Digital Regress News

"I wish I could turn or turn back" "Sometimes it’s hard to resist the feeling that there was a crucial turn in life out of which everything else flowed. Maybe in our more reasonable frames of mind we can dismiss that thought and take our plans and intentions very seriously. But, there’s often a lurking conviction that, like the oak from the acorn or the movie from its opening scene, it is already all there. In the first moment of Relics of Our Life, anything could happen, anything could come next. But as the suspense is broken with the first notes, the world of the record springs up as both an internal experience and a landscape of which we will learn something, but definitely not everything. The songs induce a swimming sense of cycling repetition and variation where shifting details tilt the ground under us. The round and round doesn’t make us dizzy; like breathing the right way, it makes us both heavier and higher. "Pawliczek’s songs can be located in the company of the greats of Flying Nun Records – maybe the delicacy of The Great Unwashed with the heavy heart of The Verlaines and smartness of The Chills. But, ultimately, his interests are elsewhere – a heart-break song over an earthly lover feels like only the tipping point for longing and devotion that outstrips the personal. In this sense, Popul Vuh for their hymnal geometry and switched-on Palestrina, and Terry Riley for cosmic elation come to mind. The songs have sweeping and cinematic proportions and depths of field constrained by a pop economy love of leanness. "But who’s supplicating whom here? The songs’ devotional quality is not upward to the sacred or even outward to the profane. It’s more like a magnetism between its elements – sounds, voices and rhythms. The track No Talk intones “why don’t you talk to me?” over a driving guitar and one feels visited by some kind of archaic god on whom the tables have been turned, finding himself jealous of our thousand little thoughts. The record finishes with his distorted lilting dance, trying to seduce us with some red red wine that is no one’s blood, but everyone’s favorite drug." -- Karina Gill (Cindy, Flowertown) 2024

"The wash of flangers & shimmery reverb have been the foundation in Cali psych ever since the Byrds went electric. And while that sound might've dropped off occasionally, it never dropped out. The Velvets minimalist stylings were infused into the mix by The Dream Syndicate in the early 80's & thus a game changer was born. Clay Allison, Opal, Green On Red all took their charge from that current. Then the Shoegaze scene of the 90's looked at those bands as vectors, things got a little more drenched, so yet more seeds were sown into the fertile terroir. Cut to current climes & the bay area is teeming with the latest iterations: Children Maybe Later, Now, & Cindy easily come to mind. But curiously the band most steeped in the mohair constitution is April Magazine, who (thus far) have been content in the shadows. Up till now they've seemed like characters plucked out of a Kazuo Ishiguo novel-mysterious & ethereal-but perhaps this pressing of last year's cassette only release will flush them out. 'Wesley's Convertible Tape For The South' shows the band defly balancing all those that have come before them while also incorporating flourishes of Les Rallizes DeNudes, Hallelujahs & Nagisa Ni Te into the pageantry . So in a way, April Magazine is transforming the landscape yet again; denser, fuzzier, lush & wistfully challenging. 'Wesley's Convertible Tape For The South' is the band's 1st vinyl release stateside (an LP of older tracks was released last year via a UK only label) so no import tariffs! What were once whispers are now proclamations. Just because you don't know them doesn't mean you can't love them. So grab a copy & hug it out amongst yourselves." -- Tom Lax (Siltbreeze Records)

"Learn To Die is a bold new step for a group of musicians, artists, and writers that has at least nominally been considered a punk band. A stylistic overhaul. For those who have been following along, it’ll carry some surprises. Slender began over a decade ago as a semi-improvisational cassette recording project, a casual collaboration between a few friends that was initially documented by two self-titled cassette-only releases released in 2014 and 2015 respectively, now both unavailable and out of print. Most fans, however, will know Slender for their two most recent releases, Walled Garden (2017) and Time On Earth (2019), both released on the tastemaking London art-punk label La Vida Es Un Mus. "Their prior work has earned them comparisons to anarcho-punks Crass and The Snipers, lo-fi flagbearers Swell Maps and Pink Reason, and artrockers Cromagnon and Amon Düül. Here, however, such comparisons feel largely unfounded and the band feels somewhat peerless. Moments of artpunk brutalism, lo-fi experimentalism, and kosmiche detours grace the fabric of Learn To Die, but the album reaches for more than pastiche. Teasing the rarified worlds of chamber music and musique concrete, Slender manages something intangible and strange. A vocoded voice intones multi-lingual poems alongside tinny guitars and sampled strings and flutes. Three chord janglepunk anthems arise suddenly out of a cosmic mist crafted by analogue synths reciting the poetry of machines. The album moves in ways reminiscent of works by artists as varied and singular as Nobukazu Takemura, Chuquimamani-Condori, Coil, and Robert Wyatt, but it doesn’t necessarily occupy the same realm as any of them.” – Leah B. Levinson