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FREAK SCENE was our project to keep us sane over the 'lockdown winter' of 2020/21...

It started with us deciding it would be fun to make a record together... And then by chance Raphael hearing Sonic Youth's 'Teen Age Riot' again for the first time in many years, and saying, "this is such a great song", and then picking up his little orange 1/2 size Spanish guitar and saying, "It's basically a bossa nova...", and Maree adding a harmony...

Which began a journey through the noisy guitar records that Raphael loved as a teenager in London, but which Maree, right through the other side of the Earth in NZ back then, had never heard... Digging out gems from the 7" singles boxes by Dinosaur Jr., My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, Lemonheads, Teenage Fanclub, Pavement & the Pale Saints...

We wanted to find musical richness beneath the grunge, of which there was plenty... All that noise is musical richness itself of course...those saturated guitars are so beautiful... But what's left if you take them away?

So we assembled a set of songs - all from that magical, silvery age of '88-'92 - and set about turning them inside out...

We made a rule that we could only use what we had in our little flat (which luckily includes recording equipment and quite a lot of musical instruments), and we would do everything ourselves... And another rule that we'd only use acoustic instruments (to make our versions as different as possible), which we only cheated on with the bass guitar (which is semi-acoustic, ok?) and a sprinkle of Clavinet on 'Teen Age Riot' (which is also semi-acoustic, so don't get pedantic!)...

Mika, who was 5 years old then, established herself as our manager, insisted on choosing the band name, and added a couple of essential vocal contributions of her own...

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