“The Fairy” marks the starting point when I really began to write music. I was serious about what I was doing and what I wanted to accomplish (even if in hindsight the song-writing was immature). “The Fairy” was to be my first full length album. The making of the album spanned from August of 2003 to January of 2004, during which I had a great many different ideas complimenting and fighting each other.

I drew the TSF7 log in my journal on August 6th

In late August of 2003 (the earliest date I was able to find is August 24th 2003) I also started building my first website. Back then there were hardly any servers that would let you host your sites for free so I luckily found GeoCities. They also had a built-in website builder because I hadn’t yet learned how to use DreamWeaver. The website was hosted at http://www.geocities.com/theslopinfairy7. I had found some gothic imagery for backgrounds and celtic letters for fonts. I also created headers in Windows Paint for each of the pages. I was still attending New York Military Academy and the school internet blocked the Geocities server so I remember asking one of my English teachers if he wanted to see my website in order to check up on it.

Rough order of song writing

Break (May/June 2003-August 2003)
Desolate Ways (learned in France, June/July 2003)
When You’re Not (July-August 2003)
Songbird (August 2003)
Bolé (August 2003)
HDS (August-September 2003)
The Emptyness (September-October 2003, still at the New York Military Academy)
Touching the Sky (September-October 2003, still at the New York Military Academy)
Mon Truck (September-November 2003)
Intro (October-November 2003)
Outro (October-November 2003)
Bonus messing around (October-November 2003)
Telephones are for Kids (September-November 2003)
Everyone (November 2003)
The World (December 2003-January 2004)
Heptagram (December 2003-January 2004)
77~79 (December 2003-January 2004)
Nahanni (was going to be January 2004)

One day, it must have been in September or October 2003, my mother picked me up from the New York Military Academy for a weekend furlough, and we went straight to the Vanderschelden’s, who lived at 197 West Prescott Avenue in Edison, NJ. They were good friends of the family, originally from Belgium, so as French-speaking immigrants they got along well with my parents. I think they also became friends with the Roux. They had two sons and a daughter, and I got along pretty well with their eldest son, Benjamin. I later taught him how to play guitar and I think his younger brother Arthur started playing drums? They were having a get-together at their house and it maybe have been some sort of holiday because their cousin was there, a very pretty girl in her early teenage years. I was very taken by her and had brought Mina, my electric guitar with me because I never left it at school when I wasn’t there.

As was still common in those days when you had kids coming over, the Vanderschelden’s had rented a couple of movies from the local video store. I’m pretty sure one of them was The Scorpion King (2002), or maybe The Mummy (1999), or The Mummy Returns (2001). It was playing in the background at one point when, while I was trying to impress this girl, I told her that I played guitar, went to get it, and started playing some of The Slopin Fairy 7 songs I had composed. All of my friends who played guitar were always able to impress girls with the instrument; and a couple of guys who played it at the New York Military Academy were pretty popular with the ladies. I thought they looked so cool when they would walk around playing and all the girls would turn and look at them. I never had that success when I tried that myself at New York Military Academy, and I remember how unimpressed this cousin was that evening, too. I can still remember the feeling of embarrassment and the rejection from the situation.

The artwork was another new thing for me. The front cover seems to have been finished by September 21st 2003, with more work on the back cover on September 27th and 28th and the booklet having its last modifications on November 1st 2003. I found pictures of fairies online and used Windows Paint to change them up. For the front artwork cover, I found a paint-by-numbers style fairy picture and used the paint bucket to color it in. The stars weren’t on the original image and I had to draw them myself and that’s why they look so horrible. I also wanted them to be upside down pentagrams because I was still going through a satanic phase. The other pictures were either stretched out (to fit a CD booklet page) or inverted to be used on the inlay and insert. I gave credit to pretty much everyone I knew or talked to at that time in the booklet, even if they had nothing to do with the album. Victor Webb was my boss at the Red Cross where I worked with Tom. Neither him nor Tom had any implication in the album. I think they were only credited because they had reserved a copy of the album in advance.

[It’s possible that the inside of the booklet pages’ artwork was influenced by Pink Floyd’s Pulse live album, which my father owned on CD (the special one with the flashing LED light), and which would have been readily available to anyone. Although I wasn’t really listening to that music at the time. But after seeing the booklet pages in Pulse, there are similarities.]

On October 3rd 2003, exactly one month before being kicked out of the New York Military Academy and while I was on home suspension from school, I used my parent’s JVC GR-DVM90 camcorder to film myself with my guitar Mina in my parents’ living room, from which I took screenshots on the playback. This was my only way of taking digital pictures back then and acted as my first photoshoot. It was also a way for me to test out video for a music video I had in mind.

Had red flashing light button that we probably got around Halloween time, which I used to indicate that I was recording by attaching it to my bedroom dooknob and I may have also had a sign that said recording. It was influenced by Hollywood studios.

The Fairy undertook a great series of recording sessions, all of which were done with Windows Sound Recorder and the famous Gateway 7002345 microphone which had been used for “Slapin“. There was no editing, no overdubs, no room for mistakes. If we wanted to record a song, we had to time it first, then press record in Wines Sound Recorder and wait, it would automatically stop at 1:00. Then we would press record again to extend the recording to another minute, and it would stop at 2:00. If the song was timed to be at 3:30, then we would press it a third time and press stop thirty seconds it. It was very complicated. And that’s why so little of them were recorded and kept. Not only was I planning to re-record the songs, but I was confident enough in the venture as to not keep the bad takes and delete the songs before having newer versions. I therefore have very little material left over from the making, as the album was never fully recorded. Songs like “Mon Truck” had guitar and vocals, which I had to do simultaneously. For that I required my sisters help, most of the time Catherine, who would hold the mic closer to my face during the singing parts and back to the amp for the guitar parts. When I didn’t have help, I constructed a mic stand with my guitar stand and sctoch tape to hold the mic on it, and would place the stand on a coffee table to have the right height. It was quite bad, but was the only way to get a decent sound. The “Outro” had another story where I wanted a bonus track, and the total time of the song was around nine minutes. After calculating the length of the Outro and the bonus track, we figured out about how long we had to stay quiet before playing the hidden bonus section. It was quite difficult with a large family so we finally came up with the idea to unplug the mic during blank time. But the recordings for this album were done in the basement of the house on Stephenville, so the noise level was low.

Some of the songs were never written at the time that the album came to a stop. On November 3rd, 2003, the same day that I was officially kicked out of the New York Military Academy, I wrote in my journal that I had ten or eleven songs written and that I was aiming for a nineteen-song album. I may have chosen such a high number of songs because of the rap albums that I listened to in the early 2000’s. Such albums as Eminem’s “The Slim Shady LP” (20 songs) and “The Marshall Mathers LP” (18 songs), Limp Bizkit’s “Significant Other” (16 songs) and “Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water” (15 songs), DMX’s “… And Then There Was X” (18 songs), Petey Pablo’s “Diary of a Sinner: 1st Entry” (18 songs), P. Diddy’s “The Saga Continues…” (25 songs), Dr. Dre’s “2001” (22 songs), Cypress Hill’s “Skull & Bones” (17 songs). It certainly was not a typical rock album influence.

A lot of work had already been going into the album because I had spent a few weeks suspended from school at home before finally being kicked out. Those few weeks were dedicated to my music although it was quite depressive. The amount of songs for the album was dropped to seventeen on November 7th 2003. Two reasons come to mind for this. First of all, having the number seventeen would be a reference to the band name, with the number seven. Secondly, it was becoming very difficult to rack up nineteen songs and I felt less pressure removing two. “Break” and “When You’re Not” [Meant for Love] were the first two songs that I had ever written and were originally on the “Slapin” EP. “Songbird” was an Oasis cover and I had only discovered them in July when I went to see Jeremy in France and a band at a concert we went to covered “Wonderwall”. During the making of “The Fairy” I started listening to them quite a bit, and “Songbird” became an important song.

“Bolé” was a song that I partly copied (stole) from one of Jeremy Roux’s friends’ band after returning from France in the summer of 2003. I do not recall the name of the nu-metal band that Jeremy’s friends played in but he took me to see them play at a festival in a park one late afternoon. Looking back, the festival was pretty pathetic; there was no one watching the band, everyone was walking away from them, and Jeremy and I remained on the rear side of the stage, not even moving to the front to support the band. At one point Jeremy went on stage to play a song, which I believe may have been a cover or Korn’s “Blind”. Jeremy knew how to play some of the band’s songs on guitar and had jammed “Olé” several times for me earlier that month when we practiced together. I picked up parts of it, but not being as good a guitarist, I came up with my own rhythm. When I was back in New Jersey, I asked Jeremy to play the main verse for me on MSN and I recorded it with my microphone. The song had a Mexican sound which really appealed to me and I took that one verse and expanded on it. I changed the title from “Olé” to “Bolé” because in Quebecois French, Bolé is a slang for a nerdy/intellectual person, and I was often teased with that as a child.

“HDS” was another Mexican song, highly influenced by The Offspring’s “Pay the Man”, with a very progressive build-up. “Mon Truck” was my Quebecois pride song, but was made up of lyrics that my cousin and I wrote when we were kids.

“Telephones Are for Kids” was a title that Tom Nunziata came up with that was a play on “Trix are for kids”. I played this song for Mikey Batrz during one of our jams, and he said he wanted me in his band just based on my playing that song. “Touching the Sky” was originally called “Reaching for the Sky” and was written while I was still at the New York Military Academy in October of 2003. I thanked my dad for this song in the booklet, only because he had the patience to listened to me play it in the car on the drive from my parent’s house to the New York Military Academy. I sat in the back seat of my dad’s van and played guitar the entire drive there, for over an hour. I don’t know how my dad put up with it.

“The Emptyness” was also written at the New York Military Academy, I believe, and the titled referred to my depressed state being single. “Everyone” was a song that I composed during my “basement days” after leaving the New York Military Academy, which I always felt was somehow ripped off by Velvet Revolver’s song “Slither” when it came out in May of 2004. I was pissed about that, and used to complain about it to Tom all the time. “77~79”, “The World” and “Heptagram” were the last songs written, during December 2003 and January 2004. “Nahanni” (named after a river in northern Canada that I found on my map), was a song name I had planned but I believe that I hadn’t yet composed the song itself.

The plan for the album promotion was going to have 7 limited copies of the album in black and white, which would come with a Slopin Fairy 7 guitar pick and a bonus, hidden track after the Outro. One of these limited edition I was keeping, and another was reserved for Tom Nunziata. At the time we didn’t have a color printer so that’s how I came with the idea to do the first press in black and white. We had a laser greyscale printer and I printed my proof copy on it, before the booklet was done being designed. A second one might have been printed for Tom but I’m not sure. The regular edition of the album would have been in full color and finally I decided that this version would have the bonus track too. The album was also going to have a single, “Bolé“, with a music video and a CD single including b-sides.

I stopped working on “The Fairy” in January of 2004 for two reasons, I think. First of all my computer was taken away from me by my parents because I had gotten in trouble in public school for carving in a wooden desk (my carving was only one of hundreds done by other students over the years, but the school used me as an an example and forced my parents to to pay for the renovating of the entire classroom). My parents felt that taking my computer away was the best way to punish me. So I had no way to record the new songs that I was writing (“77~79”, “The World”, “Heptagram” and possibly “Nahanni”), nor re-record the older songs that I had not kept. I had several cassette tape recorders, one on my boombox, another on my Talkboy, but I wasn’t using those much. This also prevented me from updating the website. I didn’t even get to the proofreading or updating stage of the artwork (which in hindsight was in dire need). My parents also forbid me to make phone calls, because they thought that the punishment was to be without friends.

The second reason was that I was heading into a low point of my depression. I was spending my entire time in my parent’s house basement, watching television and only occasionally playing guitar. I was consumed by home improvement shows on TLC, like “While You Were Out”, “Trading Spaces”, “What Not To Wear” and dramas (what I considered chick flicks at the time), namely “Mask” (1985), which seemed to always be playing and which made me cry. My friend Tom had become my only remaining friend, as I lost contact with everyone else from school, cut off from internet and the phone. I actually had to sneak to make phone calls. The song “Everyone” was written during this time.

A note from my diary dated February 1st 2004 says

… I have no motivation at all. I just play guitar and watch TV all day. Speaking of instrument, TSFS doesn’t exist anymore. I went solo for a while but about a month ago I started another band. Me=guitar, Chris [Christian Scarlett]=guitar, Roman [Moyzman]=bass, Andy [Palladino]=keyboards, Tom [Nunziata]=vocals, Phelix [Feliks Khaykin?]=drums. Great stuff. We were gonna be a weird style. Rammstein mixed with Faith No More + Mr. Bungle. And to sick it up throw in some Mexican/Spanish riffs. Well let me tell you dude. It never fucking happened. I’m gonna call them and tell them that we should drop it. We’ll see what happens then.

So this album ended unfinished although I did continue to play those songs through out February and March of 2004, but, officially (?), no longer under the name of The Slopin Fairy 7. Somehow a confusion that the band still existed was led by two factors. Firstly that the website was still active and second that in September of 2004, during the end of Scapegoat, I updated the Slopin Fairy 7 website and, removing all the old news, posted an update about the last three songs that were recorded (for Scapegoat, but posted as The Slopin Fairy 7 songs). I also updated a few of the pages to reflect that The Slopin Fairy 7 “was” and “is” no longer. I also removed Jeremy Roux’s picture from the members, as he was originally listed as the “Crazy Guitar Teacher”.

September of 2004 news post:
Wow. Some time it’s been since the last time I’ve updated this. Well i recorded 4 songs and they are now in the Music section. Check em out

probably late 2005 or early 2006 another news post, At the same time I updated the news section, posting that Throne of Mortality was my new band.:

Ok so after some three years or so of having The Slopin Fairy 7, I have decided to call it officially quits. The new solo project band is called Throne Of Mortality, and will be black metal. The band will only have me on vocals, guitar, and bass. Hopefully a drummer will help out until I learn my stuff.
I will keep the site in as best condition as possible.
Take Care.

On September 28th 2006 I decided to move the site to a different server, for a reason I can’t quite recall but it may have had to do with a new rule that a required sign-in once a month was required to keep the site up or a specific amount of visits, and I had lost my access to the site as well as the email associated with it. GeoCities also had a traffic limit so the site went out if I had too many visits. I have no idea which sever I used at that point.

September 28th 2006 news post:

I have know moved the site to a new, much more reliable server. So no more of that traffic limit.
I am going to go through all my old tapes to see if i could get together all the rehearsals I have, if any have survived. I know I have at one point recorded a ”tribute” to System Of A Down. It had a few covers as well as a couple new songs that were influenced by them. I highly doubt that the tape is in complete condition, but i will get all I can.
Take Care.

(on Archive.org, TSF7 website on FreeWebTown has the oldest date January 9th. The Triskalyon website on iFastNet also has a link to the FreeWeTown page, the oldest date backed up being January 9th. But also the list of changes made on the Triskalyon Links pages are dated January 4th and January 6th, so it was possibly on one of those 2 dates that I changed the link of the TSF7 website).
Then in early January of 2007, after I had created a website for Triskalyon on the FreeWebTown servers, created one for TSF7 at http://www.freewebtown.com/theslopinfairy7. I possibly moved the TSF7 website first as a way to familiarize myself with FreeWebTown before designing the one for Triskalyon. The site on FreeWebTown went under sometime in the next couple years, probably around the same time that GeoCities got deleted.

Download Link

1. Intro (De F@!ry)
2. Bolé
3. Break
4. When You’re Not
5. Songbird
6. Mon Truck
7. HDS
8. Everyone
9. Telephones Are for Kids
10. The World
11. Heptagram
12. Nahanni
13. .
14. The Emptyness
15. 77~79
16. Touching the Sky
17. Outro (De Elf) / Bonus Hidden Track / Desolated Ways

track 5 originally by Oasis
track 17.c originally by Morbid Angel
artwork by Alexandre Julien (as HDS)
engineering by Catherine Julien and Alexandre Julien (as HDS)
recorded from September 2003 to January 2004