It all began in 1998, when Pedro I. Salles and his friend Márcio Kelmanson decided to set up a project of home-made recording with the one objective of expressing themselves musically without barriers, labels and other people's opinions. The name of the project was La Dance Macabre. Márcio would take care of the grunts and drums while Pedro would take care of the rest. It was then that the a song named Ad Infinitum appeared, which some years later, would have the lyrics modified and retitled as The Crown Of Uncreation. In 1999, Márcio moved to England and Pedro wrote other three songs by himself, The Failed Saviour (that was never released), In Vain I Cry and She, The Lust. After they were recorded, all in his computer, Pedro decided to set up a band to execute these songs. As he was a bass player for many years and in this project he just wanted to "explore", he decided to take over the lead vocals and the guitars, and went in search of a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer and a keyboard player. After many unsuccessful attempts, the first formation rehearesed for the first time at the beginning of 2000. The members were Letícia Figueiredo on the keyboards, Marcus Feital on the guitars (today he is the official photographer of the band), Pedro "Tikinhu" on the drums and Raphæl G. (the one and only) on the bass guitar. Some rehearsals were made, but arround April, Pedro dissolved the band, just maintaining Raphæl G. in the band because he was the right person for the position, due to his great ability with the bass and his experimental vision that fit perfectly with the initial proposal of the project. By that time, the name Avec Tristesse had already appeared, based on the sad melodies that were heard in the songs, that were all made in a spontaneous manner, in order to naturally find a style, or better still, an identity for the band.
After some weeks, Nathan Thrall, a friend of a friend of Pedro I. Salles, entered (and never left) the band. As a trio, they enriched all the songs Pedro had composed until then, apart from Failed Saviour and adding a new one called Paean, in which Pedro swears to have dreamed the main riff before it was ever written. At the same time that two new members entered the band (Alexander Woden on the guitars and Bruno Campbell on the keyboards), Pedro and Nathan settled some recording dates with a studio. As the keyboard player and the guitarist had entered the band recently, hey didn't have time to learn or create songs, leaving almost all the keyboards and guitars for Pedro to record. Throughout the recording, some tunes were composed, for example De Sombre Amour Et Souffrance, were created and improvised during the recording sessions.
Close to the end of the recordings, arround the end of 2000, there was a general discussion among the owners of the studio. They then decided to close the studio and left the band with the unfinished material, divided in two different medias (ADAT and Cakewalk files) synchronized between themselves. After some difficult months, they found a studio that could synchronize those two medias. The band then finished the recordings and made a pre-mixing to try to arrange some record deal. Somber Music was interested in releasing their album, however, the band was still to run across with more problems. The first was the studio they were working with, that also closed because of internal problems, as always. Plus some months were lost until the band found a studio that passed the part that was in the computer to digital tape (ADAT), making it possible to continue the working process in any regular studio. Another problem was the financial one. Pedro, who was paying all the recording with his own salary, found himeself unemployed. With some savings and extra money collected from the only show made by the band until today, on April 21, 2001, they got to close some mixing dates with the studio FastForward, very famous in the metal scene, in the end of 2001. When the band got in touch yet again with Somber Music, they said that their schedule was full for one year and that it could not release the album at that time, but they presented the project to Hellion Records that identified themeselves with the band and provided the necessary financial help to close the mixing and to do the mastering. Because of musical differences, Bruno Campbell and Alexander Woden left the band.
