Cut.Rate.Box interview + new EP ‘Luxury Anxiety’ out now
Cut.Rate.Box interview + new EP 'Luxury Anxiety' out now
After two decades of silence, Cut.Rate.Box broke the silence in June 2025 with the comeback single and video clip “Reel Life”, a track that talked about the digitally disillusioned. The electronic project, founded by G. Wygonik in 1989, now returns with “Luxury Anxiety”, a 4-track EP.
We had a nice chat with G. Wygonik now that Cut.Rate.Box is broadcasting again! But let’s first check the new EP.
The new Cut.Rate.Box EP features the following 4 tracks: “Fireshine”, “Isticism”, the previous single “Reel life” and “Outrageless”. The EP also comes accompanied by a video for the EP track “Isticism”. Musically this new Cut.Rate.Box material will certainly please fans of Haujobb, Covenant, Assemblage 23 And VNV Nation.
SL. After two decades of silence, what finally compelled you to return with Cut.Rate.Box? Was there a specific moment or realization that sparked this creative reawakening?
G. I grew up in the 80s listening to whatever punk, goth, and electronic music we could get in small town America. My very first band back then was a punk band, doing mostly covers of thrash and hardcore songs of the day. I wrote poems and songs about the times we lived in: heightened tensions from the cold war, nuclear war felt imminent, we were worried about being drafted to fight stupid wars for old men, and that there really wasn’t any hope for our generation.
A lot of what’s happening in the world now, 40 years later – politics, war, division – reawakened ghosts of those formative days, and reignited my passion for making music because I again wanted to express my frustration and my rage at the stupidity and injustice and fear I felt and saw around me. And, 40 years later, I also wanted to express my perhaps naive hope that there’s still a way to get out of this mess we’re in; I didn’t think there was hope so long ago and somehow now find myself older than I thought I’d ever be.
November 2024 I was also out of work, in a terrible job market, and feeling increasingly isolated. That was the moment. It was the perfect storm of circumstances that came to a head and forced me to release my pent up emotions the only way I felt confident I could – by making music.
SL. “Reel Life” feels both sonically and thematically intense — a collision of EBM, synthpunk, and critique of algorithmic culture. How did your creative process evolve to address this new digital reality?
G. I really went back to that punk foundation–short focused songs with something to say, simple without trying to be clever–combined with my now many years of learning about myself, my abilities, and the world around me. I’ve never tried to intentionally do one style of music, so I wasn’t trying to recreate what cut.rate.box used to sound like; I still just make music that I like and that I want to hear. I channeled some of the bands that made an early impression on me – Cabaret Voltaire, Brian Eno, Tones on Tail, Wire.
My process evolved by devolving in ways. I basically gave away all the fancy modern hardware and software I had, and started over with an old-school (and free) linear multitrack DAW with built-in synths and some samples. Within two weeks I had four rough songs written that captured where my head was at. I found enjoyment building up tracks that mashed genres together because I think it’s a reflection of a modern culture in which we can pick and choose on very granular levels what things we want in our lives, and just do it. So I just did it.
I think that’s what the intensity stems from, but I feel it all gels together into a cohesive set of tracks. It took a few more months and some selective virtual synth purchases to get the songs where I felt they were ready for everyone to hear.
SL. The Cut.Rate.Box video for “Reel Life” is a disturbing yet captivating portrait of a society trapped in curated illusions. Can you walk us through the conceptual process behind it? How does it complement or expand on the track’s message?
G. Oooh, the symbolism and layers in the “Reel Life” video are quite deep. I could easily make a 30-minute breakdown just pointing out all the meanings, even the hidden ones. lol. It felt right to use the latest tech to make a statement about the tech. It’s incredible and fascinating to me how quickly this stuff has become commoditized; I made the video at home on a six-year-old gaming PC with free software. Yes, it’s made with generative “AI,” and some people will instantly dismiss it as “AI slop,” but that’s part of the reason I leaned into it. We used to say art should make you feel something, even discomfort.
Now it’s like everything has to be instantly good or bad, depending on what an algorithm tells us that day. So I wanted to push on that, to ask if something like this could still be considered art. It opens in a quiet middle-America town. No one’s outside, not at work or school, not playing or cooking. Everyone’s inside, together but alone, staring at their phones. There are a bunch of things in that sequence that are intentionally off, but I’ll let viewers find them on their own. There are two storylines running through the video. One is a preacher, clearly a humanoid robot, meant to represent the machine. It’s giving an almost anachronistic, old-school sermon, appearing as if broadcast from an old TV, familiar to a specific crowd. Halfway through the song, his friendly facade breaks down and you catch a glimpse of what he really is.
By the end, he’s basically unraveling, begging viewers to burn the old ways. The other thread follows four influencers of different ages. One’s an elderly woman who trusts the tech too much to realize she’s being manipulated. There’s a middle-aged man who’s hooked on it, but mourning what he’s lost. Then a young woman who feeds (no pun intended) off the way the media sells rage as entertainment. And a young kid who’s grown up in all of it–this is just life to him.
They’re also meant to reflect the actual bots and influencers out there, designed to radicalize people, while being manipulated themselves. There’s also a section of “reels” with their own path, starting with ads, then worship, imitation, mocking, admiration, collapse, and finally reverence. And I appear briefly in a church scene, as the bringer of the message, as someone who’s not immune to any of this, and also as someone who helped build it.
SL. You’ve described “Reel Life” as continuing the ideological arc of “New Religion” and “Dataseed.” In your view, how has the digital age evolved since those earlier tracks — and how do you see Cut.Rate.Box’s role in commenting on it now?
G. “New Religion” and “Dataseed” were pre-smartphone, pre-YouTube, pre-Twitter; we lived our online lives in IRC and Usenet and MySpace. The scale and reach of the social outlets at the time of the previous albums are dwarfed by current social media; 3-4 million new videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, 34 million shorts to TikTok every single day. That’s a staggering amount of content and voices fighting for a piece of our attention (and our money).
Me making a video for “Reel Life” feels like “old man shouts at clouds while standing in a dense fog”. But back then, it was about entertaining the potential of the digital world to overcome physical geographical boundaries, and building towards a common good. But it clearly wasn’t ever going to be a utopia, all the early social sites still had their social issues, and it was apparent there was a fight brewing for what gets shown and who owns it, and how they were going to use the tech to achieve their goals. Technology has always been part of my life from a very young age, and I’ve always been able to keep up and stay ahead of where things were at. I enjoy the speculative side of design, and I try to express those ideas in the music.
So while previous Cut.Rate.Box albums were looking forward, with “reel life” and the other new tracks, I wanted to twist that and focus on being in the here and now. I mean, it has been 20 years and I can see where things I wrote then have come true, or went in wildly different directions. I have no nostalgia for the old days, I like living in the present, but I can see how technology and commercialism have perverted what it means to be human, so I find it imperative to remind people – even just myself – that we’re losing our way.
SL. Cut.Rate.Box has always fused emotion with critical thought — something that’s increasingly rare in electronic music. What’s next for the project?
G. Well, first, thanks for the kind words about how you hear and think of cut.rate.box; I have always tried to craft lyrics with meaning and emotion and that express a point of view, and I’m glad that comes through. On its own, “Reel Life” is my very specific take on technology and its impact on the world. With the other three conceptually-related tracks, “Reel life” is just one part of a four-part “rock operetta” EP entitled “Luxury Anxiety”.
Lyrically, the EP has an emotional arc from anger to disbelief to disgust (“Reel Life”) to sorrow, while musically it has different aspects of the influences I mentioned above all mashed together. I’ve also enlisted some old friends and some new ones to contribute remixes, and the results are quite wonderful. I felt compelled to get “Reel Life” out now because it was a ball of repressed energy that I couldn’t keep to myself, and Alfa-Matrix graciously obliged.
The response to “Reel Life” has been amazing, and we now just released the “Luxury Anxiety” 4-track EP and we are working out the rest of the release schedule, but I’m super-excited for everyone to hear (and see) what’s to come for Cut.Rate.Box.
About Cut.Rate.Box
Cut.Rate.Box began in Florida in 1989 as the electronic project of G. (Gregg) Wygonik, soon joined by programmer-producer Clint Sand. Their early work blended emotional synthpop with EBM textures and stark, socially charged lyrics.
The Cut.Rate.Box duo built a reputation on tape releases and club shows while relocating through key U.S. scenes – first Chicago, later North Carolina, New Orleans, and eventually Texas – absorbing influences from Coil’s atmospherics to Front 242’s kinetic drive. Early 1990s gigs put Wygonik on bills with industrial mainstays such as Pigface, Foetus, and Alien Sex Fiend, sharpening a live approach that emphasized precision sequencing and cut-up vocal design.
By the mid-to-late 1990s the Cut.Rate.Box moved from underground cassettes into label circulation. and they started releasing material through the Canadian imprint Gashed! and Germany’s Accession, positioning the project on both sides of the Atlantic club network. The full-length “New Religion” arrived in 2000, followed by “Dataseed” in 2001, and included collaborations with such artists like Stefan Netschio (Beborn Beton), Kurt Harland (Information Society), and Daniel Myer (Haujobb). The Cut.Rate.Box ingredients: melodic synth frameworks, tightly quantized rhythms, and lyrics fixated on media, control, and disaffection. During this phase Cut.Rate.Box joined the roster at Chicago-area label WTII Records.
Touring and sporadic releases kept the band in the attention while line-ups and locations shifted. The project’s biography literally traced a path from Florida practice rooms to Midwest warehouses and Gulf Coast venues.
After an extended hiatus through the 2010s and early 2020s, Cut.Rate.Box resurfaced in June 2025 with the single “Reel Life,” released as a free digital drop. The track marked the project’s formal return and their signing to the Belgian label Alfa Matrix. The comeback expanded into the 4-track EP “Luxury Anxiety,” issued by Alfa Matrix in September 2025.
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