Ghost Dubs – Damaged
Regular price
£30.00
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Label: Pressure – PRESH024
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: Worldwide
Released: 16 Aug 2024
Genre: Electronic
Style: Dub Techno, Dub
SEISMIC DUBS, MORE SOON.. (MINT / NEW)
Ghost Dubs, real name Michael Fiedler, aka Jah Schulz, announces a rebirth with 'Damaged', his first album for The Bug's PRESSURE label. Having recently dropped two criminally overlooked, experimental dub LPs, with his 'Dub Over Science' series, the German producer/bass specialist, now stretches his own parameters of outwardness still further, with these twelve fresh explorations of dub deviance.
For those who feel the fusion of dub techno and ambient drone had creatively ended with the demise of the short lived, Berlin based Chain Reaction label. Ghost Dubs now upgrades and extends that legendary blueprint's abstract methodology even further and deeper, floating away upon a wonderfully warm sea of hiss and static bliss. This is dub so atomized that it disintegrates within your eardrums. Its music, where the machines take over and virtually all traces of humanity are erased. But thankfully, the warmest soul still oozes seductively from the pores of Fiedler's robo riddims. Relentlessly hypnotic, seriously sedated, 'Damaged' celebrates the point of departure within its mesmerising low-end grooves.
Album opener 'Chemical', provides an opiated slo-mo skank, which sounds like Plastikman's 'Consumed' era pulsations drenched heavily in sub aquatic fx. A triumph of surface noise surfing and sub-woofer testing relentlessness, it provides the perfect intro to this compellingly immersive album. For batty shakers and headtrippers alike, there's added thrills aplenty, as Ghost Dub's richter scale tremor rhythms remain impressively massive, and the atmospheric depths of 'Damaged' appear tantalisingly oceanic. Throughout the duration of the dreamy selection, there is an obsessive balance of bewitching ambience and heavyweight bassbin shaking.
The lead single 'Thin Line' itself provides a missing link between African Headcharge's early percussive body probes and Rhythm & Sound's addictive radiance, with the slightest hint of Burial's doomed romantic hauntology added for good taste. Alternately, and no less gracefully, 'Dub Lobotomy' bizarrely resembles Miles Davis 'Get Up with it' chopped, screwed, and relocated to a futuristic Kingston Town. Impressive indeed, Fiedler's mastery of live dubbing on his mixing desk shines accross the duration, and gives the album an improvised edge, and sense of peripheral chaos.
Elsewhere, spooked steppers ('Hot Wired'), haunting house ('True to life') and 4th World psychogeography ('Undone'), combine to ensure there is a forever changing mixture of flavours percolating within the admirable consistency of the overall sound. With a tip of the cap, and nod of the head to Pole ('Second Thoughts'), it’s no surprise then that PRESSURE would then turn to the great, Berlin based producer Stefan Betke, to master/cut this collection at his infamous Scape mastering room. And a fine job he did too, as high quality sound and levels are definitely maintained throughout.
If you like your melodies submerged, your dub narcotic, your basslines obese, and your beats evaporating, 'Damaged' provides the perfect prescription and entry point into Ghost Dub's spectral soundworld.
FFO: Pole, Rhythm & Sound, Mika Vainio
TRACKLIST
A1 Chemical
A2 The Regulator
A3 Dub Lobotomy
B1 Hot Wired
B2 Thin Line
B3 Second Thoughts
C1 True To Life
C2 Dub Battle
C3 Soul Craft
D1 Undone
D2 Dub Simulation
D3 Circles / Lines