In the summer of 2007 I began working on some metalcore material. At first, it was put off as Projection Mina songs, but I was really interested in doing something in the veins of 90’s metallic hardcore. The problem was that I had never written material like that at the time and I wasn’t even sure where to start. The first demos probably sounded something more like death metal influenced Killswitch Engage, because that’s what I was learning to play during that summer. The first two recorded demos were “Mouse” and “Castle”, which were filed in the Projection Mina folder. I was playing in straight C tuning and a lot of Drop B, Drop C tunings as well and it sure sounded like fast thrash death metal. Other early influences, as I had started listening to metalcore in the summer of 2004 (see Scapegoat), were bands like Lamb of God, Throwdown, Eighteen Visions, Hatebreed, Terror and Bleeding Through. A lot of the bigger Trustkill Records band from that time. The only song from those bands that I could play was Bleeding Through’s “Love Lost in a Hail of Gun Fire”. Luckily enough, Darklink (Phil Altobelli) was over one of those summer afternoons and filmed me playing the cover on his phone.
I also remember showing some of these early metalcore songs to Tom Nunziata when he came over. It must have been Mouse and Castle.
In late July of 2007, I moved back to Montreal for the second time, this time to stay for good. By the end of 2007 I was completely repulsed by the black and death metal junkies that I had come meet and I found my place in straight edge metalcore. I wasn’t striaght edge but I didn’t do any drugs nor drank, so I had things in common with them.
I began to seriously listen to Morning Again, Culture, Eighteen Visions, Bird of Ill Omen, One Nation Under, Until the End, bands like that. I had known of these bands before but it was during late 2007/early 2008 that I really began to learn how to play their songs, along with more Bleeding Through and some Eighteen Visions. Though some played in Drop B, I was now steadily playing in Drop D and seeping in influences from their songs. “Castle” was kept and became “Rape and Buggery” and “Mouse” seems to have been dropped completely, or evolved into something completely unrecognizable. I continued to write more material and was set to do an EP. On January 18th and 19th of 2008 I recorded three new songs, “Administering of Poison”, “Rape and Buggery” and “Wounding with Intent”. It was also during this month that I came up with the band name “Human Infect”, named after the Bird of Ill Omen song “Watch Human Infect”, my favorite song from their second release. I also created a Myspace page and added those three songs in hope to find interested musicians, convinced that the quality was tolerable enough to be listened to.
The EP I was working on had this whole amazing concept. Each song would be named after a crime punishable by death, by law in the 1800’s. I was most likely still influenced by the macabre black metal days (that would never leave me) and also by one of Eiman Nejad’s band. While I was still living in New Jersey in 2005, he had a metalcore band called “Beneath the Dead Ring”, that also had Pat Duffy on bass. One of their song was titled “Rape and Pillage” (also likely influenced by their black metal and viking background). From this grew my idea to focus on negative aspects, something that is usually not well accepted in hardcore scenes. The list of song names and their description, to help me remember which one was which, was found, saved in a notepad file on a CD:
“Administering of Poison” (a Youth Crew, Killswitch Engage song)
“Attempted Suicide” (a metalcore song, technical No. 2, similar to One Nation Under)
“Deceit and Treachery” (a galloping songs with Terror-type chorus)
“Murder in the First Degree” (the first song in Drop D, Bleeding Through-type)
“Rape and Buggery” (a Culture-type intro, One Nation Under, Deftones-type breakdown song)
“Sabotage of a Ship” (a fast tremolo, Eighteen Visions-type breakdown song)
“Wounding with Intent” (a second, short, fast song with repeated parts)
Now in February 2008, I was also steadily playing covers of Bird of Ill Omen’s “Spoon” and Morning Again’s “Murder You Call War” during my practice jams. I had also very strongly considered rehashing an old The Slopin Fairy 7/Scapegoat era song I had written called “Rage”, but unfortunately, if I did start playing it again, I never recorded it. Neither do I recall what the song would have been renamed to had it been kept. On February 2nd 2008 I re-recorded “Wounding with Intend”, and on February 4th, I recorded the other five songs for the EP. Those six songs, at the time, consisted of the entire set of Human Infect songs. Those were just rough reference demos for myself and to update the Myspace ones for a few close friends to hear, and thus the quality was very much irritating on the ear drums.
I really wanted to find people to jam with and get Human Infect as a band going, but I knew nothing about the Montreal hardcore scene. I was still living downtown on Bleury and my resource for finding musicians remained on Kijiji, where after posting some adds for a week or two I quickly discovered was not the market I was hoping for. A single person responded to me, asking if I was implying “metalcore as in Misery Signals”. At the time I wasn’t a fan of the band as I am now, and after listening to their latest material on Myspace responded to the dude that I was looking for more metallic, old metalcore, styled musicians. During this negative time I managed to find someone on Myspace who was doing free graphic design to build his name. His name was Niels Geybels and his first graphic design work had been for the Vision Sufferance EP “Forthcoming Travels” in November of 2007. He operated under the name of Depraved Designs. I asked him to create a band logo for Human Infect and on February 27th, 2008 he got back to me with the only visual art the band ever had.
Human Infect logo, created February 27th, 2008 by Niels Geybels at Depraved Designs
Simultaneously, in early 2008, a metalcore band from Philadelphia called Kingdom was looking for a second guitarist to join the line-up. They only had their first demo, but I was aware of it and thought they had potential. For a very little while back then I was straight-edge, because I hadn’t even gotten into alcohol yet, so I figured that I had a good chance of joining the band. Their material was very easy to play and didn’t require much skill. I messaged them on Myspace and we started talking. They were interested in my playing style and I let them know that I was willing to move to Philly to play with them. I really had nothing going for me in Montreal anyway. Then came the discussion on making sure I was “adept” to being a band member. Straight-edge, check. Vegan, no. I always loved meat and never planned to give that up, but to attempt to keep my possibilities open, I mentioned that my diet was mostly restricted to pasta (to reflect my budget) and it wouldn’t be difficult to be considered a vegan, ha ha. They didn’t find it funny and that very moment they let me know that they needed me no longer. About a year later they got signed to Eulogy Recordings, a label that I was supporting very strongly at the time, so I felt quite bitter towards Kingdom.
March 2008 was most likely spent posting adds on Kijiji and April and May were filled with despair by the lack of possibilities in making the band come together. To top things off, I had computer problems which prevented me from recording anything new. And it would have had to happen just when in late May of 2008, I wrote a new song. “Attempted Suicide” was the seventh song in the “Human Infect” catalog and a demo was recorded on May 31st 2008 on my Motorola Krzr cellphone.
Also in May of 2008, I moved from Bleury to De Lanaudiere and a month later finally got my computer working on the recording side. This allowed me to record an entire rehearsal on June 22nd 2008. For some reason the rehearsal recordings did not include “Wounding with Intent”, possibly due to it’s speed required to play it, and being the last song sorted alphabetically, I needed a break before recording, and never got around to it. The June 22nd rehearsal ended up being the last recordings of the band. I was working full time in construction and had very little time and energy left to contribute musically and was meeting even less musicians. It was only later in the fall on 2009 that I met hardcore musicians again. One of my childhood friends had a band called The Zyphoid Process and their guitarist, Simon Talbot and I hit it off and talked on starting a band together. I sent him the Human Infect recordings, as I still felt they were appropriate to use, but he wasn’t a fan and the material was never shown again.