The Body & Cel Genesis

THE BODY & CEL GENESIS

Tension, contradiction, curiosity, animosity and affection; these are all as essential to the collaboration between The Body and Cel Genesis as are the drummers, the sounds of trance music, distortion and electronica. Sonics delivered by voice, that carry the weight of experience and emotion, whose meaning bends to the vocalist’s intent. 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 and removal, whilst The Body’s process as explorative sound shape-shifters is open, improvisational and inclined to take ideas to their outermost limits.

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. Tracks were built from either beds of electronic tracks generated by Cel Genesis that were served to the group to be edited and arranged, or beds of live drumming by Lee Buford and Nick Cowman that were similarly edited and arranged by the group in service of a song, sound or lyric. This intensely collaborative approach was liberating and joyful, a giddiness born of boundless exploration. This contrasted with an elemental tension as The Body and Cel Genesis’ individual methods of creation were forcibly altered by compromise and revision. The inherent contradictions in process and emotion complement the themes addressed in the album: a reckoning with the past, nostalgia and lost hope.

Whole Wide World is both heavy and dense as well as joyful and fresh, an uncategorizable ode to egoless inventiveness. A work born of artists whose disparate approaches, sound sources and egos are surrendered to the work. Its musical contractions mirror the thematic contradictions of joy in the making on an album whose themes confront today's harsher realities. Unrelenting optimists processing the death of possibilities.