                |
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          \__ \ | (   | |   | |   |   |
          ____/_|\___/ \__,_|_|  _|  _|
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          A    Prelude   to    Monsters
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[1] At Night, Mostly                      - 4:59
[2] Bad Dreams                            - 3:42
[3] Wind and Issolation (Their Ghosts
      Are All Around Me)                  - 7:02
[4] The Library                           - 4:05
[5] Solitary Creatures                    - 5:49
[6] Fanfare From the End of the World     - 1:39
[7] Sleep                                 - 5:58

All sounds  by Sloum
Album Art   by Farah Mohiuddin
Inspiration by Alicia Adams
Liner notes by Sloum

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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 onone 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 [Sloum] 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'.

- Sloum (2021-01-20)

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