Jenny Hickinbotham on East to West with Fight, Flight, Freeze

East to West with Fight, Flight, Freeze charts an intercontinental journey by Jenny Hickinbotham, a totally singular emerging Australian voice in the interstice of songwriting and freeform improvised music.

Charting a single cross-Nullarbor journey in a Honda CRV, the songs vividly explore the everyday joys and troubles of the artist’s life on the road.

An interdisciplinary artist, Jenny’s groundbreaking work explores her own lived experience of schizophrenia, she says “I really want to challenge the notion that ‘hearing voices’ is an illness, needing to be controlled, eradicated and sedated into oblivion, thereby reducing the person’s lived experience to denial and inner pain, forcing the person to live on/feed on that internal pain for the rest of their lives, unable to speak their truth or tell their story.

“My work pushes back against all this. It is a cathartic expression of exploratory story-telling, and in itself a form of recovery.”

On the record, Jenny’s songs are performed with a wide variety of musicians, including internationally celebrated experimental artists like James Rushford, Dale Gorfinkel and Joel Stern, and local artists from the indie and experimental music scene Annika Moses (Nika Mo, Great Statue) and Jane Stark, they improvise alongside Jenny, bending around the rhythms of her powerful words.

Following the release of her record Jenny pulled over and took a call from Pam Boland to talk about the journey central to it’s creation.

East to West with Fight, Flight, Freeze is out now via local exploratory music label Tone List.