I have been known by various aliases throughout my musical years. Not many people tend to ask about it because a lot of people in general don’t like discussing it. But this is private and nothing can be hidden.
Smit (1999)
Smit was an alias that I used during the days of Les Rocker’s in early 1999. My sisters and I all picked out funny nicknames to make us sound cool. Mine was taken from Will Smith, because a few months prior I had gotten Bill Willie Style as my first tape. My sister Catherine took the pseudonym Jon, Anne-Elizabeth took Max, and Marie-Helene used Ti-Bob.
Hacking Dude 7 / HDS / HDS7 (2000-2004)
This was my second alias. It came from the first email I ever had. Back around 2000, after having AOL for a few months, my family finally decided to let my sisters and I each have our own logins/screen names. My best friend Jeremy Roux had the alias Lricain / Lrick1, which was a French saying, Le Ricain, (The American in French slang) and he was really into hacking at the time. I wanted to be the same but never actually did succeed to hack anything. So my first email was HackingDude7@aol.com. The number seven was influenced by a popular hacking program at the time, Sub7. My email later became Hackingd7@hotmail.com. Both emails ended up getting hacked themselves and I lost a lot of content because of it. The name was shortened to HDS for The Slopin Fairy 7, and I continued to use HDS7 for many forum or blog registrations through out the years when they required a minimum of 4 digits.
DJ Hack (2002-2003)
Before I ever played guitar, I thought that DJs were so cool. Now I don’t have any respects for them but when I didn’t know better I wanted to be one. Around 2002 I came up with the idea to credit myself as DJ Hack, based on Hacking Dude 7.
Mike Lachaire
I vividly recall the prank calls that Andy Palladino and myself used to make back when we were teenagers in middle school (Woodrow Wilson Middle School). Of course, you never gave your real name, though I’m sure that even if you did, people wouldn’t believe it to be your real name. I made up the name Mike Lachaire. “Mike” was one of the most common first names in my childhood. One of my best friends in elementary school was named Micheal Holuigue, and I used to call him “Mike” for fun. Subconsciously, Michaelangelo was always my favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle as a kid and I was really into that. “Lachaire” on the other hand sounded like a mix of French and Southern American, yet comical. The name “Lachaise” could easily be a legitimate Quebecer last name and I thought to translate it in English would make it funny. I later used the name Mike Lachaire as a fictional character recounting the story of the Soufferance album “Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The Mind” in 2009.
Virkelig Død (2005-2006)
This was during my time in Throne Of Mortality. In fact it was very early into the band, late summer 2005, and I was getting heavily into the Norwegian Black Metal scene. Of course I needed to have a Norse member name, not because it was cool, just because everyone was doing it, so to me it was just how it was done, no questions asked. I can’t recall how I came up with “Royal Death” but I chose that and translated it into Norwegian.
Virkelix (2006-2011)
Later into the Throne Of Mortality years, I was highly influenced by the French black metal scene, especially Les Légions Noires. I decided that I wanted a more Gallic-sounding name, and took influences from the Gaulois names, usually ending with an X. Thus, Virkelig Død was shortened to Virkelix in early 2006.
Around late 2011, I started realizing that I was unknown in the music world. Nothing came up when you looked for “Alexandre Julien” online and I constantly had to tell my friends, fans or family members to looks for “Virkelix” on Google in order to find my music. It also necessitated the explanation that Virkelix was not my band’s name but an alias that I used to compose and record music, along with it’s history, and that they could also find my music by looking up a couple of different bands’ names with which I was active at the time. It was too complicated and no one took me seriously; they couldn’t see that I was indeed a full-time musician.
Discogs was also giving me a hard time since they their rules have clear distinctions between an alias and an artist name variation. Virkelix was not an artist name variation of Alexandre Julien and therefore, all of my differently-credited aliases on Discogs warranted their own pages. That would cause all of my credits to be split up across five pages (Alexandre Julien, HDS, Virkelig Død, Virkelix and Peine). I really wanted all of my credits to be on a single page because it made me feel good to see all of my musical accomplishments listed together.
So I decided to stop using an alias and start crediting myself under my real name. The Last Great Torch Song was the first release to officially credit my own name. I also edited a lot of past releases and music databases to change my past credits from aliases to my real name.
[was still using it in late October 2011]
[February 27, 2012 changed my old credits on Discogs]
[March 6, 2012 change biographies on Last.fm to credit my name]
[In conversation with Alex Fawcett from March 2012, I mention that I stopped using the alias in late 2011.]
Peine (2007)
During the days in Triskalyon, we needed new members, and I felt that any band I was not playing guitar for, and rather bass, I wanted to be credited as someone else. I decided to use Peine as my hidden entity, and to back up the persona by Mike Lachaire being the person behind it. Peine was used for Soufferance and for Gallia Fornax.
[in 2009/2010 I used Peine/Virkelix alternatively in Soufferance]
Alex F. Julien
Alex F. Julien was a name that I used alternatively over the years. It was taken from how one of my friends in high school, Robert Kowitski, called me “Alex Fucking Julien!”.
Emails
- hackingdude7@aol.com
- hackingd7@hotmail.com
- laststripsearch@hotmail.com
- a.julien@hotmail.com
- alex.julien@hotmail.com (questionable, need proof)
- alex.f.julien@gmail.com
- alexandrejulien@hec.ca
- mortificationrecords@hotmail.com
- mortificationrecords@gmail.com
- alex@abridgedpause.com
- abridgedpause@gmail.com
- brandiedinbed@gmail.com
- info@brandiedinbed.com
- errancedesouvenirs@gmail.com
- citadelswamp@gmail.com
- lanternsawake@gmail.com
- soufferance@gmail.com
- visioneternel@gmail.com
- alexandre.julien@bell.ca
- info@visioneternel.com
ICQ Number: 116813690