Scotty Warren - Guitarist, Composer, and Video Artist
Scotty Warren is an experimental guitarist, composer, and video artist based in Denton, Texas. Originally from Winfield, Kansas, he began playing guitar at age nine and formed his first band, Deep Structure, during high school. He went on to study music business at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, where he played in various jazz combos and big bands under the direction of Lisa Hittle. He also studied jazz guitar with David Lord, Loretta Ewing, and Kirk Scott, earning a bachelor's degree in music business from the university in 2009.
In 2009, Scotty relocated to Denton TX, where he formed The Last Great American Rock Band with drummer Brandon Young. The duo released two albums and toured in 2018. Currently, Scotty is the lead guitarist for the chiptune-inspired Mirage Music Club and is also the driving force behind the genre-defying project Freak Establishment. As the sole writer, producer, and director of Freak Establishment, he creates all the music, records the material, and produces surreal, visually distinctive music videos that accompany the releases.
Freak Establishment’s latest album, Retroflections, continues the project's exploration of themes such as nostalgia, dreams, duality, and the decay of lost forms. The album presents a more grounded, yet surreal take on the 1980s and is marked by a combination of guitar loops, synth programming, spoken word, and Squiddy's vocals. Its accompanying music videos, blending phone filter effects with iMovie-style creativity, have been described as surreal and psychedelic, evoking a sense of horror.
The upcoming Freak Establishment visual album, Michael's Space Opera, pushes creative boundaries even further. A genre-defying work that melds experimental film, music, and video art, it takes audiences on a journey through a surreal, time-bending universe. As its characters grapple with existential questions and confront cosmic forces, Michael’s Space Opera explores the strange, ever-shifting realities of the Freak Establishment universe.