Catalog number: LTD050
Release date: March 20, 2025
Format: Cassette
Edition size: 100
Split Image is I-SM’s first public release since 2019, and first with Lily Tapes & Discs, composed over several years in his hometown in Central New York. The album and its title serve as a reflection on a number of distinct-but-related dualities – memory and forgetting, flight and return, observation and experience – not as conflicting phenomena, but as complementary processes contributing to one’s sense of self. Perhaps most importantly, Split Image appeals to the act of forgetting as an integral step in the process of becoming, as a means to defining the essence of memory and grief. Similarly, I-SM’s patient and restrained patchworks of field recordings and synthesis amplify the energy that trauma, poverty, and addiction can embed within a place with intense precision and focus. Much like memory, we exist within the art we make, and also as observers of it. With Split Image, I-SM invites us to share in that process of becoming with striking empathy and clarity.
Music and photography by Ian Sherlock Molloy.
Artwork printed using a Risograph SF9450 and size 24pt Lydian metal type on a Vandercook No. 4 press at Flower City Arts Center in Rochester, NY.