Sex Vid - Voyeur

I was thinking about mysterious guy hardcore recently, and what a feverish, overblown internet thing it was, conjured out of message board hype and limited run vinyl. Now, it's not that there weren't, simultaneously, a bunch of bands making grimy hardcore influenced as much by industrial music as they were UK82 or the early Touch & Go releases. But to assign sub-genre to highly anti-commerical bands is kinda beside the point, no?

Sex Vid are one of those bands I remember best from that time. They hailed from Kill Rock Stars country, but sounded like they'd been raised on a diet of third-gen Die Kreuzen bootleg cassettes they found while skateboarding down at a truck stop. I'd heard them for the first time on the second Fucked Up mixtape. And, unlike kindred spirits the Repos or Vile Gash, there was no redeeming art option to the presentation. Sex Vid was all degraded photocopies, UHF static, whispers through a ham radio. They might as well have been from a goddamn separate universe from the branding machinery that had been infiltrating punk music for most of the past decade. This was ugly music for the uncool.

Oddly enough, "Voyeur", their final 7", is the one Sex Vid record I don't own a physical copy of. It's a live document from 2008, from their home territory of Olympia. It was also the second of three records they'd release in 2008, culiminating in the "Communal Living" 12". They were cooked by the time 2010 rolled around. Guitarist Dave Harvey has left the most evidence of his post-Sex Vid life; as the good Captain Tripps Ballsington, he's recorded a ton of your favorite records of the past ten years, including the new All Hits and Gag slabs, of which I'm a fan.

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