Hello everyone it’s your host Daniel, and today I have with me Grim Logick from Baton Rouge, United States, and today Grim Logick is here to discuss about his recent Album Cipher Chronicles: The Network, welcome Grim Logick. Before we begin our interview here is what you need to know about this artist /band
Emerging from the vibrant yet challenging creative landscape of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Grim Logick, is a multifaceted visionary whose artistry extends far beyond conventional music. As a Digital Multimedia Architect, producer, designer, and CEO of 3NIGMA BRED MUSIC, which he co-founded with his long-time collaborator iLLLogick, Grim has built a self-sustaining creative ecosystem dedicated to independence, resilience, and innovation. His journey into music was forged through adversity, transforming personal struggles with mental health, economic hardship, and societal obstacles into a philosophy he calls “imperfect as progression,” where each failure becomes a foundation for growth. Grim’s work merges cinematic production, AI-assisted innovation, and deeply human storytelling, resulting in a sound that is both raw and revolutionary. Beyond his personal artistry, he mentors emerging creatives, including his daughter Lyrick Logick, and has cultivated The Network, a collective of over 800 artists and visionaries, as a living archive of perseverance, creative freedom, and digital ingenuity. In every beat, lyric, and design, Grim Logick embodies the intersection of survival, innovation, and legacy-building, redefining what it means to thrive as an independent artist in the modern age.
Having this brief Introduction, I’m sure new and current fans must be excited about our Interview today.
1. To begin with, let’s review your recent work. What is the Inspiration behind Cipher Chronicles: The Network Archives?
Here is the reality: We didn’t even know we were making an album until “Stranded” was released.
The narrative of this album was created because it is a literal, depictorial, documented archive of how things have gone for us since founding 3NIGMA BRED MUSIC in December 2024.
Here is the cold truth: We built a massive community. We hosted TikTok LIVE Artist Spotlights from “The 3NIGMA BRED Vibe, LIVE!”, wrote articles on The Network members, and promoted countless other people. We did everything “right.” But the reality? We have no buying customers. We have no funnel. We have no way to sustain ourselves. We are being bled dry by the very ecosystem we built, and it felt like no one seemed to care.
This album was made to document that specific desperation. The November 5th release date was chosen because iLLLogick made a promise to his late best friend that he would “do something” with his music, and his friend’s mother reminded him the date was coming. But the basis for the album? It was necessary so that people could hear (That is, if they f***ing care to listen.) the reality and scope of our situation. We aren’t just making songs, we are documenting the continuous collapse of our lives in real-time, despite trying to build something that everyone can have together.
- Your story begins in Baton Rouge, where art and adversity often merge. How did your environment shape the creative philosophies that built 3NIGMA BRED MUSIC and The Network?
Let’s get the map right first: We aren’t from Baton Rouge. We are from Ascension Parish, right outside the city in the tri-parish system. And that distinction defines everything.
Aesthetically, the parish is pleasing to the eye, a beautiful thing to behold. But that beauty is a mask more often than either of us have been fortunate enough to experience. The darkest parts of this place are under every rock, it’s unbelievable. From our personal experiences, all we’ve seen predominantly is liars, snakes, and people with no consideration for anything but self, masterminds of “calculated fuckery, who don’t give a damn about what we’re building.
That toxic local environment forced our hand. We realized we couldn’t build on this soil because the people next door just see two local rappers without a penny for their pockets. So, we had to build 3NIGMA BRED MUSIC as a purely digital infrastructure. We fully understand that by doing this, we run the risk of losing SEO optimization because we lack the “city-bound marker” the crawlers look for. We don’t have the luxury of a local storefront because the locals see two clowns telling a stupid joke. We had to bypass the snakes in our own backyard and architect a global system, choosing to fight the algorithms rather than trust the people in our own parish.
- “Imperfect as progression” is such a powerful concept. Can you explain how that philosophy guided your development as artists and entrepreneurs?
It’s about turning limitation into fuel. When you have one month to build an entire album from scratch because of a promise you refuse to break, you stop waiting for “perfect.” We used what we had, PreSonus Studio One 7.1 Pro, Izotope Ozone 12, and sheer will.
That philosophy drove us to stop trying to fit into existing boxes. We didn’t just talk about being unique; we codified it. If you check the metadata on MusicBrainz and Discogs for Stiff Person Stories or Cipher Chronicles, you will see we formally annotated the genre as “3NIGMA BRED.” We literally created the database entry for our own sub-genre because existing categories couldn’t contain what we were building.
- The Network has grown from a converted office space into a collective of over 800 creatives. What were the earliest moments that told you this idea could become a full ecosystem?
Let’s get the facts straight because the “corporate” version of this story doesn’t exist. There was no “converted office space.” The office mentioned in the EPK was literally a bedroom at The Network Hub (Angie’s house) that she gave me to sleep in, which we turned into a recording booth. That is now gone due to economic hardship.
But The Network didn’t even start there. It started when I was renting a room in Sorrento and iLLL was living in a trailer in St. Amant. We are still actively operating from separate trenches.
And regarding the “collective of over 800 creatives”? That is our Facebook group, “3NIGMA BRED: Underground Music Network”, that we started back in March. While that number looks good on paper, the reality of the “full ecosystem” is that it is still only me and iLLLogick operating everything. No one is helping. Not a damn soul. We have a very small, select group of individuals that have purchased our merch, or the album, or donated/subscribed who have been riding with us since the Facebook group launched, and we appreciate them, but as far as the labor, the expense, and the grind? It’s just us two. The “ecosystem” is built on our backs alone.
- What personal struggles or breakthroughs inspired the creation of this community-driven model?
The struggles are too many to count, but the core reality is this: both of our lives have been consumed by negative, unforeseen circumstances that we had absolutely no power over. Both of us lost very important people. Both of us took a five-year hiatus from music. Both of us felt completely alone and abandoned.
To this day, we have no genuine support beyond that of our mothers, iLLL’s father, and my daughters, Harmony (Lyrick) and Miley. Beyond that small circle? Everyone else is literally here at face value. They are a vexing succubus of ignorance and calculated cruelty. They have no goddamn concern for what we are trying to build. To them, we are just the same rappers that have been rapping for 14 and 17 years that still haven’t “gotten anywhere” and probably never will. They dismiss the empire because they only see the struggle.
We built The Network because we know there are millions of people out there who feel the exact same way we do, but are terrified to come forward. We know those are the people who often end up killing themselves or ending up dead accidentally with a needle in their arm. The list of traumatic events that stem from this isolation goes on for miles. We simply wanted to create a sanctuary and a safe haven for the people who went through what we went through, and to build a legacy for iLLL’s mother and my kids.
- Your partnership is rooted in years of friendship, struggle, and shared vision. What does creative brotherhood look like for you today?
To be honest? It looks like a fucking nightmare most days, but it is held together by a bond that is etched in stone.
The dynamic is tense because of our different speeds, that being my obsessive drive versus his methodical patience. I am a schizoaffective basket case who learns everything instantly and dives in headfirst. Then you have iLLLogick, who has endured Stiff Person Syndrome since he was 14, a fucked up disability that renders him unable to work and forces him to be patient. That contrast of my impatience vs. his physical limitations causes an insanely tense dynamic that gets heated, but iLLLogick stays because he understands my methodology.
He remembers the person I was when we first started. He remembers that when he had nowhere to go, I let him live in my home. And when the tables turned 360 degrees and I had nowhere to go, he let me in his.
That reciprocity is the foundation. We captured it explicitly at the end of “System Failure (File: 006).”
[iLLLogick] (Etched in the stone reflects to the bone) (I lived in your home and you lived in mine) (Connects that are gone, progression is known) (I’ve given ’til gone, you had to remind) (That it’s within me and the people who need) (A resonance, desperate and ready to breach) (Straight through the surface, its purpose emerging) (I promise it’s greater than we, greater than me)
[Grim Logick] (Greater than he, greater than we, no standing ovation, we’re fading indeed) (Through all that we’ve seen, through all of the weeds where snakes have been hiding to try at our feet) (We stand in a league, one we created, I hate it, but love it too much for to leave) (Can’t let it be, would rather decease, so to The Divine, I’m down on my knees) (I’m praying in silence, and So Mote It Be)
I stay because, despite my issues and his disability, he has held onto a promise from the beginning: my obligation to my daughters, Harmony (Lyrick) and Miley, comes first. No matter how big The Network gets, a chunk of this empire is theirs entirely. For example, all music royalties for the track “Help You Grow” don’t go to the business, they go directly to my children. That is what brotherhood looks like: securing the next generation’s survival before we even pay ourselves.
- How did iLLLogick’s battle with Stiff Person Syndrome influence the tone and direction of your shared mission?
It didn’t just influence the tone; it is the perfect fucking example of why this mission exists in the first place.
I came to him with the brand concept for 3NIGMA BRED MUSIC with the sole basis of having a voice and creating a community for Empowering the Unseen, Amplifying the Unheard. Our tagline, “We are the echoes of the voices that refuse to be silenced”, is a direct reflection and correlation to my current goings-on with my mental health issues and his battle with Stiff Person Syndrome.
We are the demographic that we are targeting. It isn’t just a business plan; it’s a mirror. So it only made fucking sense that we incorporated that direction because we aren’t just speaking to the unseen; we are the unseen. We are building this for the people who are living the same nightmare we are.
- You’ve created a label, a hub, a mentorship program, and a technological space, all outside the traditional industry structure. What does independence mean to you both?
Independence means everything to me, but it would be a whole lot more gratifying if, despite having created all of those things, anyone at all was interested in actually utilizing them.
I don’t understand it. We have more music industry knowledge than 80% of these underground artists out here. We built an open space where we allow them to promote their own music for free. Yet, most of them don’t even pay attention to what we post. They take the platform for granted.
You would think that with the quality we put out and the infrastructure we built, some of these artists would actually call upon us for a service, whether it’s mixing and mastering, graphic design, or artist consultation. But they don’t. We are sitting on a goldmine of resources that could change their careers, and they are too busy ignoring the architects to ask for the blueprints. So yeah, independence is freedom, but right now, it feels like screaming into a void where everyone wants to be heard, but no one wants to listen or learn.
- What are the biggest challenges of staying independent while scaling something this large?
The answer is, without a shadow of a doubt, finances.
We are absolutely dry. We have nothing left. We are in a very, very dangerous position. Personally, I am in more debt than I can possibly recover from, even if I were to go get a decent job in the immediate future at all. I am dead in the water, no job, no car, and as of last week, I’m back living at my mom’s house.
The biggest problem is that we can’t even get any strategic partnerships. We can’t get nobody to even fund us. We have no way to get any money to sustain this operation. And to make matters worse, iLLLogick has to go through crazy motions with SSI before he can even get cleared to help us secure a loan. Plus, he isn’t in a particular hurry to get one because he’s concerned (Rightfully so.) that the industry may not render a return, leaving us with a massive debt that we can’t pay back, so we are stuck. We built this massive independent music ecosystem, but without capital or partners, we are drowning in the cost of our own ambitions.
- This album is described as a living document, created during the struggle rather than after success. What inspired you to take such an honest, real-time storytelling approach?
Nothing. Nothing “inspired” us to do this.
This is just what we do. It’s literally what we’ve always done. There was no strategy session where we decided to create a living document or adopt a real-time storytelling approach. Nothing has changed about our process. This isn’t an artistic choice; this is just who we are. We document our reality in Cipher Chronicles because we don’t know how to be anything else. The honesty isn’t a marketing tactic; it’s just us existing.
- Each track is framed like a “file” in an archive. How did you decide on this narrative structure and the concept of C1PH3R-IO guiding the story?
C1PH3R-IO came to be because our other artist, Hollow Logick, suffers from Marfan Syndrome and is going to be blind in four and a half years. Because of his condition, he introduced us to AI-assisted music elements using Suno.
Originally, C1PH3R-IO was just my design for the AI chatbot on our website at www.3nigmabredmu…c.com. I had actually made the song “Remember The Name (File: FRM-WRK)” a while back as a music marketing attempt, but it never really got broadcasted because we weren’t sure how the community would take it, considering today’s controversial position on AI implementation in music. But I couldn’t deny that it had a certain flare.
Then, Hollow told us about 11Labs dropping their new Studio feature. I made a mock podcast using the “Remember The Name” track to extract C1PH3R-IO’s voice, and using their Agents interface, I experienced her as a vocal chat-bot. I loved the output, so I decided it was time to turn that simple website chatbot into something more, a fully realized narrator.
The “Files” aesthetic came naturally because we were already actively creating an archive with our blog, “Cipher Chronicles,” on our website. Matching that with the cyberpunk dystopian narrative we live in, it just made fucking sense to format the album as a digital database of our survival.
- Which track was the most emotionally difficult to create, and why?
For me? “Falling Apart (File: 002)”. It’s self-explanatory as to, “Why?”. The only contender would be “System Failure (File: 006)” for the same reasons mentioned in your earlier question.
For iLLL? “Empowered (File: 005)”. Because it’s “Where I admitted that our 50/50 agreed upon business venture, Grim was holding up his end of the deal much more than I was. If you pay attention to the first 2 bars of my verse, “Acknowledge me, acknowledging. I am what is stopping thee. Odd to me, an oddity, it’s odd to see. The Gods can see my offering.” you’ll gain a better understanding, and deeper insight into what I mean.” – iLLLogick
- What are some of the difficulties you encountered and some of the highlights in Cipher Chronicles: The Network Archives making process?
The difficulties were a logistical and technical nightmare. First, the differences in location, trying to coordinate between where I was staying and where iLLL was, made continuity impossible. Then you had the time frames colliding with iLLLogick’s medical infusions, which would take him out of commission and halt the workflow.
The heaviest part was having all of the load on my back. I was the engineer, the producer, and the artist simultaneously. I was constantly battling technical issues, vocal tracks that were either too loud or peaked because we were recording in an untreated bedroom. I wasn’t happy with the original mixes or masters, so I had to go back into the project files and fix them right before the actual release happened.
On top of the audio engineering hell, there was the psychological weight of the impending doom of losing where I was living at The Network Hub. It was a constant, crushing reminder that this was an “all or nothing” situation with a very, very short album release deadline. I was racing against homelessness and the clock at the same time.
- Your Network Venom Method blends AI, human emotion, and lived experience. Can you break down how that process works during production?
The process is a technical nightmare that requires hours of forensic audio work. It is the opposite of “push button, make song.”
It starts with the setup. We have a Suno Pro subscription, but we burned through two months of credits in one month just on rejected generations. I reject hundreds of variations to find the one specific seed that matches the vision. I dial the Style Influence to around 75, keep the Audio Influence midway, and turn the Weirdness Meter up to force unique textures.
For the music, we started with a foundation of original instrumentals gifted to me by a producer friend. I used those tracks to train a specific Persona within Suno. This wasn’t a static filter; for every single song, I extensively altered the prompt within that Persona to engineer specific instruments, moods, and tempos, keys, etc.
I write 100% of the lyrics for myself and C1PH3R-IO while iLLL writes his own, which serve as the structural backbone. I use specific syntax tags like [Verse], [Chorus], [Outro], and excruciatingly detailed instructions to dictate the sonic constructs in the blank spaces like the intro and outro.
For C1PH3R-IO, it’s a dual process. On tracks like “Remember The Name (File: FRM-WRK)” and the hooks she features on, she is generated directly inside Suno to lock in the flow and melody. But for the narration tracks where she speaks to the audience, I use 11Labs. The challenge was manipulating those 11Labs files to sound exactly like the Suno-generated voice so she remains a consistent character throughout the album, as well as altering the instrumental or narration to match the altered Suno generation.
Then comes the beat nightmare. Suno generations come out essentially already “Mastered.” They are loud, compressed, and have almost zero headroom. I use the Suno’s stemming tool to strip the vocals, but let’s be clear: Suno stems are not real stems. They don’t even properly identify the instruments in the file names most of the time. Worse, they are dirty. Ex: Any “silent” part of a synth stem has a consistent, low-level bleed from the drums or bass playing in the empty space, this is the case for every other instrument as well. When you remove the vocals, it leaves artifacts in the beat, and leaves holes in the frequency.
This is where the software evolution was critical. I started this journey in BandLab because of the steep learning curve, but I eventually transitioned into PreSonus Studio One 7.1 Pro to handle the surgical reconstruction. I have to go in and isolate different variants, manually alter the key, and completely modify the intros and outros by hand. I take chunks out of a stem, duplicate them dozens of times, and manually create reverse, glitch, and distortion effects that didn’t exist in the original generation. If you need proof of the fact, simply listen to this manual glitch aesthetic in some of iLLLogick’s human vocals that showcase the digital chaos.
The next battle is the mix. I am recording our human vocals in a poorly treated, hollow, reverb-filled room. I have to mix that raw, messy human audio, plus the dry 11Labs narrations, against these dense, already-mastered AI stems. I am constantly fighting for frequency space, carving out holes in a wall of sound, and enhancing accidental artifacts to turn errors into artistic choices. I am essentially recording, engineering, and sound-designing over a crime scene of audio files to force the machine to sound human.
For the final battle, there is the master. I use iZotope Ozone 12 to handle the final product, but let’s be clear: I do not use the ‘Assistant Mode’ with no alteration.
This has been an exciting session for us all Grim Logick, I believe fans and anyone out there just discovering your music for the first time are equally excited about this project. Thank you for the privilege to experience this masterpiece, its been an honor.
Here is my thought on what i have to say after listening to “Cipher Chronicles: The Network”:
“Cipher Chronicles: The Network” functions as a cohesive emotional and conceptual journey, weaving together themes of isolation, resilience, digital decay, and personal transformation through a meticulously crafted blend of atmospheric production, cinematic instrumentation, and commanding vocal performances. The album moves fluidly between introspective vulnerability and forceful empowerment, creating a narrative arc that feels both personal and mythic, each track adds a new layer to an overarching story about breaking free from internal and external systems that confine. The sound design is consistently detailed and immersive, merging orchestral elements with glitch textures, deep 808s, ethereal synths, and spacious ambience to create a world that feels both futuristic and deeply human. Throughout the project, the vocals serve as the emotional core, shifting from reflective calm to determined intensity, guiding the listener through moments of despair, awakening, and triumph. As a full body of work, the album stands out for its clarity of vision, emotional depth, and narrative cohesion, offering a powerful experience that resonates long after the final track fades.
Finally to our audience, I urge to listen to “Cipher Chronicles: The Network”, add it to your playlist and be Inspired by it and on behalf of Dulaxi I like to appreciate you all by saying thank you everyone, See you on our next interview.
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