Audiopile Review: Detouring from his usual dour jangle fair, Bobby Would turn in a metaphysical drone album for his newest on Digital Regress. While a sizeable move away from the “fog pop” that we’ve come to know him by, it also isn’t coming entirely out of leftfield. Originally recorded live for a podcast, Bobby Would’s lament for a friend who had recently passed is still charged with the haunted beauty that has always made his lo-fi pop efforts particularly affective for us. Made up of two side-long pieces, “Caput Mortuum” on the A Side is the more dynamic of the two, subtly shifting from a holy drone-out that occupies a space between Spacemen 3 adjacent sustained organ melodies and Brannten Schnure’s hypnagogic tape loop work, eventually settling into a melancholic shimmering of guitar that reminds us of Mumia’s tribute. The title track on the flip continues the descent, a slow crawl of tones that dissolve within each other in the kind of grainy, home-fi sublimity that Stars of the Lid captured so perfectly on Music For Nitrous Oxide. A simply beautiful and awe-inspiring eulogy from Bobby Would that we hadn’t seen coming. Huge recommendation.

***

“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 has made an album that does not propose meaning but allows it to be found. And in that, it is haunting. It is reverent. It is, undeniably, beautiful.” –Ela Orleans