When I quit my job at Bell on July 11th 2013, my girlfriend Rain pushed me to take some time to focus on music again. My budget was exhausted so I wasn’t really able to focus on a new album right away. I had been trying for the last year to purchase the left over copies of Svartgalgh Records’ repress of “Forthcoming Travels” and decided to get back on that idea. I also decided to buy a few more of Valse Sinistre Productions’ release of “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the Mind” and bundle those two together, autographed, to make a quick buck to start up Abridged Pause Recordings again and hopefully release Soufferance’s “Adieu Tristesse”.

After sitting on that idea for a few days, I decided to take it up a notch by finally pressing a limited version of the never printed first version of Forthcoming Travels in 2007. That CD never came out but I had always wanted to have a physical copy just for my collection. That idea built up more until finally I decided to go all out and really give something special for people’s money. I decided to make it into a boxset. The idea was to compile everything related to the “Travels” phase of Soufferance and package it into a final release to close the book on it. But it had to be something that the fans didn’t have yet.

On July 21st and 23rd I went to DeSerres and Michael’s to buy some things. I really had no idea what I was going to do. I have never really been to an arts and crafts store and didn’t even imagine all the possibilities that came in front of me. I bought papier mache boxes that fit the A5 sized release perfectly, two colours of brown paint, sponges, ribbons, white ink, letter stamps, sharpies, leather style paper and thick motif paper. I had a limited budget but I started dabbing the boxes with the paint to make them look like old, used parcel boxes. It turned out so amazing that I settled on that idea right there. My budget only allowed me to buy material for 20 copies, and with buying 20 copies of the EP and LP from the labels, my cost came up to 410$.

Svartgalgh Records sent me the EPs super fast and I had them inside a week. But for Valse Sinistre it was another story. A day after placing my order with them, I found out that they had licensed my music to a so called label Visionaire Records, who themselves sent it to Amadea Music who themselves sent it off to State 51 who finally published it on iTunes and a bunch of digital retailers. My music was published legally with Abridged Pause Publishing so I immediately sent out legal letters to take it down and a personal email to Valse Sinistre about copyrights infringement. That pissed him off so he purposely slowed down the shipment of the CDs for many weeks and put off the release of the box set. In fact by the release date, I still had not received my copies from Valse Sinistre and I had to open a dispute through PayPal to force him to send it out or refund me. He took his sweet time responding to the PayPal inquiry and eventually provided a tracking number which confirmed that he had lied about when he claimed to have shipped it. Because of that inaccuracy in his stories, I was able to get a $10 refund from PayPal. The first few copies of the boxed set were made and sold using the few copies that I had left of Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The Mind, until I received the ones from Valse Sinistre Productions, probably at the end of August. Another thing is that in the promotional introduction video that I filmed, I mentioned that I was putting together this boxed set because two of the three record labels that had released these albums were no longer in existence. That was true because Mortification Records (Forthcoming Travels 2007) had closed in 2010 and Svartgalgh Records (Forthcoming Travels 2009) had closed in 2012. As far as I knew, Vale Sinistre Productions was still around, just not active, so I made no reference to his record label in the video. But Rob actually assumed that Valse Sinistre was one of the two record labels that I said were closed in the video, and sent me a slighting email about it. That’s another reason he delayed the shipping of the CDs.

For the 2007 EP reissue, I only had one of the two covers created. I had lost the back cover that Niels Geybels at Depraved Designs had designed five years prior. But I still had the 100 empty jewel cases that I bought for that occasion. I spray painted the back cover trays in black and also the CDs and got the front covers pressed at a Copie Express shop on thick paper so it would look decent. For the album inserts I bought some nice beige old fashioned paper and printed and cut them to size to glue right inside the top cover. Rain took care of making the strings and number tags that were glued outside the box and I stamped the titles on the boxes with white ink. Finally I had just enough left over  red/brown painted papers from the bonus material originally released in August 2010 for the album. I used those to sign the cards personally. Everything took additional drying time with mate finishing spray. In all it took over three weeks to complete the boxset.

Travels Boxset digital flyer

By mid-August I still hadn’t received the CDs from Valse Sinistre but I wasn’t going to let the momentum of the boxset fade away. I actually had to legally threaten Robert Forgacs from Valse Sinistre Productions if he didn’t send the albums which I had paid for. I had a total of 7 copies still in my possession and decided to release it in advance and hope I’d get them soon. On August 13th I took the final pictures of the boxsets that would be used for the promotion. I polished up the story a bit for the record label write up.

“When we found out from Soufferance that their fans had trouble getting their hands on their CDs, we set ourselves the goal to do something about it. The problem was not in production but in distribution. But we decided to look at it a little differently, maybe due to an avant-garde way that we have here at Abridged Pause. During the last 2 decades, when a record label signed a new band and wanted to distribute their back catalog, all they would do is re-issue them. We found that a little too simple and wanted to offer something more complete, something new.

Soufferance had previously worked on a concept theme for multiple releases spanning 2007 to 2009, and that material was hard to find. Two of the labels that released their material had sunk their ship and it was only through digital means that the music could be heard. We traced down those defunct record labels and actually purchased what they had left in their vaults. The limited amounts left allowed us to only make 20 copies of this boxset.

To package all the material released in Soufferance’s “Travels” concept, we designed a handmade boxed set. Hand-made in every aspect, we bought papier-mâché boxes, paint, stamps, ribbons, ink, sponges, thread. The boxset was created at Abridged Pause Recordings itself, taking 2 weeks to complete. Each set includes 3 CDs; the first 2007 EP “Forthcoming Travels”, its 2009 reissue and the album “Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the Mind” released in 2010. As well, a new liner essay written by Soufferance explaining the “Travels” concept and its history and each set is individually hand-numbered on an outside tag (1 to 20). Finally we were also able to find left-overs of the original 2010 “bought from the band bonus cards” in the Soufferance vault (a trunk filled with Alexandre Julien’s music career material). These were used to autograph the albums in 2010 and that’s exactly their function in this boxset as well! This boxset is a complete packaging of everything ever released as part of the “Travels” concept.”

I finally announced the boxset on August 14th and promoted it on Facebook and sent emails to all the people who had bought something from Abridged Pause in the past.

CD1 – Forthcoming Travels 2007 (ep)
01 Theory of an Odd Man
02 Rouge Gorge
03 Le Surnom d’une Tristesse
04 Song of Sand
05 Monastere d’un Moine Perdu
06 Suicide by Venus
07 A Memory of Past Emotions
08 Outro Reverb Song
09 Solo Like Part
10 Comme Un Sage (Demo)

CD2 – Forthcoming Travels 2009 (ep)
01 Theory of an Odd Man Out
02 Mist of the Waters
03 On the Night of Fire
04 Give Us the World
05 Ambush for the Hunter
06 The Sound of Winter
07 The Magician
08 A Fragment of Glass
09 A Flask for the Journey
10 Clouds in the Wind
11 On the Edge of the Sea
12 A Song for the Angels

CD3 – Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the Mind (album)
01 The Thoughts and Memoirs of Mike Lachaire, First a Strange Individual, and then a Philosopher

compiled and created by Alexandre Julien
artwork by Alexandre Julien and Rain MacSweeney
released by Abridged Pause Recordings (APR7)
released on August 14th 2013