Bobby Would

Bobby Would

Mumia

Cost Of Living

"In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote, 'Without music, life would be a mistake.' Mumia follows that trajectory in its quiet unfolding. It lingers, seeps in. There is no drama here, no display of unique feelings. Each side offers a unified meditation on stillness, numbness, and the beauty that exists within sadness. "Robert Pawliczek aka. Bobby Would offers an explanation for the events that inspired Mumia—a story that could easily be the material for a novel. Its eerie, tragic, and unresolved backstory serves as an invitation rather than a statement, creating space for contemplation. It is not a retelling or an indulgence in sorrow but a measured, almost ritualistic meditation on absorption and acceptance. Would began working on Mumia in late 2020, after the sudden death of his close friend, artist Sven Sachsalber. Sven had come to visit Would in Vienna during the height of the pandemic but passed away mysteriously at his accommodation. Rumors spread, grief settled into something shapeless, and even though doctors traced it to a complex heart condition, uncertainty had already taken root. "At the time of his death, Sven had been painting Pantone cards of extinct pigments. He was fixated on Caput Mortuum, a deep iron-red historically linked to paintings of skulls. But he had confused it with Mumia, the ancient brown pigment once made from ground mummies and thought to hold some remnant of life within it. That mistake—two colors, two histories blending into one—became the conceptual thread in Bobby Would’s music. Bobby Would...

Bobby Would

Relics Of Our Life

Digital Regress

"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....

Bobby Would

Styx

Digital Regress

"Bobby's back with a brand new swing. Styx is, conceptually speaking, his boatman's call, two thirteen minute sides of Greek mythology-referencing purgatorial guitar murk, one half on terrafirma, the other floating down the river of the damned... If you remember those first two records on Low Company, or even the pair of records he made under the Itchy Bugger moniker, then you'll already be well acquainted with the openly sardonic, narco chimes of Styx. The fidelity remains of the characteristically 'submerged' variety, which at this point is as much of an instrument as anything actually played. It's a bit post-39 Clocks in that sense, kinda like the Cocoon or Exit Out, the hazy gloom a lot of the appeal. 'You're definitely doing the hype thing,' he sings on 'Hype On.' Are you talking to me, Bobby? 'Cos I've done a number on you here." –World Of Echo Music