Mirror/Vessels

Murky, strange and somewhat angelic. I really love this record.

It was during one of those weird “flickering” eras of the pandemic, Sam (one of the drummers in Flesh) was moving back to Boston, and several of us were all at a George Floyd protest downtown. Sam had never had a central role on the drums despite playing live with us for years and we wanted to get something concrete before he left. So we ended up writing and recording the whole EP in around a month an half.

I’d been a fan of Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg for a few years, and there’s this “liminal” quality to that movie that I love. One of my favorite books, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, came out while we were wrapping up prodution and that book NAILED it for me. Ultimately the lyrics for my contribution (Mirror) are heavily inspired by Endurance by Alfred Lansing and the Shackleton expedition to the south pole.

This one came at a time when Matt and I were talking about different ways we could approach writing/structuring albums. For the first two flesh records HIDE and HOSANNA, it was a 50/50 split where we both brought two full songs to the table. Then I wrote the bulk of Anhilla and then Matt wrote the bulk of Mercy and I wanted to do my best to merge our writing back together.

The original idea was that we would call the record “mirror” and that would be reflected in the structure of the album itself. The songs would be written collaboratively, but the themes, lyrics, riffs and direction for the two primary tracks would be handled by Matt and myself. We would have two bridge tracks in between that would be the inverse of each other.

We didn’t end up with that exactly because this was a pretty short timeframe, but we came close. For the most part, Matt and I wrote the riffs and forms for each of the tracks in isolation. Then, we brought it to the rest of the band so that everybody could spend enough time jamming on it and Sam and Travis could write their own parts.

It felt pretty shitty to call the album Mirror, with that being the title for my contribution, so we split the name.

The little ambient/electronic sections between the two songs are classic Flesh shit. Matt doing a very solid impression of Italo-esque horror soundtrack and me on my dumb ambient noise bullshit. (I was trying to make it sound like a ship getting caught in a storm)