Machine Girl
Cutting their teeth on the DIY circuit across North America, Machine Girl have quickly become known for their unpredictable and cathartic live shows, amassing a rabid following of club kids, punks and metal heads reveling in the bands amorphous blur between grindcore mosh pit and underground gabber rave. Alongside fellow New York artists Bonnie Baxter, Prison Religion and Deli Girls, Machine Girl spearhead a recent wave of DIY music culture existing on the borders between punk, noise, techno, and rap, with few, if any, belonging squarely to any one tradition. Sonically collapsing the borders between these genres,
Machine Girl’s music reflects the sensual overload of an omnipresent media in which public truth has become a prism of intersubjective realities and global tribalism no longer bound to a common fabric of facts or local cultural truths. It represents a postmodern world in which cultural points of reference have become universal, readily available to anyone at any time to be consumed, disconnected from their original meaning to be rearranged, culturally recharged and globally reconnected in ad lib fashion. In the duos music and live performances this unstable reality is not only being reflected but celebrated and thus pushed to its inevitable conclusion: horror, violence, surrealism, anxiety and chaos - all hyperactivated, peaking in the ego's death to thus clear the way for personal transcendence. To cleanse yourself, hit the reset button and ask: How to become a decent human being? What are the responsibilities that come with this kind of freedom? Are we victims or perpetrators? What can be done? Machine Girl’s most recent album, U-Void Synthesizer, was released in March 2020
Tinymixtapes. Sonically, Machine Girl represent the crisis of urban postmodernity: The false promise of organic creativity after gentrification, as artistic output is infused with anti-black violence; the horrific realization undergirding DIY culture that we are not only the victims of gentrification, but also complicit within it. “Necro Culture Vulture,” one of the album’s catchiest yet simultaneously most throttling cuts, centers on this antagonism, containing the heinous screeched vocal passages, “They built a condo on your tomb/ The earth is rotted to the root/ A marble corpse like sister moon/ They gentrified the hellscape, dude!”