Sleipnir

Commentary

Kami: Sleipnir is the closing song of the album. It’s a big song and it's the longest we’ve written. I don’t remember correctly but I believe Gonzo originally had it planned to be an instrumental. I had prior to that always had this ambition of the band having a long epic song like Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ or Queen’s ‘Innuendo’. When I heard this amazing work of art it was phenomenal and I was very inspired. It was a challenge to write though, it had many parts and I wasn’t quite sure how to sing it or which parts to sing in which not to, what the lyrics would be about. I opted for the name ‘Sleipnir’ because the song sounded like the soundtrack to a western movie, you could imagine cowboys gunning each other and riding side by side to rob trains or something. Sleipnir is the eight legged horse of the nordic god Odin and its totally the opposite of something western but I liked the juxtaposition of two diverse elements becoming a new one when being mixed. It’s funny because after we finished it Quentin Tarantino released ‘Django Unchained’ which is sorta the same idea. Mateo Camargo who engineered and helped us produce this album had the idea of putting trumpets on this one and whistleblower. It was a very good and badass idea. When I heard those first riffs and chords of the song along with the harmonies of the trumpets an image of a black carriage in the desert came to my head and I knew whatever we did with it, Art, video, short film that had to be in there. We had the idea of instead of making a video to write a comic for the song that would exist online and serve as the visual companion to the song. It was the first time we worked with the tremendous artist Juan Calle who made the illustrations for the comic. The idea as always was to create something that had a decent story and had the same flow of the band. It was also a challenge but something we experimented with in terms of transmedia that worked really really well. For anyone who dares to and finds it it's a small hidden jewel of the band’s universe.