Freya Hollick- 2007 (When Madness Overcame the Deer)

Freya Hollick is a singer/songwriter from Ballarat and occasionally Melbourne, Victoria. Over the past few years she has been pumping gem after gem from her humble home studio while slowly building a dedicated fan base via word of mouth. With no official releases to her name, the quality of demo material is only tempting listeners of what is to come.

The deceptively simple guitar echoes throughout a quiet house, never to clustered, never to sparse. Coupled with a ghostly, spider webbed voice sometimes clear like the day and other times intangible as smoke rising from a still room the musical beauty resonates just long enough to tantalise. Around this floorboards creak, ceilings crack and distant voices bounce through hallways and living rooms. These two elements are nothing without direction and it is the position as a story teller that solidifies them. With unassuming charm Freya takes us through lo-fi stories of love lost, childhood fantasies, forests and the quiet lives of animals. For me it is the theme of challenging childhood innocence that is most enduring. Costume follows the story of how family turmoil can affect a child. When scared he is cloaked in ‘costume’, a blanket of security that protects him from the outside world. It is this idea of emotional protection from something as simple as clothing that reminds me of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Before the sobering realities of the world are yet to take hold escapism for a child can be as simple as wearing their favourite costume and turning in to somebody else. Ophelia also gives the impression of life through the perception of a child. The song follows an obsessive love story of a boy infatuated by a woman/a girl/a dream. This is an omniscient love from the perception of the child. Ophelia is commanding, controlling but it seems this way only because of his innocence and ignorance. It is not necessary to anthropomorphise Ophelia, she is an emotion, a state of mind, uncontrollable anomaly that is typical within the blamelessness of childhood.

In a live context Hollick is an incarnation of her songs. I was privileged enough to watch her play at Glitch Bar, one of her first gigs in Melbourne, where she presented material she had written over the past 2 years. It was something really special. Here are 8 demos from 2007 which is but the start of her back catalogue.

http://rapidshare.com/files/91678957/2007.rar.html