public.

Bella: And sex.

Bishop: Also that. [laughs] Lots of sex for a single weekend. And, I think, a great deal of longing disguised as confidence. But every so often, something genuine cut through all that theater, and with you, for me, it did. Immediately. I saw you and everything around you seemed to lose focus.

Bella: You just had a look.

Bishop: So you’ve always said.

Bella: Because it’s true. You looked like somebody who’d just made a very bad decision and a very important one at the exact same time. Quiet, intense, not saying much, but clearly already gone somewhere deep in your own head about it.

Bishop: That sounds accurate, unfortunately, and apparently has been that way in my life since then.

Bella: I believe that.

Bishop: I was already trying to sort out who I was by then. Spiritually, artistically, practically: though “practically” may be giving myself too much credit. And then you went back to Austin, and I followed.

Bella: Chased.

Bishop: Chased, may certainly be a better word. From that first night at Beltaine to moving to Austin to be with you, or so I thought, I’d already built an entire inward narrative around you. By the time reality proved more complicated than the version I’d imagined, I was already committed. I’d already reorganized my life around a possibility that turned out not to be simple.

Bella: No, it was not simple. [laughs] That’s certainly one way to put it.

Bishop: Fair enough.

Bella: And that’s really where Scarlet Aeon came from. Not from some clean “let’s start a band” moment. It grew out of whatever was happening between us, around us, inside us. Attraction, confusion, secrecy, projection, devotion, magick, all of it. The emotional mess came first. The music gave it somewhere to go. And then we turned that personal mess toward the holy books [of Thelema] and the rest fell into place.

Bishop: Sure, I can definitely buy into that take. I was writing constantly then. Lyrics, fragments, half-finished songs. But you were the one with momentum. You were the one who took private material and insisted it become something embodied, something with voices, something with bodies in a room.

Bella: I was reckless enough to call some people. That’s the practical version. [laughs]

Bishop: You were professional enough to insist on form.

Bella: That sounds prettier, so we’ll use that. Kyle was a demon on guitars. Damian had unforgettable lead vocals. Daniel on drums was a fantastic pick. Me on keyboards and a few vocals here and there.

Bishop: A few? There are more than just a few. And that live version you did of “No Hold On My Heart” gives me goosebumps.

Bella: You’re too kind.

Bishop: It really is my favorite version of that song.

Bella: Thanks. And then there was you, hovering somewhere behind the whole messy band thing, writing, shaping, brooding, trying to decide what kind of album this band should make.

Bishop: It wasn’t easy to define, because Thelema was a huge part of our lives from the start. Not as branding. Thelema wasn’t a slogan. But for this project, this band, it needed to be more of an atmosphere, a pressure, a hunger. I never wanted songs that behaved like sermons.

Bella: No. That would have killed it immediately. Thelema was in our bloodstream. We couldn’t walk into the room wearing a name tag that said “Thelema” and showing a little red book down people’s throats.

Bishop: Exactly. I’d grown up in the 1980s CCM [Contemporary Christian Music] scene and knew that so many bands were capable of music that ministered, for lack of a better word, to kids of the time through music without being pushy about Christianity. I figured if they could do it, so could we. I figured it was better to let the songs carry meaning and feeling on their own. 

Bella: And better for the songs. People will forgive a lot if the feeling is real.

Bishop: Then we left Austin and went back to Dallas, and suddenly the whole thing had shifted geography but not the emotional messiness. Scarlet Aeon was formed in one psychic landscape and then stepped onstage in another. By the time the band played its only show, it was the Deep Ellum scene rather than the Austin scene. Very different environments. But it was one night. One unforgettable night, and that was the entire public life of the band.

Bella: Which still sounds almost like failure when you say it that way. It feels like there should have been more. More gigs, more trouble, more stories. But no. We only had that one show, and it was all over within months after we finished recording the second album.

Bishop: There was a volatility to everything in life by that time. Beauty and chaos tended to share the same wellspring.

Bella: That’s a very Bishop sentence.

Bishop: Is it wrong?

Bella: Annoyingly, no. [laughs] I’m kidding, but, no, you’re right, we were in a rough spot in life. Each of us had some kind of trial: Damian had started using [cocaine], you were married to that disaster [first marriage], and Kyle was hiding his disease [pancreatic cancer]. I was just a hot mess anyway. Of course, some of that was inexperience. Some of it was nerves. Some of it was because there was way too much private emotional material sitting underneath the set. But there were moments where it landed. Real fucking moments that felt like an out-of-body experience at times, like every nerve in my body had been plugged into an electrical socket.

Bishop: I remember standing off to the side and hearing those songs in public for the first time. They’d lived in notebooks, conversations, your garage, all that charged interior life that sometimes didn’t feel real. And then suddenly they were out in the air, in front of strangers, with bodies attached to them. That was disorienting, to say the least.

Bella:  I knew something irreversible was happening, even if nobody else in the room knew it.

Bishop: That may be why it still has the force it does. Scarlet Aeon never had time to become routine. There was no middle period. Just ignition, embodiment, then collapse.

Bella: People always want one clean reason for why it ended. There wasn’t one. There were too many unstable things all happening at once. Too much emotion, not enough structure, too much projection, not enough discipline. And yes, the drugs didn’t help.

Bishop: No. They did not.

Bella: That’s a diplomatic response.

Bishop: [laughs] Fine. The less diplomatic response is that it was a major factor, especially with me and Damian. We were both running from things we didn’t fucking know how to face directly.

Bella: Right. And when you’re that age, everything fuses together anyway. Music, romance, identity, spirituality, damage, future. It all becomes one blaze of attempted glory. And sometimes we fail at the glory because the blaze is all we could manage.

Bishop: And yet I don’t regret the band.

Bella: Neither do I.

Bishop: Even the painful parts?

Bella: I regret pain that didn’t have to fucking happen. I absolutely don’t regret Scarlet Aeon.

Under the Waning Moon

Bishop: [Under the] Waning Moon still feels to me like something born out of collision. Youth, longing, pursuit, confusion, revelation, everything happening almost too fast to process while it was happening. The songs were trying to hold all of that at once, which may be why the album still feels like it’s in motion even when it’s at its most simple or most soft.

Bella: This album just spilled out. That’s how I remember it. Not sloppy, exactly. Just fucking urgent. It still has the feeling of people discovering what kind of band they are while the tape is already rolling.

Bishop: Yes. Most of them started out as poems, a couple of them to or about you. When we started working out the music for them, I think I wanted those songs to do what I couldn’t do in life at the time, which was to hold contradiction without collapsing under it. To let longing and impossibility occupy the same space and still produce beauty.

Bella: And some of them damn near admit that. “Blue After Midnight,” certainly. That’s practically our whole story in a nutshell. “Until the End,” too. And “Emerald After,” which I still think is one of the most emotionally exposed things on the album, even if it pretends otherwise.

Bishop: I used to joke that some of those were the dumbest fucking 90s lyrics you could find. [laughs]

Bella: And I still refuse to let you say that. [laughs] It was a different time. Half the decade ran on emotionally overcharged hormones and people loved it. Sometimes a lyric didn’t need to be precise. It just needed to hit the right nerve.

Bishop: I think that’s fair. And those songs do feel lived to me now. Not really abstract at all. Certainly not decorative. They feel like attempts to endure feeling too much and somehow turn it into something singable.

Bella: Exactly. That’s why they still work. The emotion underneath them is real. You can hear it in Damian’s voice. You can hear it in the harmonies. “Emerald After” especially. There’s something desperate in the way the voices reach for each other. The performance sounds like it might come apart if you touch it too much.

Bishop: There is definitely a lot of fucking tension in that one.

Bella: Which is why I left a lot of it alone in the remaster. Some songs need the rawness. If you polish them too much, you lose the wound that created them.

Bishop: That album needed balance all the way through. It had to feel atmospheric, spiritual, and emotionally charged, yes, but also immediate. It still had to function as a typical band album. Songs with strong identities. Distinct moods with a recognizable sound across all the tracks. Entry points. Maybe a radio hit if we could have gotten airtime, which, I should emphasize here, we didn’t get at all. Not even the local college station. Scarlet Aeon just didn’t last long enough to warrant the investment.

Bella: True, but everybody gave it something essential. Kyle’s guitar gave it an edge without turning everything into blunt force. Damian brought the drama. Daniel made things move without making them stiff. And the symphonic element, I think, kept it from becoming just another heavy record by sad people in black.

Bishop: [laughs] That is an excellent summary.

Bella: Thank you. Also, the title fits it perfectly, really. Under the Waning Moon feels like something already passing while it’s still happening. Romance under pressure. Beauty with the ending built in. Desire that already knows it’s going to become memory.

Bishop: Yes. It’s full of desire, but also full of aftermath before that aftermath has technically arrived.

Bella: The first album said, “Here we are.” Maybe not neatly. Maybe not sensibly. But unmistakably.

Bishop: And it established, at least for me, that the emotional world of the band was the point. Not polish. Not cleverness. Not scene credibility. Our purpose was to make something alive enough to carry what we were actually living through.

Bella: That’s why it survives. Not because it was perfect, but because it fucking held true meaning. In the end, is there anything you’d change about it?

Bishop: Those damn [ah ah ah sound] choir samples you used way too often for my tastes. [laughs] It works, don’t get me wrong, but I think we could have eliminated those and been just fine. 

Recording Heart Girt With A Serpent

Bella: And then there was the second album. Or what became the second album. Because that felt different almost from the start.

Bishop: Very different. Heart Girt With A Serpent was more deliberate. Not calmer—gods no—but more centered, more structured, more aware of its own descent.

Bella: The first record spilled. [Heart Girt with A] Serpent didn’t spill. It stalked.

Bishop: That is exactly right. We weren’t just drawing from personal stories anymore. We were reaching into a specific text, one of Thelema’s holy books, into an entire interior cosmology, and trying to build something sustained out of it.

Bella: But this wasn’t us borrowing a few images and draping them over a rock record. Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente got under the skin of the whole project and became, literally, the heart itself.

Bishop: Completely. That text is so intimate, so fevered, so unguarded. The relationship it stages between longing, ordeal, devotion, and revelation just feels intolerably alive. I was just starting to explore the idea of a person’s … no, I was about to sound quite detached from it. I was exploring the idea of my Holy Guardian Angel and what that might look like for me. Once we started shaping the album around the intention of the book itself, as a story of someone pursuing their Holy Guardian Angel, I think all of us understood, whether we said it aloud or not, that this was going to require more than aesthetic agreement. It was going to require emotional inhabiting.

Bella: You had to live inside it.

Bishop: More than was healthy, probably.

Bella: Definitely more than was fucking healthy. [laughs] The first record still had the energy of people discovering what they could do. With Heart Girt With A Serpent, it felt more like we were trying to build one large thing. Something whole. Something that unfolded.

Bishop: A sequence rather than a collection. I wasn’t thinking as much in terms of individual tracks declaring themselves as little carbon copies of scripture. I was thinking in movements. Returns. Recurring images. Emotional stages.

Bella: I remember that. Even early on, the conversations were different. It wasn’t “Here’s the next song.” It was “Where are we now? Where are we in the descent? Where are we in the break? Where are we in the opening?”

Bishop: Exactly. The songs had to belong to each other. It wasn’t a one-to-one interpretation of [Liber Cordis Cincti] Serpente, at least not in my mind. More of a personal interpretation, my interpretation, of the inner journey defined by the book. Its hunger, its exhaustion, its ecstasy, its contradictions.

Bella: And musically it asked more from all of us, honestly. Not just musically. Personally. You could feel that in the studio.

Bishop: There were passages where writing felt less like composition and more like transcription from a state I couldn’t fully control. I don’t mean that in a cheap mystical way. I mean the material arrived with its own pressure, its own inevitability, and the work was not to reduce it.

Bella: And from the outside, that looked exactly as fucking exhausting as it sounds. [laughs]

Bishop: I’m sure it did.

Bella: But that pressure helped the album. It gave it seriousness. Not solemnity. It never felt dead. But it did feel serious.

Bishop: It had to. I would have hated for it to become some decorative “occult album.” It had to cost something emotionally. Otherwise why make it?

Bella: That’s why it impacted us differently. The first record had more immediate impact, more direct hooks into the nerves. Heart Girt With A Serpent was heavier in the long run. It didn’t just hit and move on. It burrowed.

Bishop: It accumulated.

Bella: There’s your word.

Bishop: [laughs] Yes. It accumulated. Which felt faithful to the source, because [Liber Cordis Cincti] Serpente itself repeats, deepens, intensifies, pleads, exults, breaks apart, gathers itself again. I wanted the album to have that same sense of stable instability, if I can sound contradictory here, but musically shaped into something that made sense, at least on the surface. Recurrence with consequence.

Bella: That still sounds like something you wrote in a notebook and underlined twice.

Bishop: I probably did.

Bella: I know.

Bishop: There was also the question of how to remain faithful to the Thelemic current without becoming unbearable about it.

Bella: Yes. Because by then we knew exactly what we did not want. We didn’t want songs standing there handing out tracts.

Bishop: No. Better to let Thelema saturate the emotional field of the album. Let the Will be in the song. Let the ordeal be in the song. Let the pressure toward transformation be in the song. Don’t stop every five minutes to explain the cosmology.

Bella: Exactly. If the song knows what it is, it doesn’t need to fucking introduce itself.

Bishop: I wanted the album to feel initiatory without ever saying, “This is initiation.” To feel devotional without becoming pious. To feel erotic without becoming a cheap imitation of a misplaced longing. To feel wounded without becoming self-pitying. That was the balance I kept reaching for.

Bella: And when it worked, it really worked. There were moments where it felt like the album was saying things I didn’t have language for in ordinary life. That’s when I knew it was getting somewhere real. But, okay, fair turn around here. What’s your favorite song in Heart [Girt With A Serpent]?

Bishop: [laughs] That’s easy. “Aimless Wings” for many reasons, the least of which is Damian’s vocals in the chorus at “Now I am air, and still” sound to me like “Now I am errant still.” And I bust up laughing every time I hear it.

Bella: That’s too funny. I hear it too. I think mine is “The Eight Fears,” not so much for the arrangement, though that’s fine, but the lyrics always felt like it was written at the right time of my life and the challenges I was going through personally.

Bishop: I get that. Though I think there is something just haunting about “Shadow Over the Lute.”

Bella: It’s the pivot for me of the whole album, and still sends chills up my spine at Damian’s vocals. There’s just something fucking raw in them, more so than any other song we recorded. I remember him saying it was the most difficult song for him to get through.

Bishop: Damian’s version of it that he did with his son during the COVID lockdown, the one that we’ve added to this new release, is raw as fuck to hear. 

Bella: It’s phenomenal. And his son’s [Damian, Jr.] remix of “One Light, Many Colors” is wild. I love it too.

Bishop: That one had to grow on me, but it’s in my regular lineup now in the car. He sounds so much like his father but with his own style. I heard he did all that alone, every synth, every drum track, all the vocals, all him alone.

Bella: That’s hilarious, but I heard that too. About Damian, Jr, I mean. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the shift in tone, but it works. Of course, in hindsight, I think I’d reconsider the style we used. We were all into the symphonic metal stuff and it just seemed to be the thing of the moment. Songs like “Shadow Over the Lute”  stand out for their difference from the others.

Bishop: I still think Heart [Girt With A Serpent] was our masterpiece, or the attempt at one.

Bella: It was. Even if it was too ambitious for our actual circumstances.

Bishop: Perhaps because it was too fucking ambitious.

Bella: Also fair. [laughs] The first material said, “Here we are.” This album said, “Here is the whole fucking inner world, if we can survive opening it.”

Bishop: That’s beautiful.

Bella: Thanks. It’s also true.

Remastering Sessions and the Aftermath of Scarlet Aeon

Bishop: It’s odd, really. I mean, after all this time, I thought coming back to these recordings would feel more distant than it does. More historical, maybe. Like opening a drawer and finding a few old pictures that brought back memories without being entirely pulled back into them. But that hasn’t been the experience at all. The remastering sessions have felt closer than memory usually feels.

Bella: That’s the strange part. I expected nostalgia. Maybe even a little embarrassment, if I’m being honest. Not because I’m ashamed of it. More because youth can be so absolute. So overcommitted. But hearing it now, what I mostly feel is tenderness and passion.

Bishop: Yes. Passion is the right word. Back then we were too close to it to hear it cleanly. Everything was tangled together: the songs, the feelings, the circumstances, the sheer effort of trying to make the thing real. And now, with enough distance to hear the structure, the human face of it comes through more sharply.

Bella: And not just the songs. The people. That’s the part that gets me. Kyle especially. Daniel too. Kyle died so young that memory never really got the chance to age him properly. He stays suspended. Daniel too, though differently. And then you hear them now, not as names, not as stories, but as players making specific choices in real time. And it catches you in the chest.

Bishop: There have been moments where I’ve heard an isolated guitar line from Kyle and had to stop the session for a minute. Because sound doesn’t blur the way memory does. Memory turns people into background noise if you let it. Sound keeps them specific.

Bella: Exactly. And Daniel’s the same. The little accents, the way he leaned into a transition, the personality in the playing—you hear him. Not memory-him. Him.

Bishop: Which is grief, yes, but also gratitude. For a moment they are not absent. They are active again. Present tense again.

Bella: That’s the gift in it.

Bishop: And Damian too, of course, still here, still unmistakably himself in those recordings. He had presence from the beginning. Some singers have a voice; Damian had a center of gravity. The song would gather around him.

Bella: It really would. And I hear that better now too. I hear how specific everybody was. Kyle wasn’t just “the guitarist.” Daniel wasn’t just “the drummer.” Damian wasn’t just “the singer.” Everybody was shaping the emotional identity of the thing.

Bishop: What moves me most now is that I don’t hear posture when I listen back. I don’t hear people pretending to be profound. I hear people trying to make something alive enough to hold what they were actually living through.

Bella: I feel that too. I don’t hear melodrama. Well, maybe a little melodrama. [laughs] But I also hear sincerity. I hear young Thelemites trying with everything they had to make something powerful, spiritual, romantic, dangerous. We didn’t always have the means to fully realize it, but the impulse was real. Completely real.

Bishop: And that’s what this remastering has made possible. A chance to honor what was there without falsifying it.

Bella: That matters to me a lot. We’re not pretending Scarlet Aeon was something bigger in practical terms than it was. We’re just letting it be heard properly. Maybe for the first time.

Bishop: And letting the dead speak again.

Bella: Yes.

Bishop: That’s a large part of what this means to me.

Bella: Me too.

Bishop: If someone comes to Scarlet Aeon now, in 2026, with none of this context, none of the festivals, no understanding of the Austin or Dallas scenes of the time, none of the private history, none of the losses, I’d still want them to hear something true in it. That’s enough. The longing, the will, the roughness, the beauty.

Bella: I’d want them to hear the humanity in it. And the feeling. Because it was a very small history, really. One band. Two albums. One small concert. A handful of lives tied together by this music.

Bishop: Roughness isn’t failure. Sometimes roughness is just what life sounds like before it’s been smoothed into something safer.

Bella: There you go again with those pithy phrases. [laughs] Though, seriously, maybe that’s why it still has a pulse. There was nothing safe back then about our relationships, our friendships, our music, our very short time turning life and the belief in life into something real.

Bishop: Maybe so.