The Boy on the Red Bicycle
I found out on a Monday morning, at my desk, coffee in hand, inbox still unopened.
I had messaged him a while before and heard nothing back. So after a while I typed his name into Google. Every result on the first page said the same thing. There was no ambiguity to hold on to, no second interpretation to go looking for. George had been dead for over a year, and I had not known.
It took me a full minute to make my brain accept it. I read the same headline three times, looking for a different sentence inside it.
Then, before anything else, the image my head went to was his Facebook banner. A photo of George at maybe three years old, in red overalls, sitting on a red bicycle, grinning at whoever was holding the camera. Same face he had as a grown man. He had not changed at all.
I met George in New York, introduced through a friend of a friend. He was already making real progress in synthwave, a genre built on nostalgia for a decade most of its listeners barely lived through. VHS tracking lines and analog hiss. The hero of a B action movie walking away from something on fire. A lot of us who love that sound remember only fragments of the actual eighties, a car, a mall, a television glowing in the living room, and the music fills in the rest. It was also, arguably, the last decade before everything got self aware at the turn of the century.
He was Greek, though you would never guess it. Blond hair, blue eyes, and an accent that had been sanded down by years abroad. After his conscription he went to the UK, played music, studied there, and eventually landed at Pratt in Brooklyn, where he took an MFA in digital animation and motion graphics. In 2009 his short film “Scrimshander” was nominated for an Academy Award. He spent years in visual effects in New York after that, including a stretch as a CG lead at PSYOP, and was still working in VFX by day when he passed away.
We sat down one afternoon at a Danish coffee shop in TriBeCa, and George spent hours teaching me the ins and outs of New York. I was in my mid 20s and he was in his late 20s. The city had just recovered from Hurricane Sandy. He taught me the local slang, which subway car to stand in, how the ladder actually works and how he had climbed it himself, rung by rung, with little help.
He also told me what the early years had cost him, which is the part nobody puts in their bio. He lived in an apartment where the pipes in the walls sounded like they were one cold night away from bursting. He saved every single penny. He barely went out, because going out was money and money was what got him through the fiscal year with his taxes covered and his paperwork clean. There was nothing glamorous about any of it. He had worked out the price of the point he wanted to reach, and he paid it, quietly, without complaining and without pretending afterward that it had been easier than it was.
One night, we went to see Com Truise in Brooklyn, at a point when Com Truise was about as big as the scene got. Somewhere mid set George disappeared into his phone. Completely gone, the way people are when something is actually happening. It turned out that “He^rt,” the music video he had made himself for roughly two hundred dollars, had gone viral on Reddit.
I remember standing there thinking that this was the exact moment it turned for him, and he was going to miss the concert for it. He put the phone away. He did not make a thing of it.
George kept Starcadian at arm’s length from himself on purpose. The silver mask, the red hood, the whole backstory. He said plainly that he was not selling himself as a person, that people could take the music. He meant it. He had material for an underdog narrative and refused to spend it.
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I also think it leaves something unsaid, which is that George and Starcadian were the same person, and on the morning of May 1, 2025, both of them left. Whatever he did to build the mask, it was still him underneath.
He was 44. He lived in Clinton Hill. He had six albums and an EP out since 2013, and he called his music movies for the ear, which is the best description of it anyone has managed.
He was riding his e-bike west on Broome Street in SoHo, on a Thursday morning, around ten past ten. Near Centre Street the driver of a parked Mercedes van opened his door into the lane. George had no time. The impact threw him off the bike and into the path of a box truck moving alongside him, and the truck ran him over. He suffered severe head trauma and died at Bellevue.
I had my own version of it in 2015. I was riding a Razor kick scooter down Broadway, which is steeper than it looks and gives you almost nothing to brake with. Crossing Canal, a double decker tourist bus came at me from the side. I dodged it, barely, and it blasted its exhaust straight into me turning my yellow t shirt gray. I went home, changed, and thought about it for maybe a few minutes.
That is how it goes nearly every time. You get missed, you change your shirt, you go get lunch. Then once, it goes the other way, and the gap between the two outcomes is not skill or attention or anything you can earn. It’s a matter of inches.
I still listen to “He^rt” It is a simple track, and the simplicity is why it holds up. Depending on the day, I hear it as a song about two people finding their balance, or about the balance between work and everything that is not work. It read “I need to relax, and get rid of my phone”, at a time when doomscrolling didn’t exist and Instagram was still only a place for photographs. It is about getting off the screens and letting yourself float in the nothing for a minute. George wrote it from inside a job that was all screens, all deadlines, all render times. He knew exactly what he was describing.
George is going to outlive everyone who knew him personally, and he is going to do it in a shape he never designed. The profiles are still up. The videos, the album art, the mask, all of it drifting around the internet with nobody steering it, like a spirit in the sky.
Some fifteen year old in 2045 is going to have a Starcadian track handed to them by an algorithm, and they are going to sit up. They will not know he was Greek. They will not know about the pipes in the walls, or the years of not going out, or that he made the video everyone loves for the price of a decent dinner. They will just get the music, which is exactly what he wanted. He was not selling himself as a person. He was selling the world he built, and that world runs perfectly well without him standing next to it.
I find that comforting about sixty percent of the time. The rest of the time it bothers me, because the man is the part I miss.
So let this be the part it holds. He was funny. He was modest to the point of being difficult about it. He was generous with everything he knew, to people who could do nothing for him in return. He earned every bit of it the slow way.
I thanked George plenty of times while he was here, for the coffees, the advice, the doors he opened. I assumed there would be more chances. There were not, so I am doing it once more in public, where the internet can keep it alongside the rest of him.
A bicycle at the beginning and a bicycle at the end. George was survived by a wife and a baby daughter.
Thank you, George
