Tx, '98

Nostalgia is at once the most destructive, most overused and most poetic emotion I know. This EP is my attempt at tapping into nostalgia in its utmost purity, musically and lyrically. That specific year, that specific place, that specific guitar tuning, those specific bands.

So, it's about a certain year in my life. It was 1998, I was sixteen and had just moved to Texas on my own. It's about the people I met, the people I had left behind, and the music I encountered there: The Get Up Kids, Braid, Deep Elm Records bands, and most of all the tape of Ultramagg's self titled debut. An album I haven't heard since, but that was always played in my friend's Taurus as we drove around for hours on end, to Magnolia to see a house show, or downtown to buy t-shirts & records. Or as we sat on our skateboards in all those humid nights spent in an IHOP parking lot. At least that's how I remember it.

And that, of course, is the problem with the nostalgic scope. The lens is inaccurate, always a little blurred around the edges, always filtered through the experiences of the 20 years that came after it. If I remember anything, it's not to trust my memory.

Recorded over a weekend in the summer of 2017 (June 22nd-25th, to be specific), unrehearsed and mostly live, and mixed the week after, maybe as a one-off, who knows. I guess I had to wait until the recording itself was a bit tinged with nostalgia, before releasing it.

- Sjur Lyseid