Grey Fiction
Introducing PDX-based trio Grey Fiction who took the time to talk to us about their powerful & timely video & single “Crimes” featured off the album On Your Way To Earth and Back. Comprised of brothers Zaine, Mark & Matt; the trio specializes in a sound to break down the walls of fallacy to reveal the all too real truths that are, as we have come to know them, stranger than fiction. With a sound that swirls with the post-industrial pop landscapes informed by the oughts & 90s dilletantes; the three wise men emerge out of the dystopian wreckages of our modern day with a sound that seeks a sense of justice & balance in a world where such wishes feel like a far-flung luxury that is hard to obtain.
Presenting the Arthur Veenema video for “Crimes” where Grey Fiction’s social critique of systems of governance & abusive powers are delivered with performance visuals that are played in front of a slide-show that depicts documents that lie beyond the red tape. In an otherwise low-lit gray room, the trio harmonically bemoans their grievances & visually captured by the production team of Preston Lewis, Nic Edwards, Stephane Glynn, Christian Selter & snake slithering sequences handled by animal wrangler Haley Sage. The atrocities of the twentieth & twenty-first centuries respectably are illustrated in a collage of vintage audio bytes (Dwight Eisenhower, JFK, Daniel Inouye, etc.) & damning visual evidence that further underscores the need for both atonement & genuine understanding of the civic & social errors in our collective ways (both past & present).
Grey Fiction’s singer & songwriter Zaine caught up with us to provide some insightful elaborations on the single & video for “Crimes”:
“Crimes” is a response to there being no justice on this earth; the explicit urgency one feels wanting to do something about everything going wrong in the external world that you just can’t control. Working with director Arthur V on the music video shoot reminded me about what I’ve read about Stanley Kubrick, who once said The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. Underneath this convincing illusion of separation is a universal web of inner-connectedness where there are marvelous relations between beings & things; in the inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn: all need each other. I like to reference the ultimate man of myth, Joseph Campbell, when the world goes and gets despairing who says we cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can always choose to live in joy. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. Say yea to it all. This track was an important selection in expressing the raw emotions of anger, betrayal, and injustice; all of which we felt compelled to explore in composing On Your Way to Earth and Back, our space rock opera about a lonely explorer who recounts the planetary romance that occurs during his epic odyssey on Earth.
Or, our human-experience inspired concept album which we spent four years giving birth to in the studio with producer Steve Sundholm after arriving in Portland, shortly following the death of our father. This track features speeches given by JFK, Dwight Eisenhower, and Daniel Inouye who all refer to the shadow government, an obsessive topic to our paranoid father who had served in the US Navy.
Grey Fiction’s album On Your Way to Earth and Back is available now via Spotify.
