Tuesday, February 24, 2009

New Album Review - Collected Sounds

There is a new review of our album up at the always awesome Collected Sounds website. Please go check it out. To quote:

The melodies are entrancing and the different layers of music floating above and under the main layer combine to make something very pleasing to my ears. It’s as if every little ‘tik-a-tik’ was intensely labored over so that it would be in the perfect place at the perfect volume and I’d say mission accomplished.

I’ve always loved this band, but this is an exceptional release.

Many, many thanks to the wonderful Amy Lotsberg for this.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Electrical Language Podcast Featuring the Endless

Hello from London! We want to take a quick break from sleeping on the tube to let you know we are featured in a podcast that just came out today. A little background: last weekend we had the pleasure of speaking over Skype with Gabor Kovacs of the fabulous Electrical Language podcast. Gabor has been a strong champion of our music and he has been kind enough to devote his entire program to discussing our work this week.

To listen in, just click here, and please subscribe to this excellent podcast. We discuss our history as a band, the new album Somniloquy, the Sandman, our download store, and much more.

Many, many thanks to Gabor for this. We hope you enjoy it.

Monday, February 9, 2009

What's That Stuff Coming Out Of Your Mouths In The Album Artwork?

If you haven't watched our "Making Of Somniloquy" series, you might be wondering what the long white cloth is that's coming out of our mouths in the album artwork. It's ectoplasm, brought to prominence by Victorian-era mediums during Spiritualist seances. They often used a mixture of cheesecloth coated with grease or paint which they would then hide in various orifices in the body. When they were communing with spirits, the ectoplasm would then "materialize" out of their mouths, ears, and other body parts to prove that they were in fact communicating with the spirit world. We were inspired by a photography exhibit we saw at the Met in New York called The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, which featured hundreds of beautiful photographs chronicling these phenomena. As artwork it was visually striking and deeply chilling as well, and I think a lot of the sonic concepts of the album of grew around that inspiration. We wanted to make an album that sounded like those photographs.If you just do a Google image search for "ectoplasm", you can see a lot of what we're referring to.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Where'd You Get That Fancy Jewelry?

I wanted to share a little about the great jewelry that I used for this photo shoot. A long whiles back I was perusing the great website Fabulist when I came across the gorgeous handmade jewelry at Ach Ach Liebling. I had just finished writing the lyrics for Hunt For The Heart when I came across this necklace:


It's called Call of the Wild and features a wolf and a hunter's knife, both themes that figure prominently in that song.















Earrings in this shot (you can see them better on the actual album cover) are called Bury the Hatchet and feature a shovel on one side and a hatchet in the other. Again, these felt so right for the story of this album: finding finality, peace, and closure. Good stuff. Go check out Ach Ach Liebling. There are so many fantastic and interesting items there that are unique and probably tell a piece of your story, too.
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