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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?

Ari Blaisdell and Matt Jones are System Exclusive: a San Francisco based two piece band bearing an armful of mini synths, making heart-throbbing capital P pop cut with more than a hint of post-punk. Blaisdell’s vocals hearken back to openhearted 80’s hitmakers unafraid to quaver in the name of love, and they’re buoyed by Jones’ laser-gridded synth concoctions and heavy hand on the ones and twos.