music : a prelude to monsters
Metadata
- Artist: Sloum
- Album: A Prelude to Monsters
- Date: May 2012
- Format(s): Digital, CD
- Label(s): Somehow Recordings
Track Listing
| # | Title | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | At Night, Mostly | 04:59 |
| 2 | Bad Dreams | 03:42 |
| 3 | Wind and Issolation (Their Ghosts Are All Around Me) | 07:02 |
| 4 | The Library | 04:05 |
| 5 | Solitary Creatures | 05:49 |
| 6 | Fanfare From the End of the World | 01:39 |
| 7 | Sleep | 05:58 |
Personnel
- Brian Evans: Acoustic Guitar, Cello, Electric Guitar, Toy/Small Flutes, Bells, Trumpet, Keyboard, Piano, Field Recording, Recording, Mixing, Mastering, Liner Notes
- Alicia Adams: Words, Contepts, Inspiration
- Farah Mohiuddin: Art
Notes & Thoughts
This album was originally released via a botique label in the UK called Somehow Recordings. They were nice enough to offer to do a CD run. Sadly, they were not tech savvy and the print for the cover had been upscaled from a thumbnail rather than using the print masters that were provided. The end result was packaging I was a little bit ashamed of. Which is a bummer, given how much fun it was to work on this album.
The album was written and recorded concurrently with the writing of a novel by Alicia Adams. Alicia would send me pages of writing and I would write music to it. I would then write music to represent where I felt it should go and she would write to that. That segment would get sent to me and we'd repeat the process. An album ended up forming much quicker than the novel, which has as of yet not been completed (but I can assure you that what I have read of it is quite good). As an added bit of trivia: this collaboration laid the foundation for a great friendship and ~7 years later Alicia and I were married. We had collaborated on one other piece prior to working on this album where she read a short story (flash fiction) and I composed music to it. Both of these projects were really amazing writing experiences for me and I highly recommend that people of different artistic backgrounds find non-standard ways to collaborate with each other.
This album was, to my recollection, made in my bedroom in a house I shared with a friend and his girlfriend. It was recorded in ProTools via an Mbox 2 interface. Unlike the previous album, gutiar was less of a focus here. Instead, I used an Ensoniq MR-76 keyboard, a cello that a friend had left at in my care (and that I could not play in any normal fashion), as well as quite a few bells, flutes, and one pocket trumpet.
My favorite tracks on this one are 'Wind and Issolation (Their Ghosts Are All Around Me)' and 'Sleep'.