"Lets write a 30 minute long song", was how this started. Why? Who the hell knows why. Sometimes creative people like the smell of their own farts. It was a bitch to write and whenever someone would mess up at practice it sucked cause you have to start all over from the beginning, which was the rule if we kept messing it up. Play it until you can play it without trainwrecking. So many times I was so annoyed with a goddamn song being 30 minutes long for the mere idea of being pretentious and arty. Our drummer was a weird guy. Then of course, we just HAD to have a part where Jay gets to loop and layer parts with his new delay pedal because......well, it has that feature, so lets put all the pressure on Jay to have to execute that perfectly every time and not screw up. No one else in the band has that pressure, but sure, lets put it on the bipolar, high strung guitar player and play it out live A LOT.
My favorite bits are the cinematic and instrumental movements in the middle and the end. Someone was listening to way too much Godspeed! You Black Emperor and A Silver Mount Zion at the time.

We got the idea of recording the ambient noise outside of the rehearsal space at night, so we linked every XLR cable we had together and walked around with a condenser mic outside held high above our heads, and doesn't a train go by in the background at the perfect moment. We all stared at each other trying not to make a sound, but being really stoked that a train went by in the distance. The rest of the members were made to just walk around and drag their feet on the gravel and salted winter parking lot to make foot noise of people walking, while some smoked their cigarettes and Tj and I were being weirdo's doing field recordings and making sound collages.
Suddenly, someone suggested that it have a speaking part. Shaun was too sick to be around at this point, and we had mostly been making music to his pre-recorded vocal tracks, so when it came time for someone to put a spoken word part in, it fell on Tj. Everyone else didn't want to hear their voice on a recording, and he was the only one with the guts enough to read a piece with any sincerity and not either laugh with discomfort, or sound like a complete goober in the first place as most of us were in our early 20's.
The very ending "industrial" part was finally finished late night with just Tj and I in the room, recording a tweaked out shitty Fuzz Pedal into my amp till it sounded like it was going to explode, and trying to get any of it to be in time with each other when I had to be standing across the room, away from the studio monitors cause I didn't want to break down my guitar rig and move it out of the bandroom again. We were being lazy and it was the middle of the night, so fuck it.
Luu had been listening to this drum circle chanting cd that had all these weird voices chanting about "listen to my heart song", but he really liked it, and he was slightly embarrassed but sincerely loved the message and just wanted to put it in the background somewhere on the "new record". It's a weird little chant of "listen listen listen to my heart song, I will never forget thee, I will never forsake thee", but somehow it fit when we put it in. I have no idea where he got that or where it came from but it seemed very important to him, so we kinda sampled a part and threw it in there.

We even tried to get the rest of us to record the chant together in the vocal room, but one particular member was very stoned and his chanting sounded very childish and off beat, which made the rest of the group burst into hysterics listening to him try to chant the world "listen listen listen to my heart song" with him going "Listen.....li....listen.....listen t-...listen". I was easily angered in those days, and I kept storming out of the room to stop recording and start again while chastizing the rest of the group to take this serious, but they couldn't help but laugh at how stoned one dude was. In the end of the band it was like pulling teeth to get anybody to do anything serious. I think some of us were struggling with the fact that Shaun was never going to be to practice ever again, and the band was done, and some of us were starting to self medicate their feelings and sadness.

I remember very vividly, standing in the usual practice room with only 3 of us that showed up to practice. The rest of them had mentally checked out, and it was there that we had a conversation about just "starting something pissed". Shawn the drummer made it clear that Luu was never going to be at practice again, he's on so many pain meds that he isn't even conscious for most of the day, and the band was essentially over, so all three of us who showed up were the only ones that really were still interested in playing music at all. We're all very angry at how things have turned out in life and very angry that our friend was dying, so lets just start a new band on the ashes of this one, something pissed off. Let's abandon making any sad melodies and make harsh dissonant music and let out some of this anger boiling inside of us all.
A few weeks later we were taking pieces of songs we had written for another project and also picked up from were another local band called Found Dead Hanging had left off, got their singer to become involved and we started a band called Architect that went on to do some pretty serious touring. None of us even wanted to be home anymore, cause home was just pain and sadness, so our broken way of dealing with our grief was to be seriously pissed off all the time and play really angry music for a good ten years.