Grim Logick returns with “In My Zone,” which is less a performance than an anti-performance and more of a raw dispatch from the front lines of creation. Recorded up close in Saint Amant, Louisiana, also the track’s title, the song feels urgent due to its very narrowness; it sounds imminent as only a bedroom-and-living-room recording can, intimate and unvarnished and necessary.
And it’s the origin that makes the recording so powerful: wedged between couch cushions and laptops, the production pairs old-school roughness (humming speaker oscillations) with new-school sonic precision to create a well-textured platform for the song’s emotional core. The cover art, an image of a dim room that doubles as what appears to be a self-constructed prison and also the offspring of the concept, suggests that those walls that protect a vision can lock it in.
A music-maker and dreamer operating a few clicks away under the name 3NIGMABRED MUSIC, he plays a number of roles on this release: narrator, visual artist, and lead sound architect. His project with iLLLogick is not a partnership but more of a public confession, a mutual contract to bring attention to the overlooked and amplify the voices that raise no ears.
“In My Zone” is an act of devotion in writing, not a boast but a kind of reckoning with what it takes to make that life as a creative and stay in that life. It will strike a chord with anyone who has chosen the lonely road to self-definition and how that choice can be both snug and claustrophobic. Grim Logick isn’t so much an appeal for your sympathy as a dispassionate look at the mechanics of his obsession in relation to our own personal journeys.