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Sphinx EP

by Serpentine Skies

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Lys Guillorn
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truppo
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1.
The Sphinx 15:59
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2.
The Sphinx Unravels 14:16
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about

With both of these tracks I used an odd tuning, so I had to come up with all the chord shapes used on this EP by myself, so it lends to the music sounding darker and more dissonant than my previous material, it also sounds really fucking heavy at times too.

In composing these, I came up with new methods of playing guitar, as can be heard from the noisy parts with the growls, the ghost guitar, the droning on light strings that reminds me of Ligeti, and the ghost whispers towards the end of the first track.

In recording this, I started out with one amp being mic'd into another amp, but I scrapped that idea since my demos recorded that way sounded like shit. So instead what I did was I wired my guitar in stereo directly into both of my amps, set the left amp to lower on the bass end, and the right amp to higher on the treble end, which left it sounding far less muddled than the original demo recordings.

All of the material on both of these tracks was recorded in a single take for each song, the only exception being the tremolo-picked part in the second song, which I had done in a previous recording of this and had dubbed over. That part in particular was why I set the delay times to each of my amps to be slightly off from each other, in order to create what I think sounds a bit like a Doppler effect.



These two tracks are about a character I call the sphinx, which is a symbol based on the Greek sphinx that represents moments of confusion and clarity in dreams.

From my understanding, the sphinx may also be a thing that is really a person's anima/animus manifesting itself either in a human form or in the form of pure riddle, confusion, or unrealization.

When a person encounters the sphinx while dreaming they are asked several questions, each more absurd than the last, this series of riddles-within-riddles serves to confuse the dreamer until they realize the absurdity of their predicament, and so they awaken and cease the confrontation with the sphinx.

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released June 6, 2015

Steve - Guitar

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Serpentine Skies Connecticut

Serpentine Skies is the Connecticut-based music project of Steven Belcher, focused mainly around the meditative state between the conscious and unconscious states of mind.

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