Being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was around twenty-six (being honest) was a relief. I had always known. The way my brain worked was neither sustainable nor healthy. The professionals who help me think I suffered from childhood-onset schizophrenia and that I could almost function with it for whatever reason.
My stage name is Mason Andrew Freak, but everyone calls me Drew. I have lived in my car, abandoned trailers, and isolation. And all with the dream that it was for a purpose. With hope, God had a plan for me.
Yes, I’ve done it, just about. Okay, it’s been closer to a year and a half, a couple of those albums were EP’s, one was a single, etc., but I’ve done it, just about. Five more releases, and I’ll have recorded as much music as The Beatles.
The spherical ball flew flyingly through the damn autumn leaves like a nauseating plane that was too small and round to be in any way practical. But flew it did, having been propelled as it had by Adam’s fearsome left foot. The kids who lived in Miyashita-koen still tell stories about that left foot and use words like “fearsome” and “left”. I stood vertical in the goalmouth, a moth to the flame, a fish in a barrel, a horse to water, and did what any decent Thursday morning goalkeeper is obliged to do: I saved the potential goal so hard and crushed the dreams of the understandably confident Adam.
Life during the lockdown and one finds oneself turning to the online world for community, support, and solace. The pandemic is a global phenomenon after all, and it would seem by the swell of blogs and posts on social media that millions of people the world over are doing the same. Social media explodes with information, disinformation, misinformation, distraction, and instruction.
One of the most shared posts by the online artistic community tells me ‘use the pandemic and the new reality to write that song, that novel, that screenplay you’ve always wanted to’ but this merely serves to impose a feeling of guilt -after all learning to adapt to the restrictions is difficult enough without the added pressure of trying to summon the muse and create new music.
What if I have no new ideas at my immediate disposal to inspire new tunes or fresh ideas to share with other musicians, let alone an audience?
My short 4 track EP, “2020”, first took form before the year it’s named after before all of this insanity took over. I often think it’s best to leave a song’s meaning up to the interpretation of the listener. But, if there were an outlet to air out my thoughts of my songs, it would be here. So I’ll go through each track in the lineage of which they’re recorded and break them down.
If there is one aspect of music that is underrated, it is the storytelling and imagination it inspires. I have been infatuated by those qualities since I was four years old, and I have never stopped telling stories through music.
The album costs 3 euro, but took 18 years to make, of course, not continuous 18 years, but I wouldn’t record such music without living my life as I did since 2002 when I started recording cassette tapes with my friend in a high rise block in Poznań, Poland. The block’s address was 93-105. So, now you all know what „planet 93-105” means. And high rise blocks are really like separate planets, at least in Poland…
And cassettes are beautiful items, surviving years and owners, and „93-105” is now not only my block’s address, an imaginary planet, and album title, but also a beautiful cassette released with Illuminated Paths, USA, and this full circle of space and tapes, and my life April-July 2020 is what this story is all about a sound story. A sound story best experienced on cassette.
So go grab a copy of „93-105”, and feel like it’s 2002 in a Poznań, Poland high rise block, or elsewhere in the galaxy, wherever imagination takes you… this cassette is yours, not mine, now. And 18 years are gone, but it feels like light years…
My name is Jeannie Constance Guerrilla, and I am writing this from the basement of a sort of safe house, I suppose you’d call it, in a sleepy and disintegrating Australian town. The heater here doesn’t work very well. It’s unbearably loud. A few minutes after turning it on, it heats the metal of the grille to the point that it resonates at the same frequency as the spinning fan inside, and the whole thing rattles like a milk truck. Sometimes switching the fan between its two speeds quiets it down a bit, but it seems to have found an equilibrium of density. Now it rattles no matter what I do.
