I had just moved back to Montreal in late July of 2007 to attend audio production college Recording Arts Canada. I had found this dump of an apartment at 2108 Bleury Street and I needed a job to pay my 300$ a month rent. At the corner of Bleury Street and President Kennedy was a little cafe called Cafe Depot. I had experience from working at Van Houtte the year before so I got hired there. The assistant manager was Vincent Pilon. We hit it off right away, both being musicians. He had a solo indie rock project called Green Territory, and had written three or four songs. He had played with a bassist, and maybe a drummer, earlier that year back in his hometown, in Vaudreuil, Quebec. But things had fallen through and he was looking for new members to build the band back up now that he was in Montreal. One day after work, we went back to my place where I had a room with all of my music gear and equipment and he played me the songs that he had written on guitar. I was truly amazed by the music and I offered to play bass. I was no bassist but I could get away with it at the time because I had been playing a lot on that instrument that year (for Gallia Fornax and Soufferance). We tried it out by jamming one song together and he liked what I had to offer.

One of The Green Territory logo that I had “designed”

Maybe as early as that day, or perhaps after two or three rehearsals, we started recording a first song at Mortified Studios with Cakewalk Sonar. We tracked the entire guitar track for the first song, and started tracking the guitar for a second one. I was supposed to record the bass tracks over it later on my own.

I also created two new logos for the Myspace page, but I seem to recall that Vincent didn’t like them too much. He was always going on about keeping the earth green, which the band was supposed to be about. So I made a logo using the recycling sign. I do recall Vincent coming back and saying “It’s Green Territory, not The Green Territory”. It seems likely that I would have quickly made another logo with the initials “GT”, but if I did, it has not survived.

For whatever reason, we stopped playing together and the songs got lost in a computer crash. I never got to record the bass tracks either.

I stayed in touch with Vincent and about six months later he sent me a message on Facebook to let him know that Green Territory, with new members was practicing. On March 4th of 2008, I went to see them play at an hourly rental rehearsal studio named Cite Musique, located on the corner of Beaubien Street and Park Avenue, right above Broken Headstock’s luthier shop. Vincent had finally gotten a line-up together and the songs had changed a bit. I remember that the bassist was French, from France, and that he was obviously too ambitious to show off his Primus skills and that made the songs sound bad. I really didn’t enjoy what he was doing. But that line-up also didn’t last that long and the last thing I knew was that Vincent was using the name Green Territory for his electro bedroom songs, which he posted on Myspace.