On February 11th 2014, I read that my friend Marc Hoyland was planning to release two new albums in the year. So I sent him a message asking if he though he had any room for me to collaborate on any of them. He responded that oddly enough, he was thinking of contacting me to do a new collaboration he had in mind. He had recently discovered the band Hammock and wanted to do some ambient post-rock and felt that I was the one most qualified to work with him; he liked my “sound”. I told him I’d be happy to workon something like that with him but I needed to get a new sound card. Actually I needed to get “a” sound card… He also wanted me to record on tempo, something I had never done before.

That night I set out to look for sound cards and quickly fell in love with the Focusrite Scarlet 2i2. The next day I went to Archambault (a store I hate) to purchase it. It came with a free version of Ableton Live Lite 8, which I used to record two songs that night. This was my first time composing and recording with tempo and the first song was more of a try out with bass-like grooves played  on my guitar tuned in G#G#C#F#A#D#. The second was a lot more of a Soufferance sound. I quickly sent them to Marc in the early morning of February 13th and he responded that he liked them. He suggested I double my guitars, something that I could now easily do as I was using a tempo. Later that day I sent him an updated version of the second song and he sent me a rough sketch of an idea he was playing with. When I heard it however, I didn’t like it at all and thought we were going in separate directions from the start.

I quickly found out the Ableton Live Lite limited me to eight tracks, which wasn’t enough for me. So I downloaded a cracked version of Ableton Live Suite 9, and some Lynda.com tutorials to help me learn this new program. With this I mixed the second song for the third time, still on February 13th. I spent the next three days learning more about Ableton and composing a third song. On February 18th Marc and I started exchanging ideas for a band name. I had jokingly put the songs on my computer in a folder named “Lounge Chair” to poke fun of Hammock, but I was seriously interested in using the name “Montgomery Lancaster” as our band name. I felt that it would confuse people into thinking that we were a composer, not a band, and that it might influence people to listen to use differently. But Marc didn’t like it at all and wanted a one word band name, something that I strongly disagreed with. Just this discussion almost ruined the whole project. He also wanted to have vocal textures over the songs, and I wanted more instrumental material.

After that argument, I sent him the third song I had been working on, which I had titled “William Blake (Song 3)”, because I had been watching Dead Man earlier that day. The song was greatly influenced by the unreleased Montgomery 21 song “Satan Song”. Initially Marc didn’t think it was fit for our band but quickly changed his mind to liking it the most out of the three I had sent him. On February 19th, I sent him a second mix of the third song and let him know that it was ready for his contributions over it. Then came the waiting.

We spoke about every other day about other things but I always asked him if he had started working on material over what I sent him. It was finally on February 27th that he told me that the only song he actually liked was the third one but that he felt very motivated by it. It was fine by me because I felt that the first song could be used for Citadel Swamp and the second song was perfect for Soufferance. For the next day we talked about changes that could be made in the third song, but after February 28th, Marc Hoyland disappeared. He sent me a single message on March 11th mentioning that he was sick but very interested in working on our songs as soon as he felt better. Of course I knew this was a stall and it was proven when I never heard from him again and assumed his lack of interest in the music I had composed for him. I ended up using the first song for Citadel Swamp, under the name “Plains of a Billion Sun”. The second and third songs were brought to Soufferance for the EP “Memories of Endless Nights”.