Ghost Dubs - Damaged
Ghost Dubs is maestro Michael Fiedler's latest alias, a project brimming with eerie atmospheres and rumbling subs textures. It is an exploratory venture for Fiedler, incorporating many techniques he has used before and turning to the past to reinterpret older methods. Fiedler's Ghost Dubs Damaged stands out for its innovative emphasis on the mechanical nature of vintage gear as he stays away from his more ambient projects.
Ghost Dubs adopts a new ethos, experimenting with percussive elements. There are many more dub reggae elements on Damaged. Percussive hits become the norm throughout, evident from the first few tracks. 'Hot Wired' perfectly exemplifies Fiedler's spirited move away from the strict ambience. Little shuffling hats and snares buried under the mix help impart groove. However, they come into their own when considering how far Fiedler takes these to reggae elements, pushing them further than traditions would have you believe they can go. Ghost Dubs crushes the bass within an inch across the runtime. It sounds like a live recording, as though recorded with a microphone that can hardly stand the pure bass pressure coming out of the system's cones. Just listening to the bass on 'Thin Line' feels like it's wailing, like the air pressure is whistling past you. However, 'True To Life' captures a different experience, like the sound is crackling the rumbling speakers as though they're struggling to house the power output.
The use of effects on the record feels genuinely out of Kingston, Jamaica, when King Tubby and the rest were thriving. Saturation rather than distortion gives the recorded vintage feel. It's not as overbearing as distortion or fuzz. There's an organic warmth throughout as the album has been through some analogue tape gear. But it's where Ghost Dubs utilise delays, either making them slap back or more like the classic space echoes repeat, seemingly fluttering on forever. 'Dub Battle' demonstrates the great combination of these different echos. Claps and snares rattle for a fraction of a second, giving you just enough, whereas the big dub chords cascade downwards like a waterfall and a dark pool.
Damaged holds within it a mechanical aspect that sounds like the faint wearing of a tape player at the end of its spool or the runout groove of a record. Michael Fiedler combines this heavily mechanised sound with a fantastic ambience, allowing listeners to fall deeper and deeper into the dust-covered dub techno grooves of tracks like 'Chemical' and 'Dub Simulator'. These tracks play on this idea of short loops slowly opening up through repetition, actively making them more all-encompassing with every bar or phrase as Fiedler slowly augments the loop, allowing delays to quiver for longer or the intensity of stab sounds to be punchier or cutting.
Damaged by Ghost Dubs pays a faithful tribute to the dub music that came before, whether in dub reggae or dub techno and even incorporates some more experimental sounds of downtempo and dark ambient. This dark presentation can be a barrier to entry for some people, especially when venturing from less stylised versions of the above genres. But the darkness is one of the defining features of the record. Without this darkness, these fat basslines could sound weak and flabby. Instead, they sound as though they're so powerful and pumping through a viscous bubbling oil, creating a tangibly worrying visual. I'm very excited to see where Michael Fiedler takes the Ghost Dubs project, as there are more rhythms to explore, more hypnotic sequences to create and more speakers to blow in the process.
Tracklist:
Chemical
The Regulator
Dub Lobotomy
Hot Wired
Thin Line
Second Thoughts
True to Life
Dub Battle
Soul Craft
Undone
Dub Simulation
Circles / Lines
Label: Pressure (2024)
Ghost Dubs - Damaged
