Again in 1994, tasked with curating the fourth quantity of Virgin’s ambient collection, Kevin Richard Martin coined a brand new subgenre when he dubbed the compilation Isolationism. Much less a hard-and-fast class than a common air of desolation that may crop up in any variety of contexts—drone, post-rock, industrial, and extra—isolationism forged a protracted shadow throughout subsequent many years of darkish ambient. But Martin himself didn’t linger there. Although he has made many various kinds of music below many alternative aliases over time, he grew to become most carefully recognized with the industrial-strength dancehall that he data as the Bug. That vary makes Michael Fiedler a pure match for Martin’s Stress label. Utilizing aliases like Tokyo Tower and Jah Schulz, the Stuttgart producer has been turning out dub reggae for almost 20 years. However in 2020 Fiedler started placing out a collection of drone-driven ambient albums below his personal title, tapping into the claustrophobic dread that haunted the unique Isolation comp. The 2 sides of his musical persona now come collectively on his debut album as Ghost Dubs, a distillation of ambient dub right into a wispy, wraithlike kind.
Fiedler has been transferring towards this sound for some time. On 2020’s Dub Over Science, he slowed his tempos and muffled his bass, luxuriating within the murk. However on Broken, he takes that course of to new extremes. That is dub compressed to the purpose of abstraction, every little thing extraneous stripped away. A uniform palette carries throughout the album: ultra-low sub-bass stress, hi-hats sanded all the way down to silvery streaks, an omnipresent crackling fizz. Monochrome chords slosh forwards and backwards like water in a bucket; no matter they started as—guitar? keyboard?—now they’re simply fleeting smudges smeared throughout the tape. The bass is outstanding—even at a comparatively low quantity, it appears to vibrate the partitions, turning the room right into a larger-than-life speaker cupboard. But Ghost Dubs’ sound can also be remarkably refined, accentuating the distinction between crystalline particulars and a swollen low finish that desires to devour every little thing in its path.
That is certainly not an unique sound—however then, issues related to reggae hardly ever are. The obvious antecedent is the music that Fundamental Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald made as Rhythm & Sound, shifting from the membership vestiges of their Chain Response label—dwelling to ethereal recordings from Porter Ricks, Vainqueur, Vladislav Delay, and Shinichi Atobe—to a extra vaporous imaginative and prescient of ambient dub, which regularly deserted the “techno” half of dub techno. There are additionally echoes of Deepchord Presents Echospace’s The Coldest Season, a canonical ambient dub album from 2007; Pole’s alternately lilting and lurching research in throb and crackle; and Andy Stott albums like Handed Me By and We Keep Collectively, whose air of Sisyphean effort anticipates the trudging uphill gait of Ghost Dubs’ agonizingly slow-motion grooves. The place Ghost Dubs stands out is within the depth of his productions. A lot of individuals have tried their hand at this custom, however few have achieved the heaviness, or the strangeness, of Ghost Dubs’ finest work.
