Whole Wide World - Clear With Smoke Vinyl

Tension, contradiction, curiosity, animosity and affection - these are all essential to the collaboration between The Body and Cel Genesis. Also essential are the sounds of trance music, the weight of distortion and the grinding of experimental electronica - all counterpointed against the viscerality of two live drummers. The idea to collaborate and make Whole Wide World was hatched on tour, with few parameters other than to use friendship, humility and each artist’s distinct processes to create music. Cel Genesis’ creative practice tends towards maximalist writing - coupled with aggressive editing. The Body’s process as exploratory shape shifters is foundationally improvisational, and inclined to push ideas to their outermost limits as they have with distortion, vocal techniques and in other collaborations’ samples and beats. Recorded at Machines with Magnets by Seth Manchester with additional recording in California by Andrew Oswald, Whole Wide World evolved over a period of two years, several recording sessions and meticulous editing. Some songs were built from beds of electronics generated by Cel Genesis, served to the group to be edited and arranged; others grew from beds of live drumming by Lee Buford (The Body) and Nick Cowman (Cel Genesis), that were similarly worked and re-imagined. Whole Wide World is a dense and heavy album, but one that nevertheless feels joyful and fresh - an uncategorisable ode to egoless invention. It’s a work born of artists with disparate approaches, who feel compelled and comfortable to surrender them, in service of the birth of new art. Whilst the album was made with joy, the themes of the album confront today’s harsher realities; we see this play out as through the eyes of an unrelenting optimist processing the death of possibility itself.