Two Photo Shoots, Both Alike In Dignity

Let's talk photo shoots. I want to share some pictures from the last couple of weeks. Our big shoot was two weeks ago, as I mentioned, at the wonderful Pasadena Museum of History. It is such a beautiful building and retains a lot of its old charm and intimacy. Here are some snapshots from the shoot:

Lauren and David discussing a shot

Getting the light just right.

Preparing for a seance with some special invited guests.

What could be happening here? You'll soon find out.

This weekend we had an additional shoot in our apartment building, which has a great open space with a lot of light which is great for converting into whatever you might want it to be. It has served us in the past with photo and video shoots. Lauren came by and we did some more work on what might be the cover shot.

During the shoot, I had to be sort of bound and gagged and needed to stay still for long periods of time. I have to say, it sent me to amazing places in my head. Being trussed up in Victorian gear in 92 degree heat and having cheesecloth stuck in my mouth sent me in strange directions. I began to slip outside the room, outside myself, outside the world, and soon I was seeing cells divide and atoms collide and worlds being born and dying in the blink of an eye. My ears were generating Sondheim music that I could literally hear but was not coming from outside stimulus. It. was. strange. And it felt appropriate for what was happening. I doubt you will know from seeing the images, but that's where I was...or wasn't...during the cover shoot.

Lauren also showed us the shots she had taken thus far from the previous shoot, and WOW, we are very impressed. We really can't wait to share them here. They are filled with wonder and beauty and mystery and are vaguely sinister as well. Just how we like it.

As soon as the images are delivered, we are going to get going on the next step in this journey, which is design. We've already done a lot of preliminary work on what the CD is going to look like, but the photos will probably dictate new and exciting possibilities we hadn't imagined before. David is a graphic artist and this task is one of many where his talent gets to really shine. You'll be seeing his lovely handiwork soon.

Pics from Video Shoot

Hi everyone, we've put this temporary site up so we could share this new blog with you and keep you up to date on the making of Somniloquy. We hope you enjoy it and if you're trying to find the link for the RSS feed, until we get it on this page you can click to get it here.

The video shoot last week was with a good friend of ours, Shawn Jackson.
It was pretty simple. We just hung out together and Shawn asked us questions about the album and how it fits into the overall arc of our past work. He's incredibly erudite and smart like that and did a great job interviewing us. We have a lovely new DSLR camera so we thought we'd go try it out on our rooftop overlooking the hills of Hollywood.I've known Shawn for years and he always manages to make me laugh hard.In this shot, Shawn asked us to give him a visual representation of Somniloquy. Looks pretty sullen and sulky to me.
We are lucky. Lucky indeed.
More pics on our Flickr page.

Photo Shoot...At Last!

Our new album, Somniloquy, has essentially been done on the music side since April. Since then, we've been through three months of bizarre setbacks, delays, and general ennui - not on our parts, mind you, just from the Collective. We decided to take a relaxed attitude about it. There is no point fighting against forces you cannot control. Perhaps there are deeper reasons why the album wasn't ready to come out yet, reasons we cannot see. Or maybe it's just Chaos at work. Regardless, the album that was supposed to be released late Spring/early Summer is now looking at an October release date (exact date TBA).

One of the things that took a great deal of time to get accomplished was the album artwork photo shoot. We have had a very specific idea of how this album should look from the very start of the writing process. The look and feel of the entire album was influenced by this photo exhibit we saw at the Met in New York back in October of 2005. It completely permeates the thematic structure of the whole work, and we had to make sure that the artwork was photographed in a manner befitting that theme.

After a lot of searching and false starts, we found an excellent photographer in Lauren Noble, a recent graduate of Art Center in Pasadena. We knew that we were asking for a very strange shoot and the subject matter was not to everyone's taste. With Lauren, we knew right away when we spoke that we understood each other perfectly and had similar tastes in design and interests both Gothic and Victorian. David had seen her work at her grad show and was very impressed, and we are glad we were able to secure her services.

We've been crazy about the Pasadena Museum of History since we used it in our video shoot for Labyrinth a few years back. It's a big Victorian mansion with rooms full of beautiful original furniture and art. It is large, and dark, and dense. We knew that this was the perfect place for the new album shoot and were adamant about using the space for this shoot. With the wonderful help of our friend Mary, we were able to rent the space, and the big day finally went forward - just yesterday, July 13th.

I had my hair and makeup done by my own personal glam squad - my sister Victoria, before the shoot. She did some beautiful long wavy curls that instantly frizzed and fell in the heat oven that was Pasadena. We arrived to do the garden shots at around 2 PM and already felt we were going pass out from the heat by 2:15. We pushed forward, dodging emerging sprinkler near-catastrophes, and I think got some fabulous shots (which we hope you can see soon).

We then moved into the mansion and were joined by a select group of friends to photograph a good old Victorian seance, complete with ectoplasm. Everyone was incredibly patient as the lights were being set up, and they all looked fabulous in their old-timey outfits. Lauren then spent a lot of time with David and me getting our individual shots, including the one the will hopefully make the album cover. The groundskeeper of the house told us a great story about Vincent Price and a trained wolf that helped me know we were definitely on the right track.

It was an exhilarating day. To finally see such a long project come to its fruition is incredibly rewarding. This is a huge part of the fun of the creation, and we really can't wait to see what the camera captured. There's going to be a lot of post-production work to be done on these images, so it's going to take some time for them to be completed and then designed into the album artwork and the new website.

Next post: The Making of Somniloquy video was shot this weekend as well. See you soon!

Welcome

Hi everyone, this is Adriana. I'm the singer around here. I write things too, and play things, and play on things, and with things, and around things. I'm going to be doing a fair amount of posting, as David (the other half of the Endless) tends to like to stay mysterious. I'm the lips, he's the hands.

I'm not sure how long it's going to take for this blog to go up, nor how long it will take before anyone reads it, but I figured it was a good time to start posting, as we are in the final stages of completing the new album, Somniloquy, and I've been really eager to share the process.

This has been a really interesting process, this album, and very different from the previous one, The Republic of Heaven. We are planning on filming a bit of a retrospective and discussion about all of this on this coming Saturday. We will be using the services of one of our greatest fans and even greater friends, Shawn Jackson, who will interview us and talk about the making of Somniloquy and its place in the greater whole of our work thus far. We really look forward to getting that cut together to share with you here.

We are also getting ready for our big photo shoot on Sunday for the album cover. We've been visualizing this cover since we started working on the album and the concept really drove the writing, so we are thrilled to finally be able to bring it to fruition. We have a fantastic photographer and a really cool location which we will share with you as we go along.

I wanted to announce as well that when the new website goes live, we will have an entirely new web store that we hope you will love. It is based on the Sheeba Spirit Store pioneered by Issa (formerly Jane Siberry) and will include high quality MP3s for download at self-determined pricing. We have gone back and re-mastered our two first EPs, Grumpy Ghost and ...i'm the queen of the moon and they have never sounded better. We hope this new web store makes our music accessible in a way that displays our respect and love for you, the listener and creates a system where trust and respect drives the new music model. We will be unveiling all of this in the next few months.

If you want even more up-to-date info, you can subscribe to our Twitter feed as well. All this and more is coming your way soon. Soon, soon, you're a balloon!