The record this piece is drawn from is the band's only full-length, recorded over three sessions in April, May, and December 1988, mixed in Baltimore in 1992, and first released independently in 1993–94. (Sources disagree on the exact in-the-wild date, so we hedge.)
Ten tracks, about 43 minutes, with an eleven-minute title track and an opener called Mirror - which is where this piece takes its name.
The band had already broken up by the time the record made it out. A reissue label released a fully restored 30th-anniversary edition in 2023.
1993/94 · REISSUED 2023 · RECORDED 1988The figurine on the cover is a Bronze Age clay warrior from Tepe Yahya, an archaeological site in southeastern Iran that sat on the third-millennium-BCE trade routes between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. The image was reproduced from a 1971 archaeological publication. By the band's own account, no one quite remembers how they came across it.
Artwork credits go to two members of the band. No commissioned photographer; the figurine is an archival object reproduced through the magazine.
By one account, getting the cover to look right was an uphill battle - misplaced photos, instructions garbled by the printer, and just enough apathy and lack of technical know-how to make it a fight.
The 2023 reissue restores the artwork and adds previously unpublished photos that were missing from the 1993/94 pressing.
The band formed in late 1986, an original four-piece lineup joined by a second guitarist in 1990. They played, broke up in 1991, reunited briefly in 2001, and again from 2007 onward.
Critics describe their signature as vocals that are sometimes stream-of-consciousness spoken and sung, and sometimes furiously screamed, with unpredictable and explosively dynamic soft-to-loud shifts. They're often framed as an early influence on the hardcore punk splinter genre known as post-hardcore, as well as on the eventual development of emo - with the caveat that the band members themselves have repeatedly denied knowingly contributing to the latter genre in any way.
Historians of the late-'90s screamo wave consistently place the band upstream of the scene's next generation, though the specific lineage lives more in zine-tier writing than in any single canonical citation.
FORMED LATE 1986 · ACTIVE 1986–1991, 2007–Moss Mirror is the fifth piece in BeSides. The clay warrior from the cover - or rather, a 3D model of one, made by Phil in Vizcom and exported as a textured OBJ - rotates slowly on a stage, breathing between its full-textured detail and a smoothed mirror of itself. Laplacian smoothing welds the geometry's seam-vertices, averages each vertex with its neighbors over a few iterations, and stores that as a separate attribute. A uniform uSmoothMix lerps between original and smoothed positions on a slow oscillator; the figurine seems to settle into a clay-pulled-from-the-wheel idealized form, then return to its tessellated detail. Same family of tools Lost Word's stone uses.
The soundtrack is in E minor, around 58 BPM, with arpeggiated clean-guitar lines over a low E pedal - in the register of a slow-building eleven-minute title track rather than a short opener. That kind of track is usually the long one, the one that holds a band's signature soft-to-loud arc; we sit in its quiet half and don't take the explosion, because the model is supposed to stay turnable. The pedal is what stays; the arpeggio walks Em - C - G - D over it.
The actual photograph of the figurine is on the record, which is out there to find if you want the original - a 2023 reissue restored the artwork.
The band members are all alive. Anything here that sounds like one of them is paraphrased from a public interview, not invented in their voice.
three.js · OrbitControls · Laplacian smoothing · Web Audio · renato.design · b-side