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 carry the weight of experience and emotion, their meaning bending 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«’s music is both heavy and dense, as well as joyful and fresh: an uncategorisable ode to egoless inventiveness. A work born of artists whose disparate approaches, sound sources, and egos are surrendered to the work. Its musical contradictions 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.