Ghost - Wash My Soul [Okto Media - 2011]“Wash My Soul” finds this French progressive & ambient HNW artists offer up four nineteen minute ‘walls'-these follow a fairly fixed AHNW path that’s both entrancing & a great textural immersive ride for CDR's 80 minutes playtime. All of the tracks here are untitled, and they nicely sequenced straight into each other to give a great unbroken sonic continuum over the full near on 80 minutes playtime, through of course you get nice semi jarring moments when you switch from one ‘wall’ to the next. The first wall’ is built around a AHNW mixture of rumble, judder & strangely soothing static churn- to me it brings to mind feeling sleepy and warm at the bottom of a slow motion & distant flour milling machine…I odd visual picture I know, but that’s what it triggers in my mind.
Track two is built around an continually unreeling static drone that weaved with a single stuck juddering tone- this tracks brings to mind been attached to huge fishing line that’s reeling you out into this vast & seemingly un-enable mass of pure grey static. Through saying that this track does seem to get more subtle distant battering wind like as it goes on- as if your been reeled into a soothingly yet buffeted circular tunnel. Track three is all about more cold 'n' drilling textures with mixture mid-pitched ice like drilling pitches that are mixed with a lower and more subterranean muffled like drone drills. The track feels like your drifting under ice to constant sound of echoed drilling tone…again quite a strangle & unreal situation, but that’s what much of this album feels like. And lastly track fours 'wall’ is made up of muffled 'n' circling like rumble & distant road like drone- this gives one the feeling of floating in the middle of a huge and vast hundred feet long & wide distant churning washing machine drum. As the track goes on Ghost seems to blur & drifting out the 'wall' in a most effective & entrancing manner. There is a uneven skipping texture that appears around the ten till thirteen minute point, and this seems to break the tracks spell somewhat… but I wonder if it’s just my copy as it sounds like a glitch/skip on the disc & something that shouldn’t be there. So “Wash My Soul” is another rewarding slice of AHNW from the Ghost project, it maybe not as instant or inventive as some of this projects early work, but give it time to sink in & you find your self been both entranced & soothingly battered by all four tracks on offer here. Roger Batty
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