Hi, I am Blake and my Band-mate's name is Cody. Together we are To Say the Least, the house band for
Smells Like Revenge Productions. Almost a year ago Cody approached me with an
idea to switch lanes and start work on an entirely different project. We had
bitten of a little too much to chew with a set of operatic concept albums and
accompanying animated music videos. We simply did not have the computer
equipment available to complete videos to the level we desired. We had spent
years and years and years on this project. But hey… sometimes that’s what
happens when you try and push a boundary. The technology available to you comes
back with a time barrier that is unacceptable on a human time scale. So, for
now we are left to wait for consumer available computers to catch up to our needs.
So, it was a smart
decision to step back and work on something else for a while. We have shared a
fascination with the mythos of various ancient cultures but, as we speak
English, the ones we are most familiar with are from Christianity and the
Greco-Roman Era. Above all what spoke to us was the motif of struggling with
fate. We happen to written a lot of music along these lines, but with Cody
being inspired by the work of Jeff VanderMeer, we honed in on this idea. So, we
began to cobble together songs that fit this narrative.
One thing you need to know about Cody before we continue the
story of this album, he loves snakes. He is a snake genius. Cody can name
almost any snake on sight and explain its country of origin, habitat, and
behavior. So, he has often brought up bringing the snake, the bushmaster into
the design of To Say the Least’s aesthetic.
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The Bushmaster Pit Viper - Lachesis muta muta
Photographer: Christopher Murray |
Beyond the snake’s beauty and deadliness, its Latin name is Lachesis. Lachesis
is a tesseractal entendre of a word. It comes to Latin from ancient Greek and means "to obtain by fate", "to be fated" or "happens" depending on context. It is also the
name of one of the three fates of Greek mythology. It is this that inspired the
album cover.
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Lachesis Album Cover (Work in Progress)
Digital Painting by Blake T. Ellender |
This is the digital painting that will be the basis for the
album cover. It combines the idea of the ouroboros and Lachesis.
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An ouroboros drawing in a 1478 alchemical text, copied from a now lost manuscript dated to 412
Drawing by Theodoros Pelecanos from a work of Synesius |
The ouroboros comes to the English-speaking world through Greek mythology as
well. However, it is important to note that it originated in Egypt, despite our
name for it coming from Greek words meaning “tail food”. The earliest known version of it was found on one of the gold enshrinements of Tutankhamen's sarcophagus.
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Carving of an ouroboros on one of the coverings of the Pharaoh's Tomb
Photo by Djehouty of German Wikipedia |
The ouroboros became
an important symbol in alchemy and is what it is best known for in the U.S.
today. In alchemy the ouroboros became to stand for the cyclical
nature of life and that despite death rebirth happens. So hopefully this album
will help you contemplate fate just a little bit. As the author that inspired
this album in Cody would say, or at least as best as I can paraphrase it, “There
is a defiance in acceptance.”
This album Lachesis is dedicated to the loving memory of Mabel Wallace
