2xLP in gatefold jacket. 180g black vinyl.
Truly bittersweet is this debut outing from Jim + Digbee, the product of a longstanding friendship transmuted into song that was finally completed just a few weeks before Digbee's untimely death. Tragic as that might be, the legacy that lives on in this double record is testament to shared understandings and youthful impulse. With the earliest recordings dating back to 2007, together the pair gave voice to a particularly protracted form of DIY practice that moves between lo-fi downer folk song, collagstic tape manipulations and lysergic musique concrete-like alienisms, seemingly tracing their developing interests over time. The titular Jim is of course Jim Strong, and those familiar with his oeuvre will recognise several characteristic tricks here, the purgatorial gloop staple to Eyes of the Amaryllis and his most recent solo work particularly apparent in the album's latter half. There's quite a marked shift from those earlier more, shall we say, song-based 4-track recordings into the otherness of later recordings, and caught in that transition you can hear a kind of lucid dreaming in action that sometimes reminds me of the Spillage Fete universe and the in-between-stations static song of Cuneiform Tabs. A gutter no doubt that Digbee isn't around to see the album released, though it's the kind of record that's perfect as a one-and-done, a stand-alone transmission from something that mostly only existed in the shared truth between its creators. There's a lot here still to dig into, yet still haunted by the ever-alluring, fateful notion of 'but what if...'.
FFO: Happy Return/Bons/Spillage Fete, Jim Strong, Cuneiform Tabs, Eyes of the Amaryllis, Pumice
