Rapoon is Robin Storey, one of the co-founders of Zoviet France. His ten-and-a-half minute track “Stolen Diaries and Marijuana Dreams” takes up the entire A side of Split. Chanting and subtle tribal beats open before giving way to a brief intoned vocal segment, the delivery tinged with a distant, mechanical quality as it drones through the lyrics. The chanting returns in the middle of the track, the beats given a Moroccan vibe1 by brief flashes of Eastern instrumentation before the vocals return to finish us out.
The B side is given over to conceptual artist Mykel Boyd, who is also the person behind the label that released this record, Somnimage. The track “Ashes of Memory” is minimal ambient, swaths of it given over to quiet tonality and periodically expanding with vibrational qualities that are more natural than mechanical, like the throbbing of a pulsar in deep space. This progression is briefly joined by a rain-like static and ghostly wind to further expand upon the nature/not nature dichotomy, something that feels simultaneously authentic and constructed, before slowly returning from whence it came.
Split was released in two versions, both on white vinyl – the black jacket version in an edition of 200, and the white jacket version in 100 copies. The white jacket release also includes two very nice signed black-and-white letterpress art inserts, one each by Rapoon and Boyd.
- I suspect that I specified Morocco here because the lyrics mention Marakesh, something I hadn’t registered until the second round of vocals kicked in. ↩︎