-Éphémère Part One (February to June 2010)
In the early months of 2010 I was very musically active and this was likely due to a dark and depressive period which I was going through. All at the same time, I was finishing and releasing the third Vision Éternel extended play; Abondance De Périls, waiting on the release of Soufferance’s first album; Travels Into Several Nations Of The Mind, writing and recording material for the second Soufferance album; which later took shape as Adieu Tristesse, and composing post-metal material for what would eventually become Lanterns Awake. I also began a collaboration with the Mexican dark ambient project Éphémère.
It was on February 20th of 2010 that I exchanged my first Myspace message with Monica Paola Braccini De La Torre Renteria (then known artistically as “Moon” or “Mond”). I had found Éphémère’s Myspace page a couple of months prior, while browsing the web for a Mexican bands to potentially collaborate with on Soufferance material. The music which Mond had composed was this amazing piano ambiance. Not in an Anna Rose Carter way, but in a darker and even more emotional way. It was simply beautiful and I was very much taken by it.
We got to talking and I learned that her previous guitarist, Joffre O. Videz, had recently quit the band because she had refused to sleep with him. She had originally conceived Éphémère as an atmospheric black metal band, with her on keyboards and other musicians on guitar, bass and drums. Joffre had provided all of the instruments, save for the keyboards, and the two of them had composed a single song; “A’iperon”. When I came into the picture, Monica was looking for a new guitarist to fill the position.
Coming from a black metal scene myself, but also heavily into dark ambient at the time, I offered to compose some material with her. What we were going to do was a mix of black metal and emotional driven solos and leads. I think it would of sounded very similar to Vision Lunar, but with keyboards to make it even better. However, I feel the need to specify that this would not have been the typical atmospheric black metal keyboards that every band has, which serves only to fill a background with choir sounds; Mond was a much better composer and she would have added keyboard and piano leads, not unlike how important the keyboards are in bands like Faith No More and Rammstein. The keyboards would have had an important place in the songwriting, not act as a simple filler. I once described our vision as “Really atmospheric but simple black metal stuff. One note tremolos creating melodies, but reverb added to make ambiance”.
After Joffre left Éphémère in late 2009, Monica started composing pure dark ambient piano melodies on her own. I’m not sure how many songs she had composed when we met, I believe it was around five, but the one I picked was known under the working title “Rievocando Quella Notte”. It was a beautiful melody which I compared to my own compositions in Vision Éternel. Except that it was on piano except of on guitar. So it was very easy for me to be inspired and motivated to compose with her material.
need to re-write after this:
february 21st
start talking with Monica on MSN
Feb22:
I guess I sent her the Soufferance Myspace page
she says she likes it a lot and its on that basis that we start working together
she had visted Montreal the year prior
she had two songs on Myspace, intended to be an Intro and an Outro for an album.
there was the other song A’iperon, which was incomplete because she wanted to record vocals over it.
those 3 songs were recorded in December of 2009
joffre had only worked on 1 song,
started to work on a second one but left
it was drum programming on it
That day, after chatting for a couple of hours, Mond asked me to join the band as her new guitarist, as opposed to just collaborating on a song together.
She had worked on new ideas for songs but didn’t have time to record them
that’s one of the problems why it took so long to get things moving, because on my end I was kind of waiting for her to send me stuff,
while she was waiting for me to compose some black metal stuff.
February 23rd
Monica was “editing a song”
feb 26th
monica sends me the lyrics to Le Delir de Negation
which she wants me to correct and she plans to record her vocals on one of our songs.
i’m supposed to start writing music to the lyrics.
february 27th
12:45 PM post on FB: “starting to work on a new musical project today”
Feb 28th
Moncia says she recorded a new draft idea
march 7th
she records some more drafts
talk about what we want. she wants the album to start with acoustic guitar.
uses Empyrium: Dying Brokenhearted as an example of what we should go for.
March 12th
I tell Monica that I started work work on the acoustic part
could this be the Vision Solitude stuff I found?
march 15th
I’m working on a song and I’m trying to record acoustic
March 16th:
monica sends me to the myspace page to listen to something new
www.myspace.com/ephemeremond
a friend of hers redesigned the whole page.
she asks me to work over the new song that’s up.
also sends me that new song working title “mond track 3 cslvblfdkvbkfdv.mp3”
same day she also sends me “Rievocando quella Notte.mp3” which is one of the two older songs.
march 19th
monica asks me how the song is coming along.
i tell her that i ended up recording Vision Éternel material instead.
What Vision Éternel song was recorded between March 16th-19th 2010?
april 4th
we talk and i apparently have a few ideas in the works
april 26th
said I was working on a new song
that i found an old Vision Lunar song that I had never used
planned to re-record it for Ephemere
Mother Song
Maqueta Mond was written/recorded on April 26th
she sent me a demo of it to me the same day
april 28th
Posted on FB at 4:05 PM: “working on Éphémère big time!”
april 30th
mond says she finished writing “Maqueta Mond”
same day I tell her that I have a demo recording of Rievocando
I send her: Rievocando Quella Notte (Guitar Demo)2.mp3
I tell her its a rough demo and that I plan to re-record it with a better sound card.
the plan was then that that part, the piano and guitar, would be the ending (outro) of a longer black metal song.
I was planning and working on the main part of the song, Judas Iscariot style stuff
you send me the piano parts, whatever you compose
and i will compose somematerial over them, as sorts of interludes between the black metal songs that i will also compose for you
and over the black metal parts, you can compose keyboards
we were looking for a drummer
May 12th still talking with Mond about working on new songs
that day she sends me “Ephemere5byMond”
May 25th still talking
She listened to the Vision Lunar songs and wanted to use some parts
from a three different songs
she had some ideas about using some of the riffs, re-arranging them and adding piano to them
one was Absence de la Lune
July 3rd
talk again but not about music and by then dating Laura
september 1st 2010
hey can you send me all the recordings of Ephemere? im working on a new black metal piece that may fit, right before Rievocando Quella Notte. it would ideally end on the same not that starts Rievocando Quella Notte. making that the outro of the song…
it took me a long time to come up with something. In this case a little over two months.
On the evening of April 28th 2010 I recorded the guitars of “Rievocando Quella Notte”
I composed this distorted and reverbed guitar lead over it one dark March afternoon. I remember writing the song and secretly dedicating it to my roommate at the time, Marina. She was the first one to hear it, and she loved it. In fact she asked me to play it for her again directly after. That same night I recorded it and sent it off to Mond. It was only intended to be a demo, as I wanted to professionally re-record it. But that never came to be because our collaboration just fizzled out over the next few months. I had started composing a few black metal bits here and there, but I was never quite into the black metal scene enough to make a whole song. The black metal parts were highly influenced by Judas Iscariot though.
by May of 2010 i had stopped working on it.
Rievocando Quella Notte (Demo)
-Éphémère Part Two (February 2013)
2012 may 12
Monica tells me shes recording again with guitars, drums and all.
aparently shes working with a new person in the band.
she already re-recorded Rievocando de la notte
she was supposed to send me some stuff but we didn’t talk again until January 2014.
I attempted to record the song again in
by this time she had brought back her project and posted some new recordings online, but I don’t think that I knew about it. I might be wrong but I dont think it was a motivating factor.
On February 10th of 2013 I decided to re-record the song that I collaborated on with Éphémère, “Rievocando Quella Notte”. I had attempted to record the song on multiple occasions since 2009, but was never able to do it properly. Due to poor recording equipment, I was plagued with bad delay and sound quality and I could never get the sound that I was looking for. When attempting to recording this song that night, I once again ran into recording problems. I was only able to record using the left sound channel. But I still managed to record two takes of it.
During that same night, the plan I came up with was to continue along the same direction which I had taken for “The Last Great Torch Song”; having a guest musician on nearly every song. With that in mind, I also considered using the at-the-time unreleased Citadel Swamp song, “Dead August Leaves”, on the new Vision Éternel EP. The plan was also to have a seven-song album, spelling out Amorine. Having previously failed to write a six-song album for Leonie in 2009, I already felt that this was an unattainable goal.
For whatever third song I was going to compose, I was already considering Dune Fougie, who had been brought to my attention by a friend, Mathilde Perrier. I would have asked her to record a spoken word one of the songs. But my plans were quickly abandoned as I faced the familiar challenge: the lack of decent recording equipment. I attempted to record my leads over the Éphémère song again later in February but continued having problems and gave up.
I would not record anything else for nearly a year. It wasn’t until February of 2014, at which time I finally purchased an external sound card, that I resumed composing and recording music again. But by then the plan for the fifth Vision Éternel EP was abandoned.
It’s possible that it was only on March 27th 2014, once I had an external sound card, that I was revisited the February 10th 2013 recordings and mixed the song. I duplicated the audio track in mono and mixed it with the piano.
-Éphémère Part Three (June to July 2015)
recorded it on June 28th 2015. Ephemere was back and had already released a split. there was a demo coming up and i helped her with her Bandcamp page. got me thining that with better recording equipment I could finally record Rievocando. thought about releasing the song on a compilation. she suggested one by Dementium Distros but I saw that he was into NSBM and Nazi-oriented stuff and didn’t want to be part of that.
piano recorded feb 2010
recorded June 28th- did first first mix
june 29th did second mix, but then didn’t like some of my guitars so recorded. also thought the piano was too buried
june 29th with new parts did third mix with less buried piano. but Mond prefered the second mix
july 7th so i did a fourth mix to resemble the 2nd mix but that had the updated guitars of the third mix.
then we discussed the title of the song. since she had re-recorded it in 2012, and released it under the name “Half Light”, I wanted to find a different name for the song, so that it would stand out as different. Monica suggested adding “(Notte)” which means “night” in Spanish.
then I set out to find someone to release it. I couldn’t find anyone, or any compilation to use it on. No one was interested, no one cared for it, and I really didn’t understand why. I thought it was a really good song. So I ended up putting together my own compilation Billowing Tempestus to release it. The compilation was scheduled to come out in early 2016 but it was cancelled after most of the bands weren’t serious about it and caused endless delays.
in 2017 I got the idea to use the song to promote Vision Éternel and release it as a sort of split Vision Éternel featuring Ephemere. For a little while we had interest from Ars Sigillum Manifesto that was going to release it on tape. There was talk of adding more songs to make it more like an old-fashioned single; the main song plus some b-sides and stuff. Again it was up to me to do all the work because Mond wasn’t motivated. At first we talked about doing a second song together to include it on as a b-side, and that we could also include the demo versions from 2010 and 2013. But the label dropped the idea and it still hasn’t been released.