[engl] "It’s 9:35 pm on a Saturday in Chico and it’s pouring rain. It’s three days into our NW tour and things keep going wrong. We forgot half the merch at home, we had to turn around an hour out of Sacramento after I tried to leave my lucky leather jacket behind, and sadly, the shows have been pretty slow thus far. Thankfully, the room at The Naked Lounge in Chico is filling up, and things are looking pretty good for once. Whilst happily chatting about our upcoming recording session in Portland on Monday, imagine our horror at discovering that in fact the session was booked for Sunday, a mere 15 hours away. Twin panic attacks and some frantic google searches later we hatched a plan to push through the deluge and drive as far as Yreka after the show, crash for a few hours, and make the remaining 6 hours of the drive as early as we can in the morning. 490 miles later we pulled up to Page Street Studios in Portland as shattered shells of humans, but Frankie and Leon greeted us with stellar vibes and poured us into their freshly finished and stunningly beautiful studio space. We gamely blasted through these three songs in four hours before their next session, including our cover of the Rick James and Eddy Murphy’s stone-cold electro-funk classic, 'Party All the Time.' For everything that went wrong preceding (and following) the session, those 4 hours went amazingly right, and this record is the result. While we left to play more shows and forget things in new and exotic places, Frankie polished up the tunes to a candy apple sheen. When he heard the tracks, Mark Kaiser from Mt.St.Mtn. suggested a one sided LP, and after a recommendation from our tour manager Jonas, Laurent from Six Tonnes de Chair was keen to release a special edition in France, too. We enlisted Green/Blue's Jim Blaha to make us a collage for the cover, and happily called on our girl Carmen Maher, sign painter and lettering connoisseur, to do the logo to match. We also decided you can call us SysEx now, if you want... if there’s already an abbrev, might as well?"

[engl] “Often when music is constructed with synths and other electronically generated sound makers, their level of exactitude and control is such that the vocalist will either wittingly or otherwise seek to emulate the relative no bloodedness of the soundscape. This is often done to great effect, think Kraftwerk. But what if there was a unit whose music was synth-generated but the vocals were coming from an analog rockin’ attitude? If done well, it’s a case of two great tastes that taste great together, and this is what I think about when I think about System Exclusive. This multi genre/time period collision is like a car accident where all parties walk away not only unscathed but sure they had a great time, like two different recording sessions sharing the same space and making it work. Ari Blaisdell (previously of Lower Self, The Beat Offs)’s vocals co-exist excellently amidst the driving beats and synth waves and her guitar further helps to jailbreak the tunes from the often sterile entrapments that synths provide. Matt Jones (previously of Male Gaze, Blasted Canyons, and continuing Castle Face behind-the-scenesman)’s smart use of live drums bring great juxtaposition against the machines. Ari’s irony-free sincere delivery is the perfect closer on this very cool record, recorded ably by Enrique Tena Padilla (Osees, Wand, Beach House) in their backyard studio mid-pandemic and adorned with original artwork by Miles Wintner (L.A. Takedown, Mr. Elevator, Devon Williams). If you don’t get this slab of goodness, well, that act of non-compliance will confirm you as the pain-in-the-ass that many have described you to be in great detail during Zoom chats. How dare they! Prove them wrong! Reduce their snark to mere pseudo-intellectual piffle! Your lifeline arrives in March. Grab it.” - Henry Rollins