Just Another Snake Cult

Tonight I got another track from the upcoming EP into a presentable form.  Often my music comes out sounding much more dreary than I intend.  I’m also not too sure about the arrangement of the instruments and parts, or of the lyrics/thematic content.  So I may end up reworking/redoing the song at some point.  But I’m more or less happy with this version.

Ok, I got bored with having nothing new to show, so I’m posting an unfinished track from the upcoming EP.  I’m still working on lyrics, so the vocals are yet to be recorded.  The song opens with a big nod to one of my musical/recording heroes, Joe Meek–who in the early ’60s wrote and recorded hit pop songs out of his apartment, and built his own gadgets for manipulating and creating the sounds on his recordings.  He was a pioneer not only for his recording techniques, but also for opening up the world of independent music.

Here’s my track: Just Another Snake Cult - Tornado Storm (backing track).mp3

Here’s the acoustic track from the upcoming EP.  It’s a short tale of fantasy, displacement, anarchy, profecy, and freedom.  The visitor in the middle is a Valkyre.

When I started writing this song I had just finished reading Kon Tiki.  How epic it is when after three months of crossing the Pacific Ocean on a balsa wood raft they are washed onto a distant reef.  Rather than defeat, it is the triumph of the power of the sea and of being one with it.  How freeing it is to leave land and let the water take you — I remember from my own rafting experience. How often I’ve gone to the sea to just watch in awe at its mass. The sea doesn’t flinch in response to our structures and forms, of control and containment.

We are so small — with our limited vocabulary of language, ideals, dreams and schemes. And yet if you can float, you can be set free from those bonds that hold us small. To float in, with, and above the depths that shield creation itself. That preconceptual reality. That primordial unity where Moby Dick’s Pip was “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom.”

Have you heard the song Til I Die by the Beach Boys?

It’s written by Brian Wilson and appears on their 1971 album, Surf’s Up. There are a lot of gems among the post-Smile Beach Boys stuff.