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City of Shadows Diary They say that birth is painful, and from a male perspective, it's not one I'm familiar with. However the creation of this album was a painful experience. Alot of these songs I wish I had not written, but they were a learning process, over the course of a decade, Some of them are embarresingly simplistic, some are not, some are just emotional outbursts, whatever mood I was in at the time. I think I envisioned this album back in 1996-1997, when I was first living in Madison with my friend Lee, and attending technical school. I had several songs written then that I felt weren't up to the band I was in at the time (Sanity Zero's) caliber. Not to mention I'd only been playing guitar for a couple of years at that point so most of what i was doing was learning to play. Several songs were written there, in very basic form. Far Beyond the Pale was the first multi tiered composition I worked on, and as a result there's probably 5-10 different versions of this song on 4 Track Cassette tapes strewn throughout various locations. When School became not interesting anymore, I dropped out and in a severe depression quit my job and moved back to Oshkosh, writing more. Sanity Zero continued on in various forms and I evolved with it. Eventually I moved to Iowa City, seeking fame and fortune there, and to make a long story short, It didn't work out, and once again I returned to Oshkosh, several more songs in tow. At this point I had really begun to explore computer based recording, as technology became cheaper and more readily available. I met Heathyre online, we hooked up and I recorded Blood and Destruction from 2001 on to when i released during Christmas time. At that point I had decided that the demo would be the best tracks i had written over the years, and City of Shadows would be the hoary warty, not so fresh batch of all the rest of my songs. Well, due to more drama in my life, releasing the album got put aside until recently. and I stopped working on it to focus entirely on Billion Dying Suns, always intending to finish this batch of material up and release under the City of Shadows moniker, as that being as i felt, the center piece of the songs. And so in 2006, it became an (un)official bootleg which turned into a release. a couple songs still lack vocals, but at this point, I'll probably just release it as is, as a sort of, here's Cyclophenia through the last decade album. |