was heavily influenced by Swans and Eleventh He Reaches London

When I was looking for a record label for the second Soufferance full-length album, “Adieu Tristesse”, I spent the entire night of July 30th/31st 2011 emailing over 75 record labels. One of those labels was Pale Noir Records from Wisconsin, US. Nicole Wilson Renhart got back to me wanting to release Soufferance material. But by that time I had already agreed to release “Adieu Tristesse” on Le Crepuscule du Soir Productions on CD, and had to turn down Pale Noir’s offer.

But I had more material that I had started working on in the summer of 2011. While Laura was away in Pennsylvania, I was quite tormented by how much I missed her but I somehow managed to record some music. I was also incredibly stressed by my new job, waiting at Montclair, an extremely busy restaurant on Decarie Boulevard , which left me dreaming that I was still waiting on tables during the night. And to add to the discomfort, I had just moved in a new apartment, alone with no roommate to help me pay expenses, and the place wasn’t comfortable and I hated the neighborhood. I hadn’t yet cleaned much and all my stuff was still all over the place and unorganized. Just trying to settle down in a corner to record was difficult. Altogether this was a very tense recording session.

On July 29th 2011, I recorded a first guitar demo that I titled “Dana”, named after one of my cats. That day, I came up with the idea to record a song for each of the pets that I ever had. The next day, on July 30th, I recorded a second guitar demo titled “Bonbon”, named after my most memorable fish as a child. On August 1st I recorded another piece titled “Grisou”, named after my favorite stuffed cat animal as a child. On August 2nd I recorded “Tigris”, which was named after another stuffed raccoon.

-regarding Grisou and Tigris: one was a guitar demo, the other was an eBow demo. Because these files were lost in a hard drive crash in March 2012 and were only recovered later on without titles, it is unknown which song was assigned which title.

I was happy with the way that “Dana” and “Bonbon” sounded but I really didn’t enjoy the direction of “Grisou” and “Tigris” so I decided to stop recording for a while, which in hindsight was a very grave mistake. The fact that I was not proud of the songs at the time could explain why neither was named Leo, since the title was planned for a song. I wanted Leo to be another grand and epic song, like Dana. In further hindsight, the guitar song had a lot of potential and could have been developed into one of those 10 minute epics like Dana.

While I messaged the previously mentioned record labels on July 30th/31st, I mentioned to them that I was writing and recording a new Soufferance EP to be titled “The Last Great Torch Song”, of which these two demos were to be for. The title was a name that I had come up with earlier that month and pitched it as a band name for my metalcore band, which eventually took on the name Murder On Redpath.

Around this time I was hanging out a lot with Janie De Jeu and she became an integral part of my motivation in writing the songs on this album. I’m not sure of when we hung out but it started before Laura came back from the USA.

On August 29th 2011, only twelve days after Laura broke up with me, I started recording again, something that I wasn’t expecting to be able to do. That day I recorded a fourth guitar demo titled “Bird Cage”, named after an injured bird that my sister Catherine and I found when we lived in New Jersey and nursed it back to health. The next day, on August 30th, I recorded a bass demo titled “Toucan”, named after a stuffed toucan bird that I had as an infant.

Other song titles that were planned for upcoming demos were “Leo” (another of my cats at the time), “Bilou” (one of my past cats) and “Lake” (one of my past cats). At the time, these were only recorded rehearsals and jam ideas, as most of the Soufferance songs are, but the quality was inferior to what I usually settle for. So I very much considered these rough demo takes with a plan to re-record them. Unfortunately, I never did and these recordings stuck around. I didn’t like the direction of this material so I decided to take another break from writing. I was extremely depressed, and having audio recording problems, so there was no fun in making music for me at the time.

I then sent an email to Kalpamantra on October 5th 2011, under the name of “Montgomery Lancaster” to promote my band “Errance de Souvenirs”, an acronym of Soufferance; ERRANCE de SOUVenirs” I didn’t want them to know me as Soufferance until after they heard and accepted my music. The reason why I wanted to be on Kalpamantra was because they had worked closely with a lot of Quartier23 bands and I wanted to show them all that my music had its place in the dark ambient scene that they were attempting to control and keep me out of since the fallout with Quartier23. I sent Steven at Kalpamantra the very song that was recorded for Quartier23’s compilation, “Fully Hollow”, but changed the name of it to “Une Tristesse Suit de Lointain”. Kalpamantra loved it and made me an offer to release an EP on their label.

By this time, Abandonment Records and I were in contact about the possibility of releasing a Soufferance album on the record label. The plan was then for “Adieu Tristesse” but Marc Hoyland hadn’t finished mixing it, so that was put off. On October 21st 2011, Nikolay Mitev, the owner of the record label, contacted me to contribute a song for a compilation that he was putting together. After a couple years of delay, it was eventually released under the title “Welcome To Our Decayed Factory”. But the song that I was to send in needed to be under 5 minutes, so that caused a problem for Soufferance.

So that same day, I took the unreleased song “Bonbon”, which was the shortest song that I had at the time, running at 4:53. I recorded a guitar overdub, but in turn that made the production worse. While the original track wasn’t clear in sound, the overdub was filled with hiss and background noise. But I couldn’t help it because of my setup.

On October 21st 2011 I sent it to Marc Hoyland for his opinion and he suggested that I should add an intro to the song because he felt that it should start differently. At the time, I respected his opinion, mostly because he had suggested earlier that year that I change the ending of “Fully Hollow” and it turned out to be the best thing for the song because the second version was so much better.

So  I recorded a brief, dissonant guitar part to start the song. I mixed it in and sent it back to Marc, who suggested that it should have more reverb and that the hiss be toned down.

Since “Bonbon” was always a working title, I renamed it “Au Revoir, Larmes De Lune” and sent it off to Nikolay that night. When I look back at this song, that intro is an abomination. It sounds terrible to me and should have never been added. I thought that it sounded much better with the slow fade in. After I sent the song to Nikolay, I didn’t hear back from him in a long time. Finally, on September 12th 2012, he sent news of the compilation. It was then that I asked to update the tile of the song to “In A Lonely Place” since the song’s title had changed.

on October 21st, 2011 and sent it to them. The only other songs that I wanted to actually use from that session were “Dana” and “Bird Cage”, because they were exactly what I pictured Soufferance to be at that time. So I was stalling for time in order to come up with something else to add to the Pale Noir release.

Pale Noir also offered me a second album release contract on October 31st 2011, but I had already intended on using these demos on the Kalpamantra EP, and had to turn Pale Noir down once again. But a week later, Pale Noir announced the making of posters for all their bands, and that sold me. So I got back in touch with Nicole and told her that I would come up with something. At first I collected a bunch of b-sides, but it really didn’t feel like a Soufferance concept to me. B-sides can work for some bands, but for Soufferance everything has to be part of the same concept, and I couldn’t mix different phases.

By late November Pale Noir was already sending me propositions. I needed to send in a bio, a band picture, a poster design, an exclusive song for a compilation, an exclusive music video for a DVD compilation, two lobby card designs for the DVD compilation, an EPK on PDF format, and whatever I had ready of the EP, at the time, for a radio show that wanted to get the first scoop on the new Soufferance material and air it one night on their program. This was a lot of stuff to get ready, but I had this great idea to promote everything together. I was going to have a common theme and look for everything, and it would be a mass publicity for the new album. I of course first talked to Jeremy Roux to work out a photoshoot for this great endeavor, and we were going to make a music video as well. On December 4th 2011 Jeremy and I went exploring the city for our first film noir tryout. I had been obsessed with film noirs for a long time and wanted to incorporate it in an album. “Adieu Tristesse” was originally intended to be a film noir dedication, but was passed over for a more appropriate theme about Laura. The photoshoot we did was lost due to a computer failure in March 2012, but I was able to salvage some of the pictures taken.

The poster that was going to be pressed by Pale Noir. The smoke is in sorts a reference to Orson Welles’ “F for Fake” DVD cover released by Criterion.

The promo picture that was sent to Pale Noir

The bio I sent in to Pale Noir was

“Too many people make music for the general public and that is the best way to lie to yourself. I have been working on the art of Soufferance since September 2006, and with every album I attempt to explore and deteriorate myself a little more. Soufferance is my view on life and my twisted masochist way of painfully stretching out leftover heartaches and memories. Each release is a document archiving precious moments that will continue to echo inside a superfluous living being waiting for the end. Take your own risks and make it happen.”

The album was going to be called “Memories of a City”. The name was derived from the Castevet song “Cities & Memories”, which is a song I was obsessed with at the time. I also wanted to represent Montreal and all its heartaches that had occurred to me since moving back. I had created a whole list of places where we would be filming the music video and taking album cover shots. It was going to be all my favorite spots in the city, including Windsor Station, Silo No. 5, Redpath Silos, Redpath Mansion, Sun Life Building. I hadn’t thought of what I wanted to use for an album cover, but it had to be something film noir. This album was so dark and foggy, like a wet pavement after a mid-night rain, shining reflections from a faded lamppost. And that’s how I felt at that time too. By then Laura had left me and I was still not over her.

In order to raise some funds I posted this on the Abridged Pause Recordings website.

On January 10th 2012 Jeremy and I went out for our first night of shooting for the music video. At the time I still wasn’t sure what song would be the single.

After a first night of shooting, I had about twenty minutes of footage to work from. I told Pale Noir that I was working on a full HD music video for “Dana”, which I retitled “The Asphalt Jungle”. They were pleased and added me to their website. Nicole sent me a contract to sign, but I had had a very bad experience with album contracts with Quartier23, just a year before, so I asked her to clarify some of the clause, to justify exactly what was being released by the label, and to mention the songs specifically. On January 18th 2012, I received an email from her saying that they no longer wished to release my album, because I was too difficult to deal with and was questioning their loyalty and judgement. So the album got shelved, and the music video too.

I spent the next two months working on the Vision Éternel album “The Last Great Torch Song”, and I almost used the video footage for a song from the album “Sometimes in Longing Narcosis”. It never got made because my computer was running too slow to edit videos, and HD would have completely killed it. Only twelve days after the release of “The Last Great Torch Song”, my computer crashed on March 26th and I lost all the files to “Memories of a City”, as well as all my record label files. I thought the EP was lost forever, and it depressed me so much that I considered stopping Soufferance. During this time the guy from Le Crepuscule Du Soir disappeared and I thought “Adieu Tristesse” would also never get released, so I started looking for another label. I contacted the label that was supposed to release the first EP back in 2007, Dungeons Deep Records, and convinced him to reactivate his label and to release something by Soufferance. I got him hooked with an mp3 I had left on my Ipod of “Dana”. Finally after he heard “Adieu Tristesse”, he wanted to release that album instead of “Memories of a City”.

It took me nearly a month of trial and error to recover the files I had lost, which also brought me to find “Tigris” and “Grisou” that I had deleted after the recording. I took a week in May 2012 to re-produce the EP into a full-length. The two songs I wanted to originally use, “Dana” and “Bird Cage” were mixed the same way that I had originally intended, and were renamed “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Where the Sidewalk Ends”. The song that was intended for the Abandonment Records compilation, which still was not out at the time, “Au Revoir, Larmes De Lune”, was renamed “In a Lonely Place”. Finally, I compiled the remaining three recordings “Tigris”, “Grisou” and “Toucan” into “While the City Sleeps”. All four titles were taken from film noirs that I really loved. I uploaded all four songs on Bandcamp, so I would never lose the again, and set them for download, because I thought I wouldn’t waste my time with labels again. There was also some noise compression done during the May 2012 mixing and of course beginnings and ends were faded in and out.

In early July, Le Crepuscule Du Soir reappeared and offered me once again the opportunity to release “Adieu Tristesse” in a DVD-sized digipak. As Dungeons Deep was now releasing that album, I offered him to release “Memories of a City” instead but he disappeared again. I thought about finding an artist to create a film noir theme artwork for the album, and considered asking Haate Kaate or Marc Hoyland but I knew that Jeremy could do the best job in that field and asked him for another session to photograph an album cover. I would take care of the layout myself. But the second photoshoot never happened because I feel in a depression after my grandmother died and the album stayed without a physical release.

In December of 2012 I finally had the idea to release it myself on Abridged Pause Recordings. I found a pressing plant, CDWest, that could do a limited run of 25 CD-Rs in a DVD sized digipak, similar to the release of “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the Mind”. I was going to get posters made as well with the same company, it was going to be amazing. All that I needed was to finish the artwork. Jeremy was going away for three weeks to spend the holidays in France so I asked him if we could take some pictures of old buildings in Montreal and new band pictures to get the artwork done. I had been able to recover the recordings for the album back in May, but not the film noir pictures that he took. Unfortunately, Jeremy wouldn’t be bothered with that. He also doubted that anyone would be buying music by Soufferance, although in my opinion it would have been easy to sell 25 copies with the fanbase that I had at the time. Jeremy saw Soufferance’s status as a failure band because of the labels that had dropped me in 2011 and 2012, whereas I saw this limited edition CD as being my attempt to take charge of my own band and release things myself. By this time, he was already pretty distanced from me and my work and we hardly ever saw each other. Because I was in a hurry to get this release out while I was motivated, I asked Italian collage artist Francisca Pageo Casanova (Misspaq) to do a film noir collage for the front artwork. She showed great interest and agreed to come up with something within the week. But she never got back to me with any work and ignored my future attempts to contact her. So my motivation vanished after these set backs.

After that plan fell through, I attempted to contact various record labels throughout 2013 under the moniker “Errance de Souvenirs”, promoting the four song EP as the first, self-titled release, by my new band. But nothing came out of it and it remained unreleased. Another idea for this EP was that I intended on adding a sample of the great Alfred Newman song “Street Scene” somewhere in the album. The theme song had struct me so deep while watching film noirs that I felt it would be incomplete without including it.

It wasn’t until February of 2014 that my hopes were brought back for this release. After a failed attempt to start a new band with Marc Hoyland, I decided to add the demos that I had written for the project to “Memories of a City”, as I felt that four songs were not enough to promote an album properly. The feeling of mixing two different sessions bothered me so much that I abandoned that idea and evolved it into having a second EP as part of the same “Memories” phase, an EP which would be named “Memories of Endless Nights”, and that both of these EPs would be released at the same time in a box set.

During the first two weeks of September, I sent out another twenty emails, this time each of them incredibly personal to the labels. No copy and paste. But again all of them had no interest in investing on my music.

The main thing that had delayed this album for so long was the lack of artwork. No one was making anything for it, and those who I had asked were too lazy to come back to me with anything. On the late night of October 12th, after receiving some money through Bandcamp for older albums, I realized that this album would probably never come out and I was just sitting on something that I liked so much, just because no one wanted to release it. I then decided that I would photoshop a picture that Jeremy had taken of either the old port or old Montreal, while we were doing photo shoot or exploring together.

My first attempt was using a pictures of the Redpath Mansion, but things just weren’t looking good, or my ideas didn’t work. I realized that all this time I had a perfect picture to use for the artwork. The silhouette shot of me overlooking the Jacques Cartier bridge, taken at a Vision Eternel video filming. I attempted different versions of lighting, and and blue saturation until I found the one which Jeremy thought was best (I  was consulting him). Looking back, I still prefer the bluer versions, though Jeremy kept saying “less blue”.

“Memories of a City” artwork

Memories of a City flyer

Memories of a City Bandcamp header

I then found two versions of Alfred Newman’s “Street Scene” and incorporated them into the intro of “The Asphalt Jungle” and the intro and outro of “While the City Sleeps”. I also found a stock sound recording of vinyl cracks and pops and used that to start and end the album. All this was done within two days and I released it through Abridged Pause Recordings on October 14th.

“Memories of a City” artwork

1. The Asphalt Jungle
2. Where the Sidewalk Ends
3. In a Lonely Place
4. While the City Sleeps