200 Words: GRID VICTIM
(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)
GRID VICTIM - Grid Victim cassette (Unifactor)
The air-popping synth constructions of Grid Victim don’t necessarily sound futuristic. But they feel so simultaneously of the past and that present that it’s as if they create an alternative future where time is not really linear any more. The music itself certainly is linear though: everything on the first tape by this anonymous Ohio denizen moves forward continually, such that even when Grid Victim is simply grinding out a great loop it feels more like climbing stairs that running on a treadmill.
Or maybe it feels like climbing a treadmill of stairs? From track to track, Grid Victim traces many similar paths yet somehow conjures wildly different moods. These include ambient dreaminess, pulsing agitation, cycling hypnosis, absurdist squiggling, and a bunch more things that I can’t capture in two-word descriptions. It’s fun to pick through each tune and dissect how exactly Grid Victim crafts such grand effects from such simple tools. But what remains at the end of these circular musical rides - or is it the beginning? – is a sense that you’ve been picked up somewhere and dropped off somewhere else, even though both your starting point and your destination look and sound oddly like the same thing.
– Marc Masters
GRID VICTIM on Grid Victim
A Grid Victim may suffer from consumption of High Fructose Corn Syrup or from working at a retail outlet. One whom is machined in an invisible factory the day they are born. It’s a sad life for one unwillingly brainwashed and primed for a life of slavery, born to consume and produce items and/or services of value. Each individual is slowly and slyly coerced into dying from the moment they come into being; all surfaces toxic, all sustenance cancerous. Harm inflicted by the Grid can be remedied by triple bypass open heart surgery or by using emotional compression devices to frack the pineal gland like consuming Celexa or six Dogfish Head Ales (all which generate Revenue). If the system works, one will live a life tranquilized and useless, spirit hijacked and nirvana censored.
By creating arbitrary systems of value, a Grid Victim is programmed to learn, live and die by the various tiers of Worth by ceding invaluable Life Energy for the fallacy of security and status. Rewards for energy sacrifice include escape options like Taco Bell and Pornhub. A reward for enduring life on the grid is God. Grid Victim is actually just a play on words
Grid Victim is out now on Unifactor. Buy it here.