-The second EP (April 2007 – July 2007)
In late February of 2007, less than two weeks after Vision Éternel’s first EP “Seul Dans L’obsession” had been released, I decided to end the Triskalyon collective, which I had founded in August of 2006 with some friends. By ending the collective, I also decided to put every single band that I was part of on an indefinite hiatus. That included Vision Sufferance, Vision Solitude, Vision Lunar, Vision Éternel and Gallia Fornax. When I said “indefinite hiatus” in the official press announcement from March 5th 2007 on Myspace, I was really thinking “forever”. I had been dealing with so much negative feedback from people I had considered friends and other publicity agents that I didn’t want to play music anymore. On February 25th I recorded the last Vision Lunar song, a cover of Faith No More’s “Pristina” and that was my farewell to the music industry.
I must have known that I was kidding myself because someone who’s creative can’t stay away for too long. I managed to stay away from it all for about 12 weeks. Looking back on my personal life, it made sense because I worked at the Rite Aid pharmacy in Edison, New Jersey from March 6th to May 15th. On May 18th I created a message board on Last.fm for Triskalyon and all the bands and posted all the plans I had for each band.
What started it again was my idea for a second Vision Éternel album. I began writing stuff again in April and began recording it in May. This album was to be about Dylan Seymour, and would start off from the feelings of the first EP, go into the meeting and once again into loosing. The first two songs to be written were “Desperation” and “Neglection”. I straight away had them planned as first and final songs on the release, being that they sounded similar, and fit the mood quite well. I had a really tough time writing songs at this time. I had started working, first at Rite Aid, then at Stop and Shop during the night shift. I was naturally up at night, but sleeping during the actual day and afternoon with a big family was very difficult. I recall coming home from work at seven in the morning and trying to record some ideas I had. It was extremely difficult, but I somehow did it.
June 1st posted on Last.fm message board:
“Well I am working on some new songs for the second EP. It will be 5 songs titled appropriately to a second phase of obsession. Three of the songs are composed, as of this date, but only one is recorded. I would be happy to send it to the ones who are interested enough. If you want it, contact me (here, myspace, or email). The recording process is a bit slow, so I am not sure when this will be released. Hopefully the one song will keep you hooked enough all the way until the release.”
songs were titled “Season Part I to V”.
at some point recorded the alternate version of Love Within Beauty.
research in 2017 led me to believe that it was recorded while still in NJ in May of 2007. However, I have a hand-written paper from after Moving in Montreal with a list of songs I planned to record in August of 2007 and that included Love Within Beauty Alternate Version. Either it had been recorded in May of 2007 and I planned to re-record it in Montreal, or it was only recorded in August-September of 2007.
around that time, spring 2007, I had Phil Altobelli’s Agile guitar which I was fixing for him, and I recorded a few Soufferance and Vision Éternel songs with it. The demo version of Season In Neglection was recorded with Phil’s guitar, and it had a really nice warm tone. But at the time I was going for that treble sound for Vision Éternel and always intended to re-record it on my Jackson Kelly, which I did for the released version.
Some of my older sources claimed that this EP was recorded from May to October of 2007, but I strongly debate this nowadays. I believe that the EP was finished when I moved to Montreal in early August, and therefore would have been recorded from May to July of 2007. When I first moved back to Montreal, I did not have a computer for several weeks. Following that, I started school at Recording Arts Canada and attended, loosely, from September to October of 2007. Then in January of 2008 I began playing with Adam and Nidal. “Song for Kristy” was also recorded in October of 2007, by which time I was clearly finished with the “Un automne en solitude” phase.
The song “Season in Lust” was, without me knowing it, a reuse of the intro from the Vision Lunar song “Mother Song”, as it had never been released. Around this time I was also trying to get the solo project into a band. Phil Altobelli (Darklink) was the first ever to learn the VE songs. We used to jam “Beauty”, “Narcosis” and maybe “Desperation”. There was a really great solo he composed for “Beauty” that was never recorded. That was in the early summer of 2007. There was a brief moment when I was considering doing a cover of the intro to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Killer of Giants” from his favorite album of mine. I started learning the song, but I never recorded it because I felt that VE would be awkward for covers.
-Moving to Montreal (July 2007 – October 2007)
need to find a more exact date of when I moved.
I moved back to Montreal in late July , and in September I met some people in school. By the end of September I had already dropped out of school due to a girl leading me on to a point of depression. At that point I actually wrote the first song from the third EP, “Song for Kristie”, which was later retitled “Thoughts as Solicitation”. In October/January? I started jamming with Nidal Mourad and Adam Kennedy from school. Nidal was on acoustic and Adam was doing solos. The song we worked on the most was “Absence”, though we did start to work on “Neglection” at the end. The sound was amazing, it sounded like an indie band. At that point I wanted to scrap the recorded EP and just keep those as demos and really expand the band to have something complete. Nidal however got fed up pretty fast, as he was the only one not composing anything, and he stopped showing to practice. Adam would stop one practice later. I went back to the solo status, and wanted to release the EP, but I still had no album covers.
What I finally put together, almost 20 years later, was that Nidal didn’t want to come to practice at my apartment anymore because he didn’t want to run into my roommate Christina anymore. He had had a one night stand with her, and didn’t want anything else to do with her anymore. He had used to me to get to her. He saw her when coming out of my office/studio one day after practice, because her bedroom was next to it, and quickly talked. Then after that he asked me to pass to her love letters and a demo CD-R he had burned of his solo acoustic stuff, which he said was like Damien Rice. He told me about their hooking up, and how after they had sex, she cleaned up his whole apartment and did his laundry and dishes. And I remember being appealed by that at the time, thinking like what the hell kind of asshole let’s a woman clean his dingy apartment for him. Clean up your own shit man. And he was a bit of a slob, having been to his place. But he told me he didn’t want anything to do with her because he wanted to stay single. But for some reason, I was so oblivious to that fact, because I just naively saw him as just my friend, I didn’t let that factor it to why he refused to show up to band practice anymore.
On October 16th, I asked a fan, Daniela Dahlems (her artist name was Levia Draconia back then) to create artwork for the new EP. I told her I wanted a firefly, because it would follow up the theme of the lantern. She created one or two drawings of a firefly and half colored them. I turned them down because they didn’t look serious enough, they looked like they were going to be used in a fairy tale story. She was also very stubborn and would refuse to change things that I wanted and have the mood I was striving for in the music. In general I found she was a very difficult artist to work with, and this was reminded to me when I contacted her recently about sending me those pictures for “nostalgic purposes”. She right out refused to send me the pictures because she said “she liked the music but hated the musician”.
they looked like drawings that an elementary school child would make. they were infantile and poorly drawn.
loved lanterns but didn’t want to copy the same thing. fireflies were plenty around in Edison and I used to catch them all the time. I still like them a lot. They also have a glow in the dark aspect, like a lantern.
Contacted her on Myspace
myspace.com/leviadraconia
http://legacyofleviathan.deviantart.com
myspace.com:80/legacyofleviathan
http://danieladahlems.da.funpic.de
http://www.wartower.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-447832-p-10.html
Levia Draconia
16.10.2007, 10:33
@Dream Sieht geil aus!!! =D Da freu ich mich gleich noch mehr auf Halloween <3
Aber bis dahin muss ich schaffen, schaffen schaffen… Zu meiner Überraschung hat mir heute morgen eine Band (Vision Eternel)aus Kanada in Myspace IM eine Anfrage zu einem CD Artwork geschickt. War ja ein guter Start in den Tag. 😛 Jetzt hab ich an 3 CD Artwork zu knabbern.. :S Mal schauen… *g*
http://www.wartower.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-447832-p-11.html
Levia Draconia
17.10.2007, 00:47
So hab angefangen an den Artworks für Vision Éternel zu arbeiten. Momentan ist der CD Druck dran. Hab meinem “Autraggeber mal den Zwischenstand gezeigt. Antwort darauf: Zitat:” Oh Shit! I LOVE it!” *wegschmeiß* xD
EDIT: Hab’s jetzt fertig. Weitere Bilder folgen bald =)
Months passed by, and I was trying to write new songs for a third EP, and I still had no artwork for the second one.
song Season In Seclusion is credited as being recorded on October 21st of 2007. Unsure if that’s accurate and have no way of possibly finding that out anymore.
-Expanding the band (November 2007 – February 2008)
Jan 18th 2008: wrote on Nidal’s FB profile: so whats the deal with the kid from school for eternel? [possibly inquiring about Adam?]
Jan 27th 2008: wrote on Nidal’s FB profile: yo, keep urself free monday or tueday afterschool. me you and adam have a jam session.
Jan 30th 2008: wrote on Nidal’s FB profile: so im probly not gonna go to toronto.. so how bout jamming friday after school? maybe we can try to record a rough live demo or some shit..
toronto was possibly to go visit Dylan again?
When Nidal and Adam joined, the new stuff was so good that I decided to put off the recording session of this EP as demos and not release it.
So after Nidal left, then Adam kind of stopped being interested. So February came along and I wanted to release the EP again
March 14th 2008 Facebook post to Nidal:
“yo gimme a call man… i talked to some chick that puts up acoustic shows… i got her info to contact her, but you need to have demos recorded… maybe you guys can set some shit up.”
The Artwork and the Release (February-March 2008)
It wasn’t until February came along, and I wanted it to be out on the 14th, just like the first one, but I had no idea what to do. By the end of the month, I was so desperate, I took my phones cheap camera and took a few pictures out of my back window on a hotel construction site, in inverted negatives. That became the album artwork. I think that if people don’t take time to figure out what it is, they could feel it still looks pretty cool. I wanted so desperately to do a music video for “Absence” but I had nothing to do it this time. It wasn’t until 2010 that I finally decided to make one.
2nd so artwork took forever because I had nothing to do the artwork. Nothing to take pictures. I had my first cellphone but I had no way to connect it to my computer back then you had to buy separate cable adaters to do that.
It took until I got my new Motorola krzr phone to be able to do that and it either came with a cable or I bought one as an accessory. I probably got that in March and that’s when I finally took the pictures. And the do was released in late March not on the 14th.
got phone on March 18th 2008 Motorola Krz
Pictures taken on night of March 24th-25th.
possible that the I released it on the 14th without artwork.
But also possible that I waited off until I had artwork and then lied about the release date.
Hilton Garden Inn hotel on Sherbrooke Street in downtown Montreal, which was being built in the backyard of the apartment where I lived at the time. The security lights they had to guard the construction site kept me up many nights.
First version of the flyer had a typo “Visiom Éternel” and it was up online for about a week before I realized it, took it down, fixed it and added the correct version.
In all reality the negative effect of the pictures probably happened by pure accident of playing around with my phone in my room. But always possible that it was subconsciously influenced by the artwork of Faith No More’s “Evidence” single, one of the versions had a negative picture. Also, it’s possible that I wanted opposite colours from the first EP, which was mostly black, so I had this one mostly white.
2008-03-25 “Redesigning the Eternel myspace” (for Un Automne En Solitude)
[same night that I took the pictures]
early on, I always spelled the album title in lower case “Un automne en solitude”, to respect the French spelling, but over time I changed the capitalization to conform to the music world, “Un Automne En Solitude”.
when did I come up with the title? Maybe the title was decided in October and that’s why I closed off the phase?
released on Myspace and on the Mortification Records website, with a .rar file up on Mediafire.
During the summer of 2008, I was in contact with Custom Made Music, a record label from the US that was interested in releasing Vision Eternel’s music. The owner Dave Allison wanted me to send in a physical version of Un Automne En Solitude by the mail to further discuss doing a release, which was going to be on 7″ vinyl, but I was so broke that I didn’t have the money to buy blank CD-Rs, nor pay for mailing.
Myspace background used during the promotion of “Un automne en solitude”
- Season in Desperation
- Season in Yonder
- Season in Lust
- Season in Absence
- Season in Neglection
artwork by Alexandre Julien
recorded at Mortified Studios May-August of 2007 (NJ, MTL1)
released by Mortification Records (MT014)
released on March 14th 2008