{"id":1918509,"date":"2026-05-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1918509"},"modified":"2026-05-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T21:00:00","slug":"wonderland-166","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1918509","title":{"rendered":"Wonderland"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\tAPRIL + VISTA ARE KEEPING THE FLAME ALIVE<\/span>
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On their debut album Traditional Noise<\/em>, duo April + VISTA turn memory into\u00a0reality. The acclaimed duo talk collaboration, archiving, and sharing their sonic soul.<\/h3>\n
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Photography by Foster K. White <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

April and Matt build on each other\u2019s ideas. Thoughts are passed back and forth, gently affirmed and expanded in ongoing dialogue, mirroring the way their music takes shape: instinctive and rooted in a shared language. Collaborations and touring alongside artists such as Little Dragon, Mura Masa and Little Simz have offered wider recognition, but their process has remained deliberately insular. Their work is often built at home, guided by emotion and what they describe as \u201csound experiments\u201d over a pre-defined structure.<\/p>\n

The Virginia-Maryland duo first began working together in their late teens, forming what would become April + VISTA through a shared fixation on sound and emotional texture. What started as an informal creative partnership gradually became a long-term project defined by experimentation and a refusal to settle into a fixed identity. Before their debut album, Traditional Noise<\/em>, released on 22nd April, they spent over a decade building that world independently, releasing earlier projects like \u201cYou Are Here\u201d and \u201cPit of My Dreams\u201d, which began sketching out the contours of their now fully realised sound.<\/p>\n

Written in the wake of the pandemic and across a period of creative burnout and industry uncertainty, Traditional Noise <\/em>turns inward, assembling itself from fragments of home recordings and warehouse sessions. April\u2019s classical training folds into Matt\u2019s textural production approach, with melody dissolving into atmosphere and nostalgia repurposed as a tool for introspection, shaped in part by the pair\u2019s fascination with amber fossils and preservation. Across the record, April + VISTA return to the idea of an archive as something that protects and transforms. Rather than taking a purely retrospective approach to the past, they ask what it means to carry it forward.<\/p>\n

The result is a record that feels both wholly personal and astonishingly expansive, like stepping into an alternate universe. Or, as the duo describes it, a portal.<\/p>\n

Listen to Traditional Noise\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

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Read the interview\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

How are you feeling now that the album is finally out in the world?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Matt: It\u2019s surreal. We spent nearly three years on it, so to suddenly be done feels strange. But seeing people\u2019s reactions this morning made it real, we were glued to our phones.<\/p>\n

April: It still hasn\u2019t fully sunk in, we haven\u2019t even unpacked from Sunday\u2019s [NYC album listening session] show yet!<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been working together for over a decade now. Does releasing music ever get easier emotionally?<\/strong><\/p>\n

April: I don\u2019t think it ever goes away, it\u2019s vulnerable and emotionally taxing. You just hope that people understand what you\u2019re trying to say and connect with it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Matt: It comes in waves. First I\u2019m excited, then nervous. Then once it\u2019s out, there\u2019s relief \u2013 we survived it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What defines April + VISTA for someone hearing you for the first time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

April: We\u2019re dedicated to experimentation. We embrace flaws, that\u2019s a common thread in everything we make.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Matt: Sincerity is at the core. We build around whatever ideas feel alive in the moment. Traditional Noise<\/em> pulls from everything we\u2019ve absorbed over ten years, but we never really know what\u2019s next.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve collaborated and toured with artists like Little Dragon, Mura Masa and Little Simz. What did that teach you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

April: Confidence. We\u2019ve always been DIY, so being in spaces with artists we admire felt really affirming. It made me realise we belong here too. And the crew are such an underrated part of touring: the sound engineers, lighting techs, tour managers. We learned a lot from them.<\/p>\n

Matt: It also taught us to slow down and enjoy the process. Touring also taught us efficiency \u2013 We used to go on stage with a tote bag of tangled cables before realising it was cutting into soundcheck.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a physical, tactile quality to <\/strong>Traditional Noise<\/em><\/strong>. Where does it begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Matt: It always begins with something unnamed. We mostly write and record at home, so it\u2019s very insular and it starts instinctively. Percussion is the hardest part for me, so it tends to come last. We start with what we call \u201csound experiments,\u201d just messing around with noises \u2013 sampling, warping, pitching until something emotional appears. On \u2018Grotto,\u2019 for example, we used the sound of water pouring into a cup. I like sounds that scratch my brain!<\/p>\n

At what point did Traditional Noise<\/em> stop feeling like a collection of songs and start feeling like an archive or fossilised moment in time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

April: In 2023, I found an image of an amber fossil I became obsessed with. It made me think about archiving memories in a more introspective way. The cover art is a real fossil Matt photographed. We started asking: what do we want to leave behind? If someone hears this in 100 years, what do we want them to understand about us and also about themselves?<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve spoken about the album existing almost like a portal between worlds. If you were to describe its internal alternate universe, what would it look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

April: It\u2019s a portal, that\u2019s how we came up with the short videos around the album. We had a limited budget, so we were thinking about how to translate the ideas in a way that felt intentional. There\u2019s an elevator in our warehouse where a curator puts on art shows, and it became this idea of the elevator as a portal into different worlds for each single.<\/p>\n

April, your classical training clearly threads through the record. How did that inspire you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

April: I started playing violin in fourth grade, and I instantly connected with it. I\u2019m grateful for my classical training, but it can be quite restrictive. You\u2019re meant to play everything exactly as written.\u00a0 We couldn\u2019t afford a full ensemble, so all the strings you hear are just me and a friend who plays cello \u2013 but Matt made it sound much fuller.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Matt: She recorded all of those strings right there on the floor. You can\u2019t see it now, but she just decided one Saturday, \u201cwe\u2019re going to knock all of these out,\u201d and she did!<\/p>\n

What are your most unexpected musical influences that people might not pick up on first listen?<\/strong><\/p>\n

April: Probably Primus. The first time I heard Pork Soda<\/a><\/em>, it blew my mind. It felt like I was at a concert on Mars. We don\u2019t make gritty, bass-forward rock, but their angst helped us conjure those emotions.<\/p>\n

Matt: Fuel and their song \u2018Hemorrhage.\u2019 I went through a Creed phase as a kid \u2014 that was the first concert I went to. The chords were expressive, the voices gritty and scratchy, but with a tender emotion underneath.<\/p>\n

If Traditional Noise<\/em> is an archive, what has it actually preserved?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Matt: Our love for music. It\u2019s so easy for that love to become a tool to pay the bills. With this project, we gave ourselves the space to be passionate again. I\u2019ll never stop making music because it\u2019s how I express myself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

April: I wrote this when making the album:<\/p>\n

\u201cAncient civilisations believed amber had healing properties. They called it elektron<\/em>, meaning beaming sun. Just as a fly trapped in amber finds a purpose renewed, so have I. The world as I knew it needed to end to make room for new possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have our own little beaming sun in our hands. It\u2019s about what we choose to protect. <\/strong>We started this during the pandemic, when things were shutting down and the industry felt like it was changing for the worse. This project reminds me that I need to protect my peace and leave space for fulfilment.<\/p>\n

Words by Hannah Breen<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t5 May 2026\t\t\t<\/div>\n
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Feature Interview<\/a><\/div>\n
Music<\/a><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\u201cThe Devil can wear whatever the fuck she wants\u201d: Molly Rogers on The Devil Wears Prada 2<\/span> <\/span><\/a>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wonderland APRIL + VISTA ARE KEEPING THE FLAME ALIVE On their debut album Traditional Noise, duo April + VISTA turn memory into\u00a0reality. The acclaimed duo talk collaboration, archiving, and sharing their sonic soul. Photography by Foster K. White April and Matt build on each other\u2019s ideas. Thoughts are passed back and forth, gently affirmed and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,257],"class_list":["post-1918509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-wonderlandmagazine-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1918509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1918509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1918509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1918509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}