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Ghost Dubs - Oblique
Ghost Dubs' second album is deeper and moodier than its predecessor, its cloudy abstractions, shadowy pulsations and submerged rhythms reach further into a sonic void, crafting blurred melodies and narco loops into something heavyweight and hypnotic, tipped FFO Echospace, Burial Mix, Andy Stott. On his keenly awaited 2nd LP, Ghosts Dubs tempers the dread and amps the intrigue & stuff to trippier, timber-shiver impact bound to alert disciples of Pole and Torsten Prörock’s early DIN drops thru The Bug’ or JK Flesh’s radical extremes, David Lynch’s neo-noir scores, Bela Tarr’s eastern bloc miserablism, or Andy Stott’s knackered slugs. After memorable first impressions made with the ‘Damaged’ LP in ’24 and its ’25 versions, Michael Fiedler can safely stake a claim to make the most fascinating new dub mutations as Ghosts Dubs. ‘Oblique’ now registers his most immersive material wrapped up in album form, taking the broader canvas as site of midnight spectral ritual where the spirits come out to play as narcotised shadows dancing on dripping walls. Although umbilically attached to the processes of OG Jamaican dub, proper, his rigorous use of decay and resonance almost equally echoes the experiments of Alvin Lucier or Kevin Drum in his sound’s detachment from source and embrace of the metaphysical/metaphoric abstract. Or in other words, he really knows how to suck heads under the wave with the slow burn intensity of ‘Oblique’. The dozen tracks spark off with the rolling heft of single cut ‘Low Times’, channelling Rhythm & Sound’s most expansive via sacred early Pole, and continue to masterfully modulate the pressure with a barely-there, sandman presence in ‘Cold Data’ thru the shivering metallic mass of ‘Almost a Structure’. The heartical thrum of the best Berlin dub science and the city’s minimalist experimental urges on ‘Soft Collapse’, while ‘Blackout Dust’ dwells in the dankest atmospheric half light of BM intros and Bela Tarr scores, while the title and nature of ‘Dead Channel’ infers a ’Neuromancer’ influence, compounding the album’s cinematic suss along with the ‘Ghost Dog’ like wooze of ‘Decay’ and blue hour creep of ‘Bombed Suburbs’.
