Daniel Schaumann

In May 2010 I got myself a busking licence and decided to hit the streets of Sydney to get back into the swing of all things musical - and also to try an earn a little bit of tax-free cash on the side, of course ;)  After only a few sessions I've come to realise it's an enjoyable, mind-opening pasttime, perfect for getting my performance chops back up to scratch, which is what I need if I want to start gigging again after I release my upcoming album.  Yet on the other hand it's also highly challenging and disconcerting, especially considering I used to play music professionally, where for much less effort, I earned about a hundred times more than what I've banked out on the streets!

So here, I have decided to notate my experiences as I foray into the world of amateur, cover-and-original-singing, acoustic-guitar-playing street performance.  Come with me and find out about the songs I sing, the people I meet, the enjoyment, the disappointment, and the coinage - or should I say, the lack thereof!

For the past few weeks I've been up visiting my home territory of north Queensland, holidaying around the place and showing the sights to my dear friend, Jess from London.  My lovely mother bestowed a gift upon me in the form of a digital SLR camera, so I thought that throughout our travels - just for something different - I'd keep a photo journal of all the interesting toilet-related paraphernalia that we came across.  This idea was inspired by another one of my London friends, Rhiannon, who appreciates a good dunny when she sees one!

And so I begin my journal in the small township of Tully, about half way between my home in Bluewater and the tropical city of Cairns, where I would meet up with Jess. Tully is known for being one of the wettest towns in Australia, and an eight metre statue of a gumboot was erected at the entrance to the town to signify their highest annual rainfall. It's also the UFO capital of Australia, with more sightings occurring here than anywhere else.

I stopped at the public toilets located just behind some picturesque gardens on the main street of town, Butler St. I was particularly impressed with the art deco tiling and the dislodged floor tile by the wall:

*you can download a demo recording of this song here

You don’t know intuition like the dark don’t know the sun
And what’s not known is fabricated firm
Trust my premonition of the hours having won
And settling in

A dormant revolution lies awaiting birth to come
But what’s not known is still fabricated firm
An evil eye, a parasite, my powers are overcome
And settling in

Lacking the days of karma
You bought the wine instead
How can you be happy with that cloud above your bed?

To solemnize you is to select scattering samples of sarcasm simulcast straight to the starving stomach of Satan

To contemplate you is to conjure crumbling cues of cold, cutting comments conveyed by your callous, corrupt crevice

To respect you is to reap repeated reproaching rewards of ridiculous, regretful remote restrictions

To enjoy you is to encase an extinct, enslaving essense of experiential execration

To worship you is to wonder why weary, wounded wolves whimper at the wasting, weakening worthiness

To yearn for you is to yowl at the yolkish yesteryear of your yellow, youthsome yield

To ogle you is to observe optic omission of overwhelming ornamental offerings

To upholster your uprising, unsentimental, unsweetened, unreasonable, unwilling, unflavoured, unsealed, unpitying, underexposed, unseductive, unoccupied, unadulterated, unauthorised, uncurable, unfaithful universe of ubiquitous unsymmetricality is to uglify

This morning, for the second morning in a row, I rose from my slumber unusually early. Yesterday it was 2:45am for the ANZAC day dawn service, but today's wake-up alarm was a slightly more reasonable 5:45am. Laugh at me all you will, my friends, but I had all intentions of heading on down to Circular Quay along with 5,000 screaming teenage girls in order to catch the Justin Bieber gig that Sunrise was putting on.

Just before I was due to leave home though, I heeded to the fact that the riot police had cancelled the event due to the overly raucous crowd refusing to abide by safety announcements, resulting in a number of tween girls getting crushed. I was quite disappointed - not at the ironic hilarity that fans had flown across the country for this moment only to screw it up for themselves - but because I genuinely did want to see him perform. I'd heard so much about him via Twitter and wanted to see for myself what the hype was about.

Which left me in a debacle as to what to do with my day seeing as it was so early and I was already wide awake. So I randomly decided to hop on the next train to Newcastle!

The first thing that struck me was the painfully slow three & a half hour train journey just to travel 160km. If I was still living in London I could have passed through three whole countries in that time, for heavens sake! A lot of the scenery was pretty spectacular though, especially around the Hawkesbury River area, so I couldn't really complain.

Approaching the city though, the train line ran past the ugly rears of run-down, graffitied old shops & buildings, and my first impression as the locomotive pulled into my destination was as follows:

In August of last year I took a trip to Amsterdam for a long weekend:

I ate a muffin and I saw some pretty colours:

A few weeks ago the 7PM project ran a competition to win a Rhianna CD, and all you had to do to enter was leave a message on their forum describing what your favourite thing is that starts with R, and why? I ended up writing a mini-essay as my competition entry so I thought I might as well post it here and tell the world why my favourite thing that starts with R is Rome!

I went to Italy in July of 2009 for a weeklong holiday, incorporating a few days in Rome, a daytrip south to Naples and Pompeii, then up north through Pisa, Florence, Venice and finally to my mum's birthplace of Trieste.

I have many fond travel memories of my European adventures, but one of the fondest of them all was the evening I went to a small and quite hard-to-find pizzeria in central Rome called da Baffetto. It was just around the corner from Piazza Navona, and it was suggested by my trusty guidebook to be the best pizzeria in the city. It actually looked quite dodgy and run-down from the outside - you couldn't see inside the windows because they were blocked out with newspaper - but the smell was heavenly, and there was a substantial lineup of people waiting outside the front door, so I decided to give it a go.

It took about 10 minutes and an encounter with a cranky Italian waiter to reach the front of the queue, and when I finally stepped through the doors I found the place was so packed that they had to sit me at the same table as someone else - a happy & smiling girl who looked to be in her late 20's and was still perusing the menu. We got chatting and established that English was our common language. She was an actress from Spain and had a few days in Rome for business, and I soon found out the reason she was at this restaurant was because she had the same guidebook as me (albeit in Spanish of course). She too wanted to experience the best pizza in the city!

*you can download a demo recording of this song here

This bag of hearts, this tender vale
We'll pick the berries as the mud gets in our nails
And it's no barrier, as we hold hands when we walk home
And by the bed I brush you down as we brush up our own

We'll paint your four grey walls of gold
Evade this frozen world and journey far away from all we know

Hypnagogia
noun
a term for the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, characterized by dreamlike auditory, visual, or tactile sensations when half-awake.

Many years ago, I remember waking up one morning, checking the time on my phone, and being surprised to see six weird, random words on the screen which I must have written as a note while I was asleep: "I need to talk to Gentor."

What on earth...? It made no sense at all. I didn't know anyone or anything called Gentor and I certainly didn't want to speak to him/her/it. Eventually I summoned a vague memory of hearing this sentence in my head as I was trying to fall asleep the previous night, and for whatever reason I obviously must have woken up and recorded the words onto my phone.

Over the following few weeks I did some research and found that this was caused by a phenomenon known as the hypnagogic state. This is the watery, dreamlike state of consciousness your mind turns to as you are in the process of falling asleep, but not quite fully asleep just yet. During this process you may experience the randomest of images, shapes, colours, sounds, sensastions, hallucinations, or seemingly in my case, words, filtering through into the half-conscious eye of your mind - not quite with the "fullness" experienced from an actual dream, but moreso in brief bursts, and often more lucid and memorable.

Anyway, recently I've noticed these hypnagogic words have been coming to me two or three times a week, so over the past two months I've written down every one that my mind has graced me with! I've literally been going to bed at night, closing my eyes, drifting off, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere I'll be hit by this short, whacked-out, extremely random sentence or question that makes barely any sense at all, sometimes even including completely made-up words that have no meaning whatsoever. I wake up and write them down as soon as this happens - and now, for your enoyment, transcribed below is this unpredictable and peculiar insight into my subconscious night-time mentality:

I first had a chicken when I was twelve.

They get all desperate to find out.

You don't want to suit me up to be a bear?

In the process of renewing and travelling, did you go travelling?

Over the coming few months I’m going to lay down some demos of a few new songs on my trusty home recording desk, and then in the latter part of the year I’ll be heading back into the studio to record an album. I’ve uploaded a couple of the demos for you to listen to – I’d love to hear what you think about them!

DEMO #1: The Tree That Took My Love

- 7th February, 2010

I wrote this about a tree in London that I was sat under as her heartbreaking words shattered my life to pieces.

Click here to listen to the demo MP3

Click here to see the lyrics

DEMO #2: A Thousand Days Beneath The Sun

-27th February, 2010

Written & recorded in one evening, this song is about the choice between spending time with the one you love either in the full bloom of the sun, or in an ebb shadowed by the moon’s darnkess…

Click here to listen to the demo MP3

Click here to see the lyrics

DEMO #3: Days Of Karma

-23rd May, 2010

What goes around comes around. Except for some people who’s karma seems to be lacking…

Click here to listen to the demo MP3

Click here to see the lyrics

Youtube recordings: