Scroll Hole/Alex

“Scroll Hole”

I like short songs. I don’t like being addicted to the phone. If I’m going to be addicted to the phone I might as well make short songs about it. This is based on true, recurring events. This ditty tells the story of reaching for my phone to perform a simple task (tuning a guitar) and mindlessly getting lost scrolling instagram. I wrote the song in March 2024, finishing the recording and shot the video while staying in the guestroom of my friend and his mum’s house in the suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia. While they were off working I was in the dark with my face buried in a camera lens, experimenting with the video edits to pull off what I saw in my head. Watch the video here:

I’m reaching to do something quick and simple on my phone
Then suddenly
I get lost
In a hole as I scroll I have no control at all
I’m sinking
Precious fleeting
Moments of my life
That I’ll never get back
I can’t recall
A single thing that I was just looking at

I never close this app with more than
I had when I opened it

Where was I at
Oh that’s right
All I was trying to do was open up the tuner app

LISTEN

Every video, every recording and every day is a fresh experiment. From the album “March 2024” available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms. “March 2024” is a collection of songs that reflect my life and travels. Recorded across various states and continents, the sounds and images for the album cover a span of six years and 11,000 miles.
https://linktr.ee/ericprincessdragon

Alex

I will add some additional notes to fill in some details of the trip from Oahu onto Tassie. I will also take a detour to talk about my good friend Alex and some of our adventures around the globe.

I arrived in Australia on March 12, just two days before my birthday, beginning a one-year working holiday visa. I flew on a one-way ticket with more luggage and gear than I had ever traveled with before. I wanted to be ready for a whole range of possible gig/recording/photo/video scenarios and packed enough gear to perform as a solo act, take photos & videos in different scenarios, record myself or a full band, put on an impromptu hostel porch open mic and more. Between the guitar, backpack, and big suitcase, it was too much to comfortably lug around a city, on buses, trains, or the side of the road – too much even to easily stash at a hostel. I had planned to purchase a vehicle as soon as I arrived and continue my adventure into the unknown. The only step of the trip I had figured out was the very first: arrival in Adelaide and a stay with my longtime friend and travel buddy Alex.

Alex is a multi-talented fella and all around sweet heart. He is a photographer, actor, ASMR artist and after living and traveling around the world for years has settled back into his home in Adelaide working for VFX company Rising Sun Pictures.

We first met in the winter of 2013 when I was working in Granada, Spain at a hostel called Makuto. He came in as a guest while touring Europe and we hit it off, wandering the cobblestone city, sharing travel stories, and hiking out early one morning to catch the sunrise over La Alhambra.

I was nearing the end of my stint in Granada and nearly ready to head to Berlin for Christmas & New Years. As it turned out, Berlin was one of Alex’s next stops and our visits would overlap. Just a week or two later we met up to spend more quality time wandering, this time in the grittier urban setting of Berlin. One of the highlights from that visit was attending an event in the basement of a bookstore – a storytelling open mic where everyone was encouraged to get up and tell an improvised story on a particular theme. That night the theme was “family.”

We both joined the audience and told our stories. I spoke about my grandparents and what I knew of their migrations from Cuba & Mexico, of my paternal grandfather working in forced labor camps operated by the new Cuban government under Fidel Castro. I spoke of my maternal grandparents being robbed by the “coyotes” they hired to take them across the border and my mother eventually crossing into the US underneath the seat of a car as a child. And I spoke of my life and travels being a walk in the park in comparison to the experiences they endured.

After Berlin we went our separate ways, keeping in touch but living worlds away, both of us traveling regularly over those next years. Eventually, in 2016, Alex’s travels brought him to North America and he came to visit me in LA. I was living in San Bernardino County at a warehouse at the time – a condemned building which just a year or so later would be demolished without a trace, but at that time provided refuge for a large cast of artists, musicians, hippies, stoners, and weirdos. Me being one of the all-those-things. We went wandering around the area from the warehouse, my childhood home (Acaso) out to downtown LA where we drove past tent cities and looked over the skyline. Alex returned to the US once again in 2018 and our adventures continued around my new home in Oregon. Across over a decade we have met up on three continents in four countries.

Back to 2024: I felt like family coming to stay with Alex and his mum, an intelligent and hilarious woman from South Africa. We shared lots of interesting conversations and she took an active interest in helping me figure out my next move. When I first got the inkling to go to Tasmania, she was very encouraging, recounting the itinerary of her honeymoon trip around Tassie while I saved the locations of all her favorite places on the map. I remember just after that conversation, finding Frying Pan Studios while researching Tasmania and being overcome with a sense that I must go there and record. Tasmania was pulling me in.

I only stayed about a week in Adelaide, and Alex was working for much of that week, but we found time to do plenty of wandering around Adelaide and take a trip along the coast of South Australia, share meals with his family, catch some comedy at Adelaide Fringe and share plenty of d&m (deep and meaningful conversations) along the way. Here are some photos taken on film. I shot the photo of him, and he the photos of me.

Also within that week I managed to fit in an all nighter, staying up past sunrise working on the Scroll Hole video. The song was written just before I left for Australia, but I recorded it, shot the video and mixed/edited everything right there in Alex’s family home.

On March 20th, after a quality stay in Adelaide, I was off for Hobart.