Far from his electro deftonish metal sound, Ian Paris (Ex guitars for Earshot, Comastar, and guitars+vocals for Phinger), delivers here a touching intimate journey through loneliness. With "Games", 'Are you happy now ?", "How many times?", "Holding the lines", or the bare bluesy "Woke up", he re-arranges the songs to their quintessential emotion. "Holding the line" is here quite far from the Deftonish original, or the electron/tech re-rendering by MP Tsu. All in all, 13 pieces of soul that stay floating between the ears, until the end, when we just want to press play again. The album which took 3 years to be finally released, almost never saw the light of day. Ian kept walking away from it. As far as Japan, the borders of Mongolia, or Paris... "Sometimes, you touch on things, you dig out pain you had buried inside, and they just jump at you, and makes you take a real hard look at yourself. Sometimes, you just can't, sometimes, you just have to walk away. Then you wonder if the whole process is really worth it. Then, you ask yourself, how much you want to share. You feel you have become that fragile plant, in the winter of your emotions, and all you need is someone to come and step on you and crush it... Then you wonder: What if they laugh when you suffocate ? ... What if you laugh when you pull the plug ?... " The back story goes that it was not meant to be an album for release in the first place, but merely a personal exercise, something like an exorcism. But the label kept pushing, and felt the songs were very strong. "At the end, they asked me the question: What if the message resonates with someone else's pain and they too can see that there is a way out … So i went along with finishing the recording, without really thinking about any commercial avenue for it…." Bare, the songs stand very deep and dark on their own. "Woke up" is a bluesy song with slide guitar, and 1 vocal track. Only untouched song is "In my eyes" left just as is previously recorded, a mix of Marylin Manson impressions, of keys, and vocals, with Pink Floydesk acoustic guitars. "In my eyes is a song for my father, sort of a conversation i'm having with I'm as he contemplates his life, alone facing death. We haven't ever really spoken. I think i saw him the equivalent of 6 months since i was 5 yrs old… Then old age comes into the picture bringing about the certainty of the end, and people tend to be scared, and try and reach out..But it is very difficult to bring out something neither of us ever had..Or at least i never had, since i spent my whole life without ". I don't really know if it was a closure, more so just expressing my side of the story… I think i had closure long ago. "Shadows in the sun": " I co-wrote this song with my 2 yr old son, who often comes down to the studio with me. One afternoon, he was playing with one of the guitars, and when i picked it up it was all detuned. Yet, it sounded like an open chord, or something, it was D#, G, A#, F, and i thought i'd try and come up with something. And there it is.