Inner City Sounds
Damaged and Damaged Versions, by Ghost Dubs
By Charlie Bertsch
Michael Fielder’s new project, Ghost Dubs, demonstrates how minimalism can be a shortcut to depth.
While the hard-working Stuttgart producer has released a lot of dub-adjacent material in recent years, the new album Damaged and its companion Damaged Versions take his work to a new level.
They combine the different modes of dub Fiedler has experimented with over the years with the avant-garde electronic music he recently released under his own name.
The result follows the basic conventions of dub but makes them seem more distant, like the bleak, broken-down DDR that the artist grew up in.
Ghost Dubs extrapolates a logic from the echo-drenched notes that have been a linchpin of dub since Lee Scratch Perry’s Black Ark days.
What we want is far away and is heading in the wrong direction.
We want less, not more.
In the early days of dub, the sound of the music was self-reflexive about economy.
Producers couldn’t afford to release many records, so they found a way to cut up and rearrange the material on them to produce new versions.
While this collage technique can be used in the service of maximalism, dub producers tried to make their music as spare as possible, an auditory correlate of the space-travel narratives circulating in the 1970s.
When computers made home recording mainstream at the turn of the century, musicians could experiment with the cut-and-mix aesthetic to a vastly greater degree.
Before then, the cost of recording and producing professional-sounding music had been exorbitant for most people; afterwards, a diligent one-person band could produce a lot of music for almost no expense.
This helps explain why dub became a subcultural phenomenon in fin-de-siècle Germany. When almost anything seems feasible, self-imposed limits have a powerful allure.
Although the asceticism of dub narrows its scope, its most interesting practitioners turn that myopia inside out, adding filigree to the genre’s architectural elements, but always under the sign of minimalism.
Both the records released by Berlin’s Rhythm & Sound and Pole’s staticky post-dub communicate a profound aversion to excess. The same goes for the litter-strewn soundscapes popularised by the Hyperdub label in London.
Damaged and Damaged Versions convey nostalgia for the early 2000s when these new approaches to dub were making a major impact. But they aren’t trying to imitate any particular sound too closely.
The purpose seems to be creating music that is hard to date.
Songs like “Thin Line” and “Dub Battle” exist outside of historical chronology, sort of how the first Ramones songs did.
Even though we know they had to come after the dub pioneers of the 1970s, they have such a strong back-to-basics air that it seems they must have come first.
The point is never to reference for the sake of referencing.
Fielder immerses us in a claustrophobically vast world where holding onto anything for long feels impossible.
As is frequently the case with high-quality dub, what sets Damaged and Damaged Versions apart from lesser records are details found in the margins.
On “True to Life”, a keyboard figure calls Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker to mind while we hear beats pounded out on what sounds like a coconut or two.
“Dub Laboratory” opens with what sounds like a haunted medical facility.
The catchy “Hot Wired” pairs a heartbeat bass line with a self-consciously Orientalist horn riff.
Details like these briefly emerge from a sonic mist before disappearing again.
Together, they give Ghost Dubs the quality of an exquisite soundtrack. David Lynch’s more out-there films come to mind.
Damaged and Damaged Versions communicate intense loyalty to the dub aesthetic while still leaving room for novelty.
Dub is insular.
True devotees of the genre can be strangely conservative, forgiving few deviations from their favourite musical templates.
It’s a minimalist subculture where most people make their mark with small innovations.
The records Fielder has released under Jah Schulz provide plenty of satisfaction for listeners like these.
Damaged and Damaged Versions go in a different direction.
Although Ghost Dubs are easy on the ears, they are too muted to please the party dub crowd.
This is music for people who almost don’t need to listen to music anymore, who have absorbed it into their skin.
Part of what makes Damaged and Damaged Versions so deep is that they make this condition perceptible.
These are records in which negative space bears the imprimatur of the restless few who can only be sated by absence.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.