How I Joined Machine Girl (Patreon)

Bonjour les psychopathes!

Now that we're all settled in, please gather round for a major lore drop. Hopefully this will answer some consistent questions I see posed online to this day such as, "Who tf is Lucy?" "I thought MG was a duo?" and my personal favorite "Who is that other dude???"

It all began in 2014. For some context, in 2014 it was still kind of weird and alternative to be online all the time. Social media hadn't really taken hold quite yet, and anyone who was very online congregated on Tumblr and small (often private) Facebook groups, aptly known as "weird Facebook." Post-Myspace, pre-evil Spotify, and at the tail end of popular music blogs, SoundCloud became the center of the underground electronic music universe. It really was an interesting and exciting time (which included the genesis of PC Music). Matthew and I ran in those same early 2010s internet music circles as young producers. I can distinctly remember listening to WLFGRL when it first came out on the Dred Collective (now defunct netlabel) blog with one of my close friends at the time.

An internet friend of mine based in Chicago, Ethan Jared, suggested I submit a track to a new compilation he was helping put together. On July 9th 2014, Anime Club Vol 2 was released with my track "Moon Stone" in the promotional materials alongside Machine Girl's "Night Saber." This would create the initial connection between Matt and I, which remained a very casual internet friendship for many years. There was a kindred musical spirit from the beginning because we both made heavily VGM OST-inspired dance music (which was not at all common at the time, at least in our respective musical lane). An early Soundcloud convo I was able to unearth:

The unreleased track in question "Human Enhance" that was almost on Phantasy Trax:

Not exactly sure why it never happened, but probably because I was (and still am to some degree) shy to release music publicly. I'm working on changing that very soon, especially because i'm proud of how my skills have developed since then.

Years passed, I moved back home to Florida, Matt and Sean moved to and fro Pittsburg (where they made The Ugly Art). For some reason there always seemed to be a missed connection. Until...the great year of Our Lord 2020...

Once again, we found each other inhabiting the same deep internet chasms, this time on a Discord server. Now with ample spare time, we had some proper conversations about our lives, niche producers we missed from the earlier SoundCloud era, and just music in general. I told Matt I played guitar and kicked around in stupid (positive) little punk bands, and it was then we realized we shared a lot of the same band influences (Hella, Zach Hill, Melt-Banana, Devo, Mark Winter, Behold The Arctopus, just to name a few). Matt talked about eventually adding guitar to MG, something I always wished the band would do. We also had a couple of MTG Online matches where I was absolutely trounced :c In any case, the seed was planted that perhaps one day I could join the band.

Flashback to 2018 when I was still living in NYC, I befriended Mithril and Dani Rev who were the proprietors of Hurt-free Network, an online rave party that took place on IMVU. For the uninitiated, IMVU is a virtual avatar based world that charmingly has not changed much since the mid-aughts. At the time, virtual concerts were generally unheard of. Until 2020 when the world needed us most. We had already created the infrastructure required to organize a successful virtual rave event and felt excited that the general public would finally understand and appreciate the space we cultivated over many years. A lot of the archive is missing now, but there are still some mixes online including the event Matt and I played together! Some of my mixes for those interested:

Hurt-free Network IX: Speedpaint [10.17.18]

Hurt-free Network X: Speedpaint [01.16.20]

Live @ Hurt-free Network 11.29.20

As the world reopened, MG started touring again and Matt and I would FINALLY hang out IRL. It only took 7 years and a global pandemic but it frickin' happened! We linked at a bunch of shows, including the infamous Hard Rock Orlando incident. Besides Matt begrudgingly putting MG onto Spotify during the pandemic and reaching a new generation of fans, I think the tour with 100 Gecs really put the band on the radar. Larger entities took notice that MG had already garnered a loyal fanbase over the span of a decade, and a number of people went to the show just to see MG. I remember hearing Nu Nu Meta for the first time on that tour and feeling so proud of how far Matt and Sean had come. There are some artists that are propelled both organically and inorganically what seems like overnight, and then there's the artists who really grind and painstakingly rise up from the underground. You love to see it! As we get older, we've seen so many scenes and people come and go whether that be because of life circumstances, personal struggles, starting families, etc. Most often I would say it's just being fed up, disenchanted by the music industry, and dealing with financial instability. It's an unfortunate reality of not being a nepo baby. The artist life is not a comfortable road, especially in the current hyper capitalist and gamed ecosystem. Many bands who you would think are very successful still struggle to get by, and some of the most insanely talented musicians quit before ever receiving the recognition they deserve.

My time in Florida (where I am from) was a way to grapple with that reality. I got a 9-5 remote IT job that was very unfulfilling but stable, but it was a perfect way to stay afloat during the pandemic. I traveled to NYC in May of 2022, which was just a series of jam sessions and experimentation with Matt and Sean that served as an unofficial tryout, seeing as though other people were being considered as guitarists. They are recorded, but we are by no means a jam band LOL. Maybe 20 years from now those sessions will see the light of day <3 Sean says one of the first conversations we had that week was me claiming that Caroline Polachek did vehicular manslaughter. I don't know where I read that but it's not true. Oops...

Soon after MG would hit the road again, so in the mean time I went back to school and took on a second job shucking oysters at a nearby restaurant. I really worked hard to stabilize my life and music wasn't really the main focus for awhile.

It wasn't until late 2023 when my life was turned upside down by a devastating house fire. I lost my home, a lot of my belongings, and ended up breaking my foot while saving my cat and escaping from my burning house. Thankfully everyone and every pet got out alive, but I was extremely rattled by the experience and had to reevaluate what I was doing with my life while I couldn't walk for 3 months and dealt with some PTSD. An experience like that really put things into perspective for me, and I realized what truly mattered: family, friends, and living an authentic life that isn't entirely tethered to enriching some a$$hole. That being said, after years of working my IT job I had the financial freedom to just say fuck it and quit. So much of my adult life had been spent just trying to survive. I decided to let go of control, create space for something new to form, accept the mystery of my life, and surrender to the unknown.

It was only a matter of weeks until that I got the call from Matt to start working on some more developed demos and that things were becoming more solidified with me joining the band. We would trade ideas back and forth over the next few months (a lot of which went on to become Psychowarrior). I would travel back and forth between Florida and NYC, staying months at a time in sublets to get as much done as we could during our physical time together and prepare for the 2024 MG Ultra fall tour. Within the span of a month or so, I had to learn and write guitar parts for around 20 different MG songs to perform live that were not composed for guitar at all. I was stressed asf and being thrust into what I would call a smattering of new experiences. Not to mention the palpable anxiety looming in the back of my mind that my first gig with the band would be a sold out show at Brooklyn Steel on Halloween. The biggest audience I had ever performed for prior was only a couple hundred and I had debilitating stage fright.

I had to compartmentalize MAJOR and remind myself that I was there because Matt and Sean believed in me. Right before the tour, Matt and I happened to purchase the same book at two separate locations of the same bookstore at around the same time of day, that book being The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. I don't know if there was any significance to our relationship related to the book's plot, but maybe there's something to extrapolate from the androgyny and mindspeech explored in the story. It really made me feel like things were kismet.

That first tour was so nerve wracking for me. Between the expectations and moving through performance anxiety in real time in front of thousands of people...I was fighting demons every show lmao. Halfway through the tour I fell terribly ill, resulting in an ER visit on Thanksgiving while in Portland, and I continued to be sick for the remainder of the tour. I don't think most people could tell, but curiosity got the best of me and I stupidly checked the comment section. I can't lie, some of it hurt my feelings. I had worked so hard only to be minimized and reduced to how I looked on stage. But Matt and Sean always kept me grounded. They hate us cuz they anus.

I love Matt and Sean so much, and it's been a dream come true to not only work alongside them and travel the world in one of my favorite bands of all time, but to get to know them personally and discover what lovely people they are beyond the artistry. Their support and unwavering freakdom has granted me so much confidence and buffed my ability to walk through the world as I truly am with no fear. A lot of bands struggle internally with personality dynamics and differences, but the 3 of us function well as a unit and truly enjoy each others company. I spend the majority of my time with them and they crack me up every day. I will defend Matthew Stephenson and Sean Kelly at all costs.

A certified Sean classic

I hope this tl:dr provides some critical insights as to how the hell I got here. I was never really given a proper introduction because things were just too chaotic, resulting in confusion early on (and lowkey kinda still). Me joining Machine Girl was years and years and years in the making that most people will never know about or understand. Except now for you, our precious girlies.

xoxo

Lucy