What is the Avation Project? It is the name of my 15 year music project. I will explain my influences and detail the song later but first here is the story on how I started it and how it got its name.
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.