Being the sort of person who typically leans towards the "full album" experience in my daily music-listening ways, I'll readily admit that I have had a bit of a difficult time in the past getting into split records, being such a clear diversion from my usual listening habits. Fortunately, Cincinnati based record label Whited Sepulchre has showed up in my life recently with the seemingly single-minded mission of challenging my stubbornness and preconceptions of how a record should be listened to (hint: there is no should), and leaving me a more open minded and well rounded listener in the process.
Following a recent split record between Brianna Kelly and Sympathy Pain that we covered just a couple of weeks ago (which you can read over here), the newest release from the label, a split between long time favourite Kyle Bobby Dunn and very recent favourite Wayne Robert Thomas, confirms my new love for the format with two delicate, long-form ambient pieces that flow into each other like two independent yet deeply interconnected bodies of water, each piece accentuating the other with a balance and depth seen most clearly when viewed, and listened to, as a whole.
"I guess it is about a lot of things. How we are always on a journey searching for ourselves or searching ourselves through others", Kyle tells me over a short online exchange, referring to his opening track The Searchers, a drifting piece of overwhelming beauty and sadness, longing and nostalgia, disconnected from the groundedness of the present and choosing rather to exist somewhere suspended in the in-between realms of possibility, of what could have been and what might be. "The piece is certainly about history and how it all correlates to present time. How we are all so busy searching and never satisfied with the beauty and things in our lives". Ringing, sustained notes, somehow sourced from an old guitar yet sounding more like the slowly ascending celestial horn section of an orchestra tuning up to the vibrations of the universe, or the cries of hundreds of Geese heard from across thousands of feet of open, reverberating water, begin to blur together over time like the broad brush strokes of memory, each individual note an indistinguishable drop in the towering, suspended wall of water created by KBD over the 20 minute course of the track with such delicacy and subtlety so as to sneak up on you in it's immensity, threatening to all but drown the listener in a nearly overwhelming tide of memories and emotions.
Wayne Robert Thomas' Voyevoda, serving as the B-side of the record, moves at a slower pace, drifting more patiently and with a darker glow at it's centre; dark purples and violet hues pulsing from within and bleeding out into every corner of space like trails of light painted across the sky during a meteor shower. Slow, billowing drones expand and uncurl upon themselves, a collective, cosmic breath that rises and falls with the patience and omnipotence of something unaffected by the limits of space and time, entire civilizations rising and falling with within the parameters of a single breath. Where The Searchers feels earthly and elemental, a study on the ethereality of time that is at least contained to the confines of our own worldly experiences, Voyevoda feels completely untethered, the concepts of gravity and weight made more and more meaningless with each swell acting as a sort of dropped counterweight, the track lent a lightness so profound so as to lose it's corporeality altogether, swallowed up by the night without so much as a single trace of light left behind in its wake.