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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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