Last.fm Scrobbles

2010 September 22nd
Soufferance, Vision — Soufferance Split Song

2010 October 1st
Soufferance, Vision — Dementia Praecox

2010 October 4th
Soufferance, Vision — Dementia Praecox

2010 October 5th
Soufferance, Vision — Dementia Praecox

2010 October 10th
Soufferance, Vision — Dementia Præcox

2010 October 21st
Soufferance, Vision — Dementia Præcox

2010 October 23rd
Soufferance, Vision — Dementia Præcox

2010 October 26th
Soufferance, Vision — Dementia Præcox

 

The discussion for this song originally came up when I came in contact with Marc of Intra Tenebrae from UK. He was interested in doing a split with Soufferance, and although I really did not like the music he was making, I agreed because I knew I would have more material composed soon and would need a release. We came up with the idea of making a split based on the phases of schizophrenia. I was going to have one long track, as usual for Soufferance at the time and he would have various other songs, that would come before and after my song. And as to confuse the listener even more, everything was going to be untitled, apart from the band names and the title of the album “Dementia Preacox”. The label that was supposed to press this, Gravelord Productions, then came to us and asked if his band, Spectre, could also be on it. I didn’t have a say in it because he was the one putting up the money, and in he came. With this uprising, he brought in two more shitty bands, Diabolus Ritus and Luggaldimerankia.

At this point I was starting to wonder what the fuck I was doing in this mess of shitty bands that I didn’t like. Instead of being just one split, it was now a three splits box set, and all these ideas started being thrown around by all the bands on how many different versions we could do. A lot of those ideas were mine, and they seemed to like them. Someone suggested we needed a big band into the line up, so I contacted Neige et Noirceur and got him in. We had been “meaning” to collaborate for a little while.

The split was supposed to come out in October 2010, so in early September I decided it was about time that I start working on this song. I was only sure of one thing when I started, I wanted a long song. I started recording bass tracks, and layering them and just building up what became the first part of the song. It went rather quickly and was done in a completely different manner as the past Soufferance material. I was actually composing a piece as one for the first time, instead of individual parts that would later be put together, like “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the Mind”. The second instrumental part of the song, the third part in the finished song, was recorded next. I ended up using almost exclusively bass on this record and a lot of layered vocals. It was so great to do vocals again, and I totally fucked up my voice from those screams since it had been some time since I had done some. In three days I had recorded the instrumentals and had written some of the lyrics. But it took me almost a whole month until I was moved enough to finish writing the lyrics.

Then the worst of all hits me, I learned why the label was asking all these bands in this compilation. He was asking each band to pay for his share of the pressing costs, apart from Neige et Noirceur, because he was the “big band” and wanted to keep him in. I thought that was fucking bullshit! At the same time I got into an argument with Intra Tenebrae over how bad on an influence the Black Legions were in music, which even if I myself am influenced, it does nothing but make your music worse. I wanted out, I had no interest in being part of a roster of bands I didn’t like, nor to pay for something a label claims to be able to do. To be nice, when I left I found a replacement band, which I can’t recall the name of, but was a pretty decent dark ambient band from East Asia.

At the end of the month I finished the lyrics, and recorded them over a raining piece. This would finish up the song, and I was now looking for a label to release this as an EP. The name of the EP “Bonjour Tristesse” was one of the first titles I had been wanting to use for Soufferance. Initially it was going to be one of the two song names on the first album. It was influenced by the book of the same name, but mostly by the filmed version which was directed by Otto Preminger. The poem that influenced the book, written by Paul Éluard, also uses “Adieu Tristesse”, which I plan to use as the name of the third EP, and follow up of this album. I feel  that the name of this album fits this EP quite well because it directly concerns an area in my life where unhappiness would settle in permanently. This song reflects the days I spent in hospitals in late 2004 to early 2005, and the third part of the song depicts what I could have become had I stayed in longer.

The first label I asked was Robert Forgacs at Valse Sinistre, who had to turned it down because it was so soon after the release of the first full-length. I once again sent it to multiple record labels for a release. This was one of the most difficult moments of my musical history because every single label that heard it, told me how much they loved the material, but were however not interested in releasing it. I realized later that this was due to Soufferance being a much different kind of dark ambient band than most of what is usually known as “dark ambient”. It was possibly a completely new kind of dark ambient and apparently not many people seem to find the right niche for this band.

I came in contact with Quartier23 because Immundus had recently signed with the label. I had been on a compilation with that band in August of 2009, and at the time he was signed to a Canadian label that had released Astral Luminous, which I loved. So I was following his goings a little bit, although I didn’t enjoy his type of music. But he was getting “big” so I wanted to follow his steps. I sent an email to the label, but never received a response. I then started talking to a few of the bands on the label, Marc Hoyland from Hoyland and Mike O’Brien from Melankolia, and they liked my new material, and said that they thought I would fit nicely on the label. It was suggested that I write a plain honest and heartfelt email to Marco, head of Quartier23, about how bad I wanted to work with the label, that my music really belonged on his label and just how much work has been put thus far into the making of this album. The email worked and we started talking a little bit, but didn’t confirm the interest of a release yet… It was about a week later, he was working on an idea for a new zine called Ritvs, that I found out Soufferance was going to be part of the label. The band was listed second on the front cover of the zine! But he would not mention anything about wanting to release “Bonjour Tristesse” until November 24th. However he did announce “unofficially” that Soufferance would be on the label with a preview of a zine that was supposed to come out in 2011. RITVS never came out anyway.

I was also looking for someone to make the artwork. I had been talking for about a month to Christophe Szpajdel for artwork on a cassette tape re-issue of “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the Mind”. He liked the album so much that he offered to do the artwork for free. We couldn’t find a label to release this, and he had not started it at the time I finished the new EP, so I asked him if he was interested in doing the artwork for this instead. When Christophe sent me the artwork for the album, I didn’t know what to say. I was extremely disappointed with what he sent me. The illustration he had drawn didn’t represent the album at all, and the pictures he took were less than good. It seemed that, like a lot of artists in the past, they think that because the band name is Soufferance, that they need to focus on suffering or on dark themes. I really felt that he was overlooking the album concept, and I knew he was in comparison with Costin Chioreanu, who did such a great job on the first full length. Costin had taken exactly the ideas I had in mind, and did something that focused on that concept, regardless of the band name. Out of the fourteen images Christophe sent me, there was only one that I thought was decent, and that was only because it had a lantern, and I really enjoy using lanterns.

So my big dilemma was to find a new artist to create artwork. Costin was an option but he was a little bit over my budget, and the label wasn’t going to pay for it this time. I immediately asked HaateKaate to do it because we had previously talked of collaborating, and I absolutely love her artwork. She agreed and asked me to let her know some ideas. This was to be the most difficult part yet. I told her that I wanted her to do artwork for this EP as well as the second full length album. I gave her some ideas, but focused principally on what I did not want. I disliked all those cliché album covers that depict asylums or hospitals as soon as there is some talk of mental instabilities. I knew what I didn’t want, but I didn’t know what I wanted, so it was difficult to communicate. After a few weeks she finally got back to me, but she was asking me for 150 euros for the artwork of the EP and 180 euros for the artwork of the second full length. That was way over my budget and I was disappointed to let her know this couldn’t work.

On December 27th 2010, in between finding a new graphic designer, I sent the song to my best friend Jeremy for him to get a feel of the what Soufferance was about for an upcoming photoshoot. He liked the song and its production but thought the vocals weren’t well done. It was in fact the only thing that had been bothering me, but I was set on leaving it as is, and not re-recording anything. I recorded them in pretty bad conditions the first time, with a roomate next door that I didn’t like, so my tone wasn’t the best. I realized that I shouldn’t allow myself to release something that I wasn’t satisfied with knowing that I could easily fix it. So on that same night, right after coming back from an Ottawa Christmas weekend, I re-recorded the vocals and fixed up the rain samples. I would later to a final re-re-fixing of the rain samples on February 19th 2011.

I finally contacted Niels Geybels who had done artwork for the first Soufferance EP back in 2007. We had also attempted to collaborate since then on some Vision Éternel stuff, but this time it was for real. His price of 40 Euros was cheaper and in my budget. In a couple weeks time he sent me a first draft of an idea he had of working “in the blue colors”.

I liked the idea he was going for, and so did Jeremy and Hoyland. So I was satisfied, but I asked him if he could do a full image rather than a mirror one. I felt it would be of better effect. A week later he got back to me with a brand new idea.

What he had sent me this time, I really didn’t like. First of all the forest imagery didn’t represent well the concept at all. Second was all the random words in red, it was just overdoing it and didn’t look good with the design. He had attempted something like this with the first EP as well, which I had asked him to change then too. Choosing random letters from the song titles and making them a different color and slightly over or under the lines. It was just trying to be artsy but not working out. So rather than ask him to change just about everything about this new idea, I suggested that we would go back to the original idea. At the end of February I got the artwork back from Niels, and it looked great. But there were going to be quite a few little glitches to fix, as I would soon find out after a game of back and forth sending of the full artwork with the record label. First of all, the images were all shorter than the bleed area, in some areas not even reaching to the bleed lines, so a lot of white area was appearing. The font also had to be fixed, and the logos had to be added. In all I spent a couple of hours fixing a bunch of things. So I wanted to add myself as an additional credit for the art work.

I signed a contract with Quartier23 on February 27th for the release of the album, but the problems didn’t stop there. The artwork was still getting fixed a week before its set release date, and I was asking the label to hold the pressing plant queue because I hadn’t sent them the final version of the artwork. The label wasn’t pleased at all with this idea, and said that we should simply leave the first version as is, regardless of errors and gaps in artwork, and to wait until the potential repress of the album to send the fixed artwork. I was completely against that, and wanted the album to look its best from the beginning, and told this to the label, which started making matters complicated. At the same time, behind the curtain, Bruno from Immundus was talking shit to Marco (label head) Marco (from Ouroboros), Papirus23 (of Akoustic Timbre Frekuencies), Veronika and Franco (both ex-label heads) and the dude in Tamerlan. There was apparently so much shit talking going on that by the time the album came out on March 23rd, I was under probation watch. What it came down to was that everyone implicated at the label, other than Marc Hoyland and Mike O’Brien, were against me.

I was planning out my entire promotion plan. Apart from having submitted the album to the database of various music websites, I had planned out a new promotional idea. First of all having the album on Bandcamp for full listening but not downloadable was the first idea. And with this link I would email everyone in the world that I knew and told them about my new album, and honestly ask them to buy it. Just another heartfelt letter. The album was pressed in fifty units, so it couldn’t be hard to sell. The label would complain about having the full album up for streaming on Bandcamp, so what I wanted to do was let him do the promotion by himself for the first month, and then of course him not having sold many copies, I would tell him about my promotion idea and show him how much I could sell.

But on the week of the album’s release I was working full time, had a severe flu (which lasted two weeks), had just broken up (temporarily) with my girlfriend, there was a suicide in the family and my house was infested with ants and flies and my landlord was not sending over the exterminator, so I was trying to be home as little as possible. These events prevented me from doing promotion right away and less than  two days after the album came out, I was receiving hate mails and Facebook messages from various Q23 associates listed above. On the Q23 page itself I was called out for not mentioning the album. I figured it was time for a second heartfelt and honest email to Marco (head of label) to find out what the beef was. I knew already that Immundus was the one doing most of the shit talking due to out recent collaboration which went down the drain. The email response from Marco was a counterattack and you could tell he was on the edge and felt threatened. He blamed everything on me, without saying anything specific or giving names, but one of the things was that I was apparently refusing to answer questions and interviews about my album. Anyone reading this blog will know that it is unlike me to turn down talking about my music. In the next two weeks I would be plagued with emails, Facebook messages, wall posts on my personal and band pages on Facebook, by all of the above mentioned people related to Q23.

My release was eventually made completely free on the labels website along with a very nasty note directed towards me. I tried to make the best of it and get people to get the album for free, and calling it a bootleg to save time on explanations. After all, the label did decide to press the album without my final consent of the artwork. When I received my five copies of the album, of course there were mistakes on the cover, but it still looked good enough for me to want to promote it. I was about to send Marco an email to attempt to work things out, when I noticed that the label had completely taken the release off their website, and posted in the news section a very hateful message towards me, and once again talking about allegations I had never heard of before. I was also no longer part of the Septem compilation. So on the digital version on bandcamp I decided to add the song I recorded for the compilation as well as the Immundus collaboration.

Download Link (Old vocals version)
Download/Buy (Final version)

 

1. Dementia Præcox

artwork by Niels Geybels at Depraved Designs with additional work by Alexandre Julien
music recorded September 7th, 8th, 9th. effects recorded September 30th 2010 and February 19th 2011, vocals recorded September 29th and December 27th 2010 at Mortified Studios (MTL4)
released by Quartier23 (Q23-LXX)
released on March 23rd 2011

 

add part about Adrian from Ambientaria Records initially offering to release the album, with a mendatory permanant digital contract, which i turned down. then went on to take sides with Q23 in the feud and spread rumors.
gmail October and November of 2010