I have yet to complete the final track-listing as some tracks need names, so heres a bastardization:

1. Track 1

2. Track 2

3. Track 3

4. Track 4

5. Track 5

6. Track 6

7. Track 7

8. Track 8

ps. This project does contain The Tower’s Heartbeat.

Mirror

01 – Reflection II        2:00
02 – Explosion I    5:00
03 – Explosion II    6:00
04 – Violence        5:00
05 – Blood        7:00
06 – Witness        6:00
07 – Reflection III    8:00
08 – Freedom        10:00

Track times are estimated before recording.

After giving this album a lot of thought, I realize this has taken quite a lot more time than my usual. Here are the dates of previous albums (or collections) in comparison.

One (instrumentals) – 1992

Two (instrumentals) – 1993

Three (instrumentals) – 1994 (scrapped)

-note : all instrumentals eventually became songs

Trilogy – 1994

-note: what I would call songwriters diarrhea tossed into three mood piece collections, eventually fleshed out more, and many became completely different beasts

Vaccine – 1995 (scrapped, most songs went to Lifeless and Shattered)

Chameleon – 1997 (scrapped, most songs forgotten, some went to Lifeless)

Green – 1998 (scrapped, songs went to Lifeless, Titan)

Ivory – 1998 (scrapped, songs went to Frozen and The Trial)

-Note: These four never felt right, I had to start over as I was forgetting songs. One song I called ‘untitled’ I humorously use to reference this mistake as I remember it being so good, but it remains forgotten.

The Trial – 1998 – First concept album.

Lifeless – 1999 – A typical collection of songs, no central concept.

Shattered – 2000 – Incredibly intense industrial (III) album written after hearing Nine Inch Nails. Ends with one of my favorites.

Controlled – 2000 – Beat versions and mixes of Shattered songs.

Frozen – 2000 – My favorite piece, finally found out how to write atmospheric songs the way I want them.

Red – 2001 – Mostly instrumental, incredibly evil sounding.

Titan – 2001 – Anti War album, everybody writes these right?

Colour Emotion – 2001 – Experiment on emotion, every track feels completely different but feels good on a whole.

Black Room Stereo – 2002 – Somewhat Shattered sequel, dark ambient industrial.

Lines – 2002 – My big breakdown album, everybody writes these right?

Changed – 2003 – Second part of breakdown album.

Metal – 2003 – Frozen done backwards, industrial style

The Pendant – 2005 – First full concept album (done on purpose) since The Trial.

I Breathe Blue Smoke – 2007 – A 7 track masterpiece (yes I love it) based on city life.

Effigy – 2007 – Black Room Stereo sequel of sorts, far more metal sounding, written before I really got into metal. No seriously.

Glass / Mirror – 2009 – Concept album about lies.

Well.. that wasn’t so bad.

Today I will reveal the tracklisting for Glass, and I will reveal information about each track in the coming days and weeks.

Glass

01 – Glass — 8:00
02 – Intro – 2:00
03 – Hangmen – 7:00
04 – Warmth – 2:00
05 – Threw – 6:00
06 – Winter – 9:00
07 – Reflection I – 3:00
08 – Mourn – 10:00

Track time is estimated. After recording, it may shrink or expand a bit.

I cannot tell you what it is specifically about and have really only told a handful of people (making the mistake of telling somebody just this week), but it feels like an odd fantasy story with a few terrifying moments. What I can tell you about is a story within the story – the pendant itself. This part of the story is completely fictional and based on an old human obsession – world peace, or a selfish peace (whichever you choose). The pendant is a mythical dream object searched for and obsessed over. It is found in this story, on track 8. What happens will be eventually revealed when I get off of my ass and record this properly.

Part 1 – Sounds and song names.

When I was in elementary school, I noticed how I was able to memorize melodies and replay them in my head as if I had a huge speaker somewhere inside. There were a few instruments that I chose to focus on at first, mostly violin and piano, and I tried to recreate the sound in my head exactly. After this, I tried to create little tunes usually by repeating some notes over and over until it stuck, eventually writing sweeping instrumentals. I would be riding my bike to school and there would be this orchestra in my head which I created, and I was in heaven.

Mid grade 8 my family and I moved to another city and this is where I started imagining full songs with vocals. The first few of these were eventually forgotten or mishmashed into other songs later, but one that I will never forget is a song called ‘The Darkened House’ which was about someone having an epiphony late in life about how they wasted their whole life in misery and loneliness. Funny how depression affects you when you are young. Soon I had a few dozen songs memorized and I decided to divide them into groups related to the feeling of the song. There was no reason to name the project because I did not speak to anybody about it, but I eventually wrote it down as ‘Trilogy’. As the songs were forgotten one by one, I grouped the stronger songs into groups which eventually became something like album names for them. The first was Vaccine, which included the songs ‘Purple Cloud Sunrise’, ‘Reality’, and ‘Time’, which are very important songs to me. I wrote two more albums of material, one named Chemeleon which had a few strange songs on it, one being ‘I Win’, then there was the third album of material called Green, which was very atmospheric and had a song called ‘Lifeless’. These song titles do not mean much now, but I am hoping that you will eventually hear them.

Soon I was writing a forth group of songs and named it Ivory, and while I was originally content with the name, there were a lot of Ivory soap commercials on tv. Angry, I decided to scrap the groups and reinvent the project. After graduating from high school, I moved to Victoria BC and tried to get my head together on life, death, music, depression, etc.

Internet Relay Chat was a big thing at the time and I enjoyed using the service to chat with friends and sometimes family. Entering a chat environment forces you to invent a nickname for yourself, so I invented a few. First was Trez, which just sounded cool at the time. A few days later I was typing nonsense and came up with Ceilt|ei. When asked how to pronounce it, I changed the pipe to an S and thus created Ceiltsei’. Since IRC was a great place to cause trouble on the internet (similar to 4chan now), I had a lot of fun getting banned from religous channels and the such, and people knew me as a troublemaker. I changed my identity over night to Avate, which was a play on the name of a game I created back in 1996 (The Lost Rain, The tales of Avalorn). Somehow I named the project The Avation Project, which made me laugh since my father listened to The Alan Parsons Project.

While gathering up the songs I hit the ol’ song writing train and a concept piece called ‘The Trial’ was born. From this album on things got easier and if I had actually recorded these, I would have over 20 albums to my name. I have yet to forget a single one of these songs.

Recently turning 28, I decided it was time to record them.