Lanterns Awake was a name I came up with in 2008. During that time I originally recorded a single indie/post-rock type of song, but I found that it sounded too similar to Vision Éternel and abandoned the project, planning on reusing the name later on. This was until 2010 when it became my new “Projection Mina“, that is; all heavy material in the genres of doom, sludge, post-metal and death metal, were all put into the Lanterns Awake folder. From this I started composing for a separate post-blackened-sludge metal band from which some of the Lanterns Awake material was taken. At this point I was somewhat splitting up the post-metal stuff from the Lanterns Awake material.
What was left in the Lanterns Awake folder were really doomy death metal ideas. And they were horribly produced. I decided to go exactly for that idea and have my take on the noise/doom scene. I knew that this would be a bad final product, but that was the point. So many micro labels at the time were releasing any sort of unlistenable, inaudible, doom metal garbage and this was my pun to them. I wanted it so bad that I would be the only person to understand it.
Starting on April 1st of 2010, I used the worse guitar in my collection, a B.C. Rich Mickingbird, which had a broken trust rod, and tunned it down to drop A. I had only gotten the guitar in March of 2010 when my friend Charles Lemieux traded it to me for my Epiphone. I didn’t know at the time that the trust rod was broken… I then plugged it in my amp with the worst possible distortion setting that I could find on my Boss Metalzone. To seal the deal, I took a 4-track cassette recorder, and recorded using a mic in the middle of the room, instead of plugging the instruments directly. This was Les Legions Noires style all the way. I also set up my Ibanez bass in the middle of the room, sitting in its stand, and plugged it in a second amp, so that while I would play long open chords on guitar, I could pluck a couple of bass strings at the same time. With the guitar in Drop A and the bass at the same time, it was doomy and crusty and bassy.
I recorded a second song the next day on April 2nd 2010. Once these doom jams were recorded, I plugged the 4-track recorder out into my computer input, using a 1/4 inch to 1/8 inch cable adapter and recorded the cassette tape playback on Cakewalk Sonar. I was certain that the sound was almost as bad as it could get, but I quickly realized that the music behind all this noise was actually good with interesting riffs. The compositions were mostly open chords being progressed to a full loop and ending with death metal breakdowns. Some of the breakdowns were recycled from the early Throne of Mortality songs, when it was a death metal band.
My idea was then to try to record one doom-metal song per day for as long as I could keep it up. I seem to remember recording on April 3rd but not liking the material at all. April 4th could have yielded similar results and so I stopped. I also asked Garry Brents to program drums for these first two songs but he didn’t have time for this project. My next idea was to try to see what labels would be stupid enough to release this mess of a project that I had created. Thankfully I abandoned the idea before contacting any of them.
I was in late August of 2010 that I decided to finally re-use these songs. The name Lanterns Awake was to be used for my post-metal band, which failed miserably, and my friend Charles Andre Lemieux had fucked me over. I can’t even recall what had happened. And so I packed the two songs from April into this first EP, “The Times and Betrayals of Charles Adrain Lemieure, in Two Parts”, as a personal fuck you to an old friend and to a band name that I loved but would never get to use properly. I was actually really happy with the name of the album, to me it sounded like an old book title from the nineteenth century. The song titles were simply “Parts One and Two” because it was the simplest form I could find.
The artwork for this EP was taken from a shopping bag of my great-grandfathers’ leather company. I had scanned the bag earlier in the year and had spent hours retracing it on Adobe Illustrator, but because this EP was about ruining things, I used the scanned version and photoshopped it a little bit and added a cool font. To make matters even worse, I brought back my defunct record label, Mortification Records to release this EP digitally. I didn’t want to lower the status of Abridged Pause Recordings with an album as lo-fi as this. I did absolutely no promotion for it when it came out on August 22nd 2010. I initially added it to Last.fm and Bandcamp but after a few months I removed them completely and invented the idea that they were limited-time-downloads only. It’s hard to believe it but one blog actually reposted them and praised it. I feel that if it was not for the artwork looking this interesting, this album would be a complete black mark on my record. As it stands now, it is only a very dark grey.
Scan and crop of the Ernest Beaudoin leather company bag
“The Times and Betrayals of Charles Adrian Lemieure, in Two Parts” artwork front cover
- Part One
- Part Two
artwork by Alexandre Julien and E. Beaudoin
recorded April 1st and 2nd 2010 at Mortified Studios (MTL3)
released by Mortification Records (MT015)
released on August 22nd 2010