FREE.99 is an experimental “Gay” dyad making music to reduce suffering.
Ahead of their glitchpunk performance at Pique on June 7, we spoke with FREE.99 members Hypha and Four about their online existence, how to disrupt the social media status quo, and the inevitable nature of death. Read more below!
Many of your lyrics explore trans identity through computational terms ("in love with a glitch," "worms in her circuitry," etc.). How has the Internet shaped your identities and your relationships?
hypha: i like to think human beings are semiotic creatures--that our identities are edited by symbols, most readily by language.. there's that umberto eco quote, "reading is immortality backwards," the idea that if you read 5000 books, you'll live 5000 lives.. but books have the benefit of being largely written by a single person. the text is unified and linear, and even when it's not, there's a unification that results from a single subject writing it. but our new reality is super fractured because the internet is written by everyone, and the net has woven its way into all aspects of our lives.
as things have developed, there's been this exponential acceleration of how fractured the net's user experience is, how high its information density. as a result what it /feels/ like to be a person right now is absolutely insane, alienating and disorienting. who am i when my existence is bouncing between a million discrete fragments of sensory information every day? all of humanity sewn together? as a force of social inscription, the internet is constantly dismembering and reconnecting a million different "me"s.. you gotta be careful because there's global systems of control behind a lot of the machinery, and that inscription is less benign and more like kafka's harrow.
Instagram is now the primary platform for many artists to promote their work (as well as their image), despite these same artists critiquing Instagram’s algorithm and subsequent hustle culture. How do you navigate music distribution and promotion without using Instagram?
four: we have a loooot of thoughts about this. instagram relying so heavily on visual stimuli can be a blessing and a curse as an artist. its pretty efficient as a promotion machine, and sort of as a digital gallery, but a very poor method of communication, and especially lacking for community building. like, this interview cannot fit in a post description. besides that, if we as individuals don't use something, then we don't use it as a band either. our one exception to this is streaming services - particularly spotify - and even then we were off it for a long time.
our intent from the start was to be accessible & direct with our community. our first decision with this in mind was to make all of our music free to download, or "name your price". we also started posting weekly preview videos of demos & progress on songs that were eventually released, to keep people involved and make them a part of the process. incidentally this was done on twitter because its where we met each other, and it became our main social platform until we stopped using that as well.
the way we best foster our community now is in our discord server. the pros outweigh the cons in terms of giving people a direct line of communication to us, and it's worked out really well. our main spot for the music itself is bandcamp, and other than that we're on: bluesky, youtube, and newgrounds.
In the 2000s, people used Newgrounds to share Flash animation and indie games before the rise of social media giants, like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. What drew you to start posting music on Newgrounds in 2022?
hypha: newgrounds was the best social media platform ever and calling it that feels sort of like an insult honestly. it was a community. the people that ran it were contactable, listened to everyone who messaged them (tom still answers my DMs, like right away, like he used to 15 years ago when i wanted to know if i could have the username of a dormant account or whatever...) the users decided what got through the portal, the voting system was class. imagine if YouTube had a voting system? fuckin' hell, nothing online is democratic like that anymore. but yeah it wasn't a decision based in promotion, that's just my hood, been there since i was 11.
Your website centres death, from the text-based skull on your homepage to the hidden text boxes that explore the "infopocalypse" and the fall of man. Why is death of such interest to FREE.99?
four: you're the first person to have directly mentioned finding the hidden text. hell yeah. those are my stream of consciousness notes & poetic japanese practice. the significance i think, related to your first question too actually, is that a life lived online is a life made of many deaths. its also sight without vision. im wary of this becoming a tome so i cannot properly explain either of those things in the level of detail they warrant. "memento mori" is both a compromise and a genuine way that i would respond to this. honestly, im afraid of death. i used to wish it upon myself - we both did - and now i want to live more than ever. it consumes my thoughts a lot more as i get older, and im determined to confront it. in general spiritual darkness has found us again and again over the course of our lives. also, hypha is obsessed with the ideas in ernest becker's "the denial of death" and what they mean to overall human progress / psychology.
Catch FREE.99 at Pique summer edition on June 7, 2025. Pay-what-you-can tickets on sale here!