“Panic diaries” is what happens when you try to make something out of a nervous system in disrepair. It’s not quite autobiographical, not quite documentary, not quite fictional, and not particularly interested in the difference. The piece moves through panic in its quieter forms. The kind you can mostly hide in public, the kind that just slightly interrupts your ability to function, walk, eat, send an email, but also fills you with crippling existential dread.
There’s no grand arc or resolution. Just the persistence of sensation, the awkwardness of describing it, and the increasingly self-conscious compulsion to turn it into something performable.
It isn’t trying to fix anything. It doesn’t ask for empathy or promise catharsis. It’s just one person turning experience – his own and others’ – into form, and hoping that if it’s specific enough, it might resonate.
At its core, “Panic diaries” is a small experiment in sitting with discomfort. In trying not to resolve it too quickly. And maybe in figuring out how much you can say out loud before it becomes a bit much.

CALL FOR TEXT SUBMISSIONS

The project

I’m a composer currently developing a major intermedial piece set for 4 musicians, video (with processed audio), and cassette player. The working title is “Panic diaries”.

The work explores the nature of panic disorder. Something I’ve lived with, mostly recovered from, and occasionally backslid into. It deals with the experience of panic attacks, anxiety, corroding self-worth, and much more.

There’s not a linear narrative, but there is a set of monologues of my own making (the cassette tapes) with an emotional, conceptual and formal arc.

What I’m looking for

In addition to my own material, I want to invite people online, friends, and anyone interested, to send in short personal texts. These will become part of the video layer.

I’m looking for short texts (50-1000 characters; longer ones may be excerpted) about your experience with panic, anxiety, or adjacent feelings.

They can be journal-like entries, poetic fragments, raw recollections of a specific moment, pure rage, desperation, clinical descriptions. Whatever feels real to you. The point isn’t polish. It’s presence.

Why

Partly it’s a way to ease up on the navel-gazing. To provide context. To open up other perspectives and narratives. And not in the least to destabilize the authority of my monologue voice.

Yes, it’s also a defense mechanism. Trying to shield myself from the narcissism inherent in this endeavor with other people’s words. But more than that, it’s about building a small archive of experience. Not a support group, not a collective. Just a fragile, scattered kind of sense of community.

When I first developed panic disorder, reading other people’s posts on r/panicdisorder, and sometimes asking questions, was incredibly important to me. This project owes a lot to that.

However, while this work deals with panic disorder, anxiety, and corroding self-worth, it also deals with what it means to make art out of those experiences. Especially when using other people’s innermost thoughts.

That question doesn’t stay in the background. As the piece unfolds, it becomes more central. The work starts circling around itself, picking at its own framing. My presence as composer becomes increasingly central – partly because I try to offset it, and partly because I fail to.

But this isn’t just intended as intellectual masturbation. For me, it is a way to embody anxiety in the inner workings of the piece itself. In how it’s structured, how it presents material, and how it struggles with its own legitimacy. In some sense, the piece itself will be having an anxiety spiral about making art about anxiety.

If you submit something, I think it’s only fair you know that this tension is part of what you’re contributing to. It won’t be resolved. It’s a friction the work sits with.

Where your texts go

The texts will become part of a video layer built around footage of a 90s semi-digital typewriter. You can enter texts into a databank and have the typewriter type them out itself. It has this relentless, mechanical, pummeling quality.

The audio from that footage is processed into hyper-digital music. Sometimes aggressive noise, sometimes more ambient or fractured, depending on the tone of the text. There are glitch aesthetics (mosh effects, broken buffering). The anachronism is intentional, no VHS glitch effects here.

Texts are never altered in content. If they’re longer than 1000 characters, they may be excerpted, which is made clear in the form. Note: line breaks and paragraph breaks may be altered, unless clearly part of the texts’ expressive mode, for legibility in footage.

Even though the words are left untouched, the presentation and musical framing inevitably recontextualize them.

How to submit

There’s info on data protection, copyright, and how the material is used in the form. But feel free to reach out if you have questions.

Submissions can be completely anonymous or pseudonymous. They can include an email, to be notified about the finished work, or not.

Submission form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc81aTTngSRqhpun2Ky4dfUqofqXhlviJG2rKTs7UWMtwI7lw/viewform?usp=dialog

A bit more context

When making such a big ask, it seems only fair that I share something myself.

Here are a few of the lighter monologues:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UwdfAOmJ4pgVVtzCae4mlMhGVOL94bJ1rz2tG5ykcyE/edit?usp=sharing

Note that the dry, darkly comedic tone will crack under its own weight at times. That there will be vulnerable moments, awful moments, and moments of spiraling with the ethical crux of making art out of these types of materials. 

Ethical dimension

There’s an inherent precariousness in making art about suffering. I won’t try to resolve that here, but it will remain central to the piece. A constant friction, leading toward a kind of artistic collapse.

This isn’t about making trauma porn. It’s about sitting with discomfort and resisting the urge to tidy it up. I’m not offering catharsis. The work leans into its own breakdown – ethically, emotionally, aesthetically.

There’s a power imbalance here that I want to make visible. I’m the one composing. I’m the one shaping a formal arc with cultivated monologues – texts I’ve spent a long time refining, that will be spoken out loud (albeit on cassette tapes). In contrast, the submitted texts are raw, fragmentary, and machine-written: they appear typed out, relentlessly. I choose the order. The contrast is not neutral. It exposes something about authorship, distance, and vulnerability.

Finally, depending on the number of submissions, there may or not be a need to somehow curate which is included and which is not, although I will make every effort to include every submission. Should the case be that I cannot, I will rely on random chance to help me select submissions.

This asymmetry isn’t accidental. It’s part of the work. The whole thing is trying – and possibly failing – to destabilize my voice, to unseat the illusion of control. It’s a way to let other experiences interrupt mine, to create a fragile, scattered kind of sense of community, even if only temporarily. But even this is with me at the helm. This anxiety about working with these materials will permeate the work. Hopefully making something worthwhile in the process.

Compensation

There’s no payment, not due to budget constraints, but because I find it ethically weird. I don’t want to treat these texts as commodities (even though the work is partly about that dynamic too). If you are in Copenhagen in November, when the work premieres, you are of course invited to the premiere. If you do not connect an email to your submission (because you don’t want it tied to one individual text), you can simply send an email to info@frejwedlund.se, say you submitted a text, and ask to be put on a guest list for the premiere when it’s time.

And if you’re a composer and ever need engraving feedback, I’d be happy to take a look. I work for a bunch of major publishers on everything from Bach and Rachmaninoff to piles of new music.

Also, if you’re ever in Copenhagen, I’d love to buy you a beer.