Ghost Dubs

Dreader than dread dub vapors from Ghost Dubs, in a lineage stretching from Dadawah to Burial Mix, Vainqueur to Resilent, Pole to Rod Modelll...​

Toiling in Berlin’s deep seam of abstract dub practice that scrolls back to Rhythm & Sound’s earliest via Pole’s dusty convections and Chain Reaction's fritzed mutations; Ghost Dubs embodies the art of dub as method with a strong haul of dematerialised, sludgy tramplers operating close to the scuzzy heart of Kevin Martin, aka The Bug. Uncompromisingly in-the-zone and dank as a bong, the dozen cuts get right under the skin, up-the-pharynx, with an intoxicatingly sedated and hallucinatory quality that impresses murky, vaporous patterns on the back of blunted eyelids and may possibly raise knees to its slompy skank and imaginary physics.

Of course, the sound is rooted in the innovative, half century-old traditions of Jamaican dub, as established by King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, and developed by the likes of Scientist or Mad Professor. But Ghost Dubs picks it up at the point where it diffused into techno and noise during the ‘90s, taking that sound as a jump-off into his microcosm of granular, atomised atmospheric disintegration that nevertheless holds to a steady ballast of scoop-worrying sub-bass tremors. No doubt anyone who’s followed the devolution of this sound outside Jamaica, from NYC illbient to Berlin dub techno, will recognise his hands-on-desk tekkerz ushering the sound into oblique new spaces with a canny sense of proprioception that locates it somewhere in fissure between classic and contemporary soundspheres.

From the caustic attrition of ‘Chemical’, thru the inverted mulch of ‘Dub Lobotomy’, to the sensuous but elephantine trample of ‘Hot Wired’ and tumescent swell of ‘Circles Lines’ ,Ghost Dubs leaves his clammy fingerprint on every cut. Some are primed to bend your Clarks, as with the bilgy step of ‘The Regulator’, and airborne skank of ‘Thin Line’, and the harness-tugging pressure of ‘Dub Battle’, but they’re all held in check with a overarching slowness that gels the 12 tracks as a proper end-to-end listen in the manner of Pole’s early albums with a deeply reliable robustness and temper that stakes it out as arguably canonic tackle.