MOSS MIRROR

The 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 Scientific American article. Wikipedia notes that neither Tonie Joy (guitar) nor Jonathan Vance (vocals) recall how they came across it.

Artwork credits, per Discogs, go to Monica DiGialleonardo (bass) and Chris Bald. No commissioned photographer; the figurine is an archival object reproduced through the magazine.

"Getting Lyburnum to look like what I envisioned in my mind became an uphill battle that involved misplaced photos, misunderstood instructions by the printer, increasing apathy, and lack of advanced printing knowledge." — Tonie Joy, on the original packaging.

The 2023 reissue restores the artwork and adds previously unpublished photos that were missing from the 1993/94 pressing.

Moss Icon formed in late 1986 in Annapolis, Maryland. Original lineup: Jonathan Vance (vocals, lyrics), Tonie Joy (guitar), Monica DiGialleonardo (bass), Mark Laurence (drums). Alex Badertscher joined as second guitarist in 1990. They played, broke up in 1991, reunited briefly in 2001 (with Zak Fusciello on drums) and again from 2007 onward.

Critic Andrew Earles describes 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. Wikipedia frames them 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, in the same article, 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 Moss Icon upstream of bands like Saetia, Orchid, and Pg.99, though the specific lineage lives more in zine-tier writing than in any single canonical citation.

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 the album's 11-minute title track, Lyburnum Wits' End Liberation Fly, rather than the opener. The title track is the long one, the one that holds the 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 album, which you should buy. The 2023 Temporary Residence reissue restored the artwork; the Bandcamp page is at mossicon.bandcamp.com.

Vance, Joy, DiGialleonardo, Laurence, Badertscher, McPheeters, Fusciello — all alive. Anything that sounds like one of them is paraphrased from a public interview, not invented in their voice.