Echokinesis Icy Grape

April 7, 2021 marks 25 years since my friend Tony died. So I sat down with some of Tony's best friends from his last years — some of my best friends to this day — to talk about Tony again and tell Tony stories and try and understand better what happened back in 1996 and why has Tony had such an effect on some of our lives all these years later.
👉🏾 Listen to Part 1 here: echokinesis.com
🙏🏽 Thank you to the participants, my friends: Thea Anderson, Brenda Baletti, David Goldberg, Brent Kanbayashi, Jonah Moran, and Rhasaan Orange.
🎹 Music by Tyler Cash. Thanks to Eric Freidenberg for editorial guidance and Luz Fleming for expert additional editing, mixing, recording, and technical guidance.
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode includes discussions of drug use, mental illness, and some language that may not be appropriate for kids. Listener discretion is advised.
🤘🏽 TF3 for life


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I was 21, my friend Tony died. It was a tough, sad decline and his friends like me witnessed it up close. Or at least I thought we were up close, because what's clear to me now, is that none of us really understood what Tony was going through. And then, suddenly, he was gone. For me and some of his other friends, losing Tony at age 21 was a major, defining moment in our lives, and all these years later, he's still an important figure in what made us who we are.
We all have our own memories of Tony, and what I found working on this piece was: we remember some of the same things differently. And we all look back at our time with Tony *through the lens* of our *own* lives, so we all look back at *Tony* differently. I guess that's to be expected, but working on this put that into focus for me.
April 7, 2021 marks 25 years since all that happened. So I sat down with some of Tony's friends to talk about him again and to tell some Tony stories and to try and understand better what happened back in 1996 and why has Tony loomed large in our lives all these years.
👉🏾 Listen to Part 2 here: echokinesis.com
🙏🏽 Thank you to the participants, my friends: Thea Anderson, Brenda Baletti, David Goldberg, Brent Kanbayashi, Jonah Moran, and Rhasaan Orange.
🎹 Music by Tyler Cash. Thanks to Eric Freidenberg for editorial advice and Luz Fleming for expert additional editing, mixing, recording, and technical guidance. Cover photo by Max Osterweis.
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode includes discussions of drug use, mental illness, and some language that may not be appropriate for kids. Listener discretion is advised.



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rhasaan recounts a dreamlike tale from a previous life, of young adults living in New York City in the late 90s awash in drinking, drugs, and VHS mixtapes, and a curious evening in the West Village with a strange visit from a police officer. 
CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains explicit language and adult situations. Listener discretion is advised.
🥋🇧🇷 Learn more about Rhasaan Orange at RenatoLaranja.com

[TRANSCRIPT]
Well, you know, now coming to think about it, I'll never fucking forget this. And this is a story.
We’re talking about stories? I remember, still to this day, this shit seems like something that I made up or something that I dreamt, but I know it happened. And I can't place all the fucking people that were with us. But there are people who could vouch for this, who can corroborate this story.
You remember that place that he was living? It was in the West Village and right up the street there was a public pool. You remember it was like a classic New York apartment, you know, with the fire escape on the outside.
So we would, a lot of times, you remember these days, like a lot of times we would end up at that place, you know, drinking and smoking, watching stupid ass movies or whatever. I remember I would bring, I don't know if you remember, but I would always bring mix tapes I would make at home, like kind of pre-Internet, you know, like Instagram or whatever, like, my way of like sharing videos and shit with people was like, I would keep a VHS tape in the VCR and record Video Music Box for videos that would come on or like some weird shit on public access or whatever. And I would make, like, mix tapes of just weird shit and videos and what have you. I would bring those over and watch that kinda shit.
But anyway, so we're all there. And this is at the point where it hasn't gotten to the real, real bad. But it was at a time when he was frequently doing coke and shit. And, you know, it was me, him, I could be mistaken but I believe Jonah was there. And Brenda was there and maybe…who was the roommate at that time? Damn. The Italian chick. This is embarrassing because I should know her name. In any case, maybe we edit this part out.
But anyway. Ok, so we were all in there and just smoking weed and whatever. But also people are doing coke, you know, and I don’t remember if I was doing it, but I don't think so because I wasn't the type—I would do coke, honestly, when I was really drunk. I wouldn’t do it just kind of casually at like, 8:00 at night.
So that was at a time when I was trying to get all like diesel. I was maybe 19 or 20, something like that. I was trying to get all diesel and so I was on the fire escape doing my pull-ups and, you know, just jeans, no shirt kind of deal. So I'm doing that and kind of coming back in, having a drink, going back out and smoking a joint and whatever.
By this time, everybody is just f****d up and, I mean like, I'm high as the moon and I'm just real high mostly just on weed, just high as fuck, mind you. There's coke, you know, there's CDs with like a razor on it. And, you know, nobody's twenty-one. So there's drinks and the place is all hot boxed with weed. And we're all sitting there watching some shit on TV, I can’t remember what it was.
And then, just as if he belongs, like he was just part of the party, you see a fully clothed beat cop just ease through the window, the open window, from the fire escape, into the room. Just as if he had just stepped out for a cigarette. Some white dude. And we were fucking stunned.
I mean, it was a kind of thing where I look over and I think to myself, “Am I even seeing this?” You know, it was surreal. I was like, this can't be happening. And he just came in and we look like, I mean, we didn't even jump. It was like, we look in slow motion… like, “huh? Is he even here? Are we hallucinating this shit?”
And then he proceeds to tell us that he's gotten calls in the neighborhood about a fucking, a Puerto Ri

During a late-night drive on a snowy, rural highway in far Northern California when everyone else is asleep, Liz has a strange and unexplained sighting of some kind of unidentifiable animal.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan describes an unsettling condition that causes his sleeping mind to mix the waking world and the dreaming world to create some singularly terrifying visions in the night.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Several members of a family across three generations discuss their sometimes conflicting memories of a particular incident. That's a lot of what memory is. You don't know how much of it is the stories being retold in slightly changed versions or the original fact. It's amazing how memory plays tricks.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.