Secret Sphinx (1998)

I have been fascinated by Arabic music for some time, and to this day, world music continues to be one of my major influences.

At the time Pat Gardner and I had had started to work together in 1995, I already had a backlog of song ideas, grooves and textures, but no lyrics. I had composed the intro to Obsidian Dreams in about 1994, when I was listening to a lot of Turkish music, which often has lots of drone in it.

I had stumbled on a book on the mysteries of Mars, which discussed the theory that intelligent beings at one time inhabited Mars, and they had constructed monuments much the same as the ancient Egyptians did on Earth. They found that amongst the various structures discovered in the region of the "face", there was a constellation of other structures, formations, pyramids, etc. that drew some interesting parallels with the pyramids in Egypt. In any event, there were photos in that book which illustrated the possible connection, and on adjacent pages were the sphinx and the face on Mars. If you believe in synchronicity, this seems to be more than a coincidence. But there really is no connection between Secret Sphinx and Miles From Mars, and in fact, they are diametrically opposed to each other in terms of their musical philosophy: Secret Sphinx is a collection of songs, whereas Miles is ambient/space jazz.

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Obsidian Dreams

Lyrics by Pat Gardner. I sang this originally as an elaborate demo, including a cello part in the (long) intro. But recently (2024) I re-imagined it with a TTS spoken voice and made a Video 45.

Path of Salvation

Whitley Strieber’s book Communion was a bestseller in 1987. At the time, there seemed to have been a renewed interest in UFOs and alien abductions—sparked in large part by that book. I also had a new interest in ecumenism and was generally a "spiritual seeker"--a  common theme in your 20s.

There are a lot of good aspects of the New Age movement (I see it as continuing on, although in different forms), and bad as well, which sometimes result in conspiracy theories. I do not mean to take a position here on UFOs; but what I did find interesting was the intersection between religion, spirituality, and cults. I  understood them as a kind of group vision/hallucination and at that time, and grist for songwriting.  

Threads

The first verse was actually inspired by magnet poetry, which I used in the studio to generate lyric ideas. The genesis was random, but a deeper meaning was revealed. I found the Melville quote much later, which fit perfectly.

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results."

Bottom of the Sea

This started as an improvised vocal into a harmonizer on a dummy lyric, which suggested its ultimate mood and production. If the inferences are sinister, it is by accident only, and may have been a story in the news at the time that was incorporated to what I was doing at the moment. (The old Beatles aleatorical trick). The other Beatlesque treatment was a string quartet version I did of this, now lost.