Presha Pack was a crew of rappers headed by Soul D. based in the region of Quebec City — with a couple members that were in Montreal.
In high school some of my interests included skateboarding and rap music.
By fate of luck — and because I was able to make beats, and even rap a little bit — I ended up joining the crew.
In 1995 we produced a demo tape — I made all the music at the home studio my dad had at the time.
I programmed the MIDI on a sequencer with hardware synths and drum machines; recorded it all to four-track cassette — this was copied to DAT — which we took and went to a professional studio to record our group vocals.
We self-released our demo tape — in a run of 50 copies.
We were booking our own shows — and at one point we were selling out clubs on the “Grande Allée.”
It was because of the Presha Pack I got the moniker “Geronimo tha Mad Eskimo,” and got my first chance to produce, record, and perform original music.
It got me digging for records in order to sample for beats — but also to DJ, since my Presha Pack connections would open my world up to that…
Soul D. ended up leaving to Africa, and while members of the collective continued making music and putting on events, the core collective kind of fell apart without his leadership.
Some of the people involved were able to continue performing and even releasing commercially distributed music and videos through their own projects.
I ended up taking a break from it all to do some post-secondary studies.
My interests in rap music kind of waned a bit, and I got more into experimental electronic music production and new sounds I could explore there.
Nonetheless, Presha Pack was where I began…
Up until then, I was pretty much just a dorky teenager from Frobisher Bay!