Songs helped artist articulate the abstract

Songs helped artist articulate the abstract. Parkdale musician Mary Cobham's sophomore album, Mazeway Resynthesis, uses music and lyrics to illustrate her own experience undergoing a process of the same name. Staff photo/ERIN HATFIELD

Mazeway Resynthesis, Cobham's second album, uses music and lyrics to illustrate her own experience undergoing a process of the same name.

"The bulk of the songs were written in 2006 during a really intense time in my life," Cobham said. "They were written while I was undergoing what is called Mazeway Resynthesis."

Cobham explained, as she understands it, Mazeway Resynthesis is a psychological and spiritual process by which individuals reorganize their values, ethical codes and their understandings of how they fit into the world. It usually begins when a person's ethics and values fail them.

"We have certain notions about the world and we have certain moral codes that keep us functioning in the world - reasons to wake up in the morning," she explained. "But sometimes if that reason is removed, or the philosophy that we go by, suddenly stops making sense we can no longer function in the world."

For Cobham, it was a person leaving her life, but also notions and morals that were starting to not make sense to her anymore.

Symptoms of Mazeway Resynthesis, Cobham said, are similar to schizophrenia and there can be psychotic episodes, delusions, confusion and isolation.

"I had read about it and I realized that this was what I had been going through," Cobham said. "It is all about finding a new foundation upon which you can function in the world and upon which you can feel like you belong again."

She used meditation, saw a psychotherapist, attended a grief group, exercised and read to help her through the experience.

"Music helped, too, as a type of therapy," she said. "These songs came out as a way of helping me articulate an abstract process."

Cobham lives at Queen and Lansdowne and grew up in Victoria, B.C. At 18, she went to school in Halifax, N.S., which is where she started playing music. She moved to Toronto in 2007 and had been living in Parkdale for the past two years. She moved to the area largely because it was affordable, but since then has taken great comfort in her Tibetan neighbours.

Parkdale is home to Canada's largest concentration of Tibetan, often Buddhist, people.

She practices Shambhala Buddhism, which she started doing while living in Halifax, around the same time she started recording Mazeway Resynthesis.

"It helped me to quiet my mind and to understand how it helps not to focus on any moment except for the now and being present," she said. "That was incredibly helpful in keeping me stable."

She recorded the album slowly, over the course of five years on an almost $0 budget. Mazeway Resynthesis is a solo album, but Cobham is also in a number of bands. She plays guitar, bass and drums in addition to singing.

"I am a totally self-taught musician and my training is completely experiential," Cobham said. "I have a natural musical sense and I learned everything I know from joining bands and just figuring it out."

Her second disc is largely a conceptual album, but where this one addresses a relatively serious topic, the first one was comedy.

"It was a whole album about Jay Ferguson from Sloan," she said. "It was called Songs in the Key of Jay and it was literally all about him because I had a huge crush on him."

The album is available digitally on bandcamp.com and iTunes, among other online sites.