What's That Stuff Coming Out Of Your Mouths In The Album Artwork?

If you haven't watched our "Making Of Somniloquy" series, you might be wondering what the long white cloth is that's coming out of our mouths in the album artwork. It's ectoplasm, brought to prominence by Victorian-era mediums during Spiritualist seances. They often used a mixture of cheesecloth coated with grease or paint which they would then hide in various orifices in the body. When they were communing with spirits, the ectoplasm would then "materialize" out of their mouths, ears, and other body parts to prove that they were in fact communicating with the spirit world. We were inspired by a photography exhibit we saw at the Met in New York called The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, which featured hundreds of beautiful photographs chronicling these phenomena. As artwork it was visually striking and deeply chilling as well, and I think a lot of the sonic concepts of the album of grew around that inspiration. We wanted to make an album that sounded like those photographs.If you just do a Google image search for "ectoplasm", you can see a lot of what we're referring to.