Ghost Dubs: Damaged
Out Now (order here)
On Damaged, Ghost Dubs (Michael Fiedler) summons up the spirits that once populated ancient fields throughout the globe and, by injecting them back into the industrial mainframes of a modern, sweatbox laboratory, births 12 stealthy conjurations of dark, dub sorcery. Review and interview by Ryan Walker.
There’s little, if anything on the internet regarding the history of Michael Fiedler. No background information. No trace. No echo of where he started to charter where he is now, and where he might end up in the future. Yet contrary to the absence of information available to us online or in music magazines, hardly a vow of silence but more a case of shyness, primarily due to Fiedler preferring the music itself to inform and illuminate the minds of those who listen to it about the individual artist who created it, rather than refer to some quote or two about the tortured artist, the creative process, etc. etc, there is an abundance of Fiedler’s musical projects scattered across the known universe for us to access. Projects including Knipsen, an experimental jazz and electronic trio, his Klaus Schulze-meets-King Tubby classic dub soundsystem portals with Jah Schulz, and Michael Fiedler, a man of Drone, a man of Noise, a man of Music for Theatre (Tokyo Tower is also worth checking out)
Damaged is his debut as Ghost Dubs. Released physically on Aug 16th via Kevin ‘The Bug‘ Martin’s Pressure label (dub is the music of the spheres that vinyl, and possibly, only vinyl has the keys to know the ancient mysteries of), it is an opportunity for rebirth, redefinition of the design, a reconfiguration of the pieces and the elements whereby the pieces of the palette are dislodged to form something cohesive and new and the art of dub as a tool, a spiritual as well as technological philosophy to filter one’s entire life through, a sonic alphabet engrained deep in the DNA of some eternally turning chronotropic manifesto that provides those who wield it, for example – Basic Channel, The Bug, KMRU, Justin Broadrick, Adrian Sherwood, Andrew Weatherall, Youth, Steve Albini, Thomas Fehlmann, Zero Hannett, Scratch Perry, Dan Carey, William Burroughs, P Orridge, Luna Ludmila, Ari Up and also including – Michael Fiedler, a sufficient means of looking for things capable of breaking apart in the moment that, without dub to seize, would be lost to the cracks in the antique details of sedimentary time with a hardened exterior shell encased around it.
His Dub Over Science series on the Basscomesaveme label is a plentiful testament to his joining of these ranks, a way to ensnare the vulnerable present, the volatile slip a moment as it trickles into another and leaves an unfortunate knot in its transitional place.
And like those aforementioned dub wizards; unique wayfarers exploring netherworlds with their dub like a metal detector shrieks with excitement when stumbling upon antique coins, Feildler is interested in peeking into; even exploring, the cavernous boiler rooms located in the substrates below the earth’s crust: urban spaces breaking down (and building up), silhouettes swinging from howling pipes cast against the corrugated corridors of ghostly storage units, twitching limbs twisted together like an orgasm of bolts and branches, a moaning nest of nervous machines intimating free will, phantoms snoozing around a fire the size of one’s thumbnail with an unsettling, toxic warmth beaming from it, a distant clang in the corner of an abandoned warehouse, an elongated hum from prisoners long forgotten gone cold turkey, and crush all those snippets of what is found upon his travels into subatomic particles of haunting weight that shakes us into catatonic states of zombified dub bliss that could knock the planet of its axis if it so desired- the echoes of each other: ghost dubs among us.
The information we have?
Fiedler was born in East Germany, a small town called Löbau… just before the Polish border. Possessing no musical background, he was motivated by a love of electronic music and DJ culture from a very young age. From around 1989, he absorbed everything English club music that spilt into his East German village. ”The KLF were really a huge influence and their ambient records. I’ve loved this since I was 11’’ Fiedler says of his early influential gateways into the dub world. ”But also The Orb, Leftfield, FSOL, ColdCut. Everyone has experimented with Dub in their own way. I liked this long before I saw the inside of a club. I could hear what was coming on the radio. There was also a huge tape bootleg market in Poland on the border. I got a lot there’’.
A resident of Stuttgart since 1994, and various lousy training jobs aside, he has, was, and always is focused on making music. His first EP was released in 1999. 2023 saw the initiation of a co-owned label, Infinite Density Records that focuses on 7’’ dub music releases. This year sees the beginning of something else. The explorative possibilities of this strand of electronic music, this weaponised voice dub can give those who might otherwise feel muted, are endless.
”Dub and electronic music influenced me from a very early age. But not as separate genres’’ Fielder tells me. ”KLF, The Orb, Prodigy, Leftfield, early hardcore stuff, jungle and Dub played a big role there. But I didn’t know that it came from Dub/Reggae. I couldn’t do much with classic reggae. Marley, Tosh, It was boring. When I discovered Dub, I liked the technical, playful, experimental stuff. I also became curious because I heard them sample old reggae songs in the club tracks. Mad Professor came along at around the age of 13 or 14. I found that very exciting. At that time, I couldn’t do much with reggae. That came much later when I started looking into the history and discovered the old producers from the 70s’’.
Chemical steadily boils over but beautifully hypnotises to maximum effect the more its voodoo spells and sizzling signals dislodge the jigsaw pieces from the dancefloor and, although free to drift upwards; weightless and wanted by something our bodies cannot combat, the somnambulant pulse keeps us fixed to a filthy root. The Regulator meanwhile, is a report from a moody club in Kingston, dark energy drums thump their firsts against the edges of a city as they drive through the holographic monuments and neon drapes, buzzing flies straying too close to the zapper, hissing machines whir and exhale as much smoke as they inhale, chamber snakes slide on their bellies and dance to the warehouse charms palpitating from this spectral assemblage of electronic-noir, slo-mo techno skank and jagged, radioactive reggae shuffle, exchanging numbers at the same interface to enhance the pulse of the whole smouldering throng.
Ghost Dubs is a rebirth. An electrical connection of all the distinct, disparate influences that, a testament to the true artistic spirit that defined preconceptions of genre by destroying it, sees no reason to not hybridise them into some monstrous, makeshift industrial-dub juggernaut.
But why a rebirth?
”On Damaged, I tried out a lot more and allowed it to happen; that would never have worked on the Jah Schulz records. Kevin from Pressure gave me a lot of freedom. Originally he wanted something completely different. He got the complete opposite. That’s how it is with me’’ says Fiedler.
”You reposition yourself, redefine yourself. The birth of Ghost Dubs took place indirectly in 2020. In 2020 and 2023 my albums, Dub over Science 1 & 2 (Jah Schulz) were released on the Basscomesaveme label. The albums are actually by-products that were created in the Jah Schulz context, but don’t really fit into the picture’’ Fiedler comments. ”Basscomesave, a fairly open bass music label, was thrilled. The records they received were great. Especially outside of the reggae or dub community. I reached a new audience with it’’.
Wanting something but then doing the opposite. Getting what you’re given. Trying out new ideas and allowing those ideas to bless you with something new or blow up in your face. These are what make Ghost Dubs an exceptional slice of a record. It’s deviant. Evil. A narrative of dissent/descent. A bad science. An unsettling psychedelia of shadows scattered over plinths of chrome and tall grass. It’s warped with a kind of deformed, alchemical, lysergic industrial groove (the Pole-meets-Plastikman of Dub Lobotomy), animated with a vision of some alienated, officious dystonia dub warrior, conjuring up thunderstorms from an uneven concrete texture at the cyborg dancehall (the Upsetters-signed-to-On-U-Sound of Second Thoughts) that validates it as a record obsessed with pushing forward and against, the confines of time by welcoming the contradictions of style to merge as one heaving beast with the substance still fully featured throughout.
Ostensibly, electronic music, and our relationship with technology as a species would have it that the human soul, eaten alive with errors, engulfed with the unexpected, full of sorrowful holes, regrets and mistakes – is replaced in favour of a particular paradigm that favours perfectionism and formula over experimentation and evolution born out of instinct, out of resistance, out of reaction. What Fiedler manages to execute with Ghost Dubs is a record, heavy on the disquieting, alien techno dub vibes – either the climax or the aftershock of something momentous about reducing the self to an insect on a branch, but still keeps the scars visibly scabbing over. With dub, there is nothing to hide. In Fiedler’s mind, what makes a good techno or dub producer?
”I can’t say that, I’m very picky. If everything is too programmed and produced it loses its soul, but that applies to all genres. It also happens to me that I sit on a track for too long, it’s dangerous’’ he states. ”But let’s take dub techno…There are a lot of dub techno pieces that are overproduced and boring. In such cases, what defines Dub is often erased by too much perfection and smoothness. I prefer dub techno where you can feel the influence and essence of King Tubby. This means the music remains raw and authentic, capturing the spontaneous energy of a moment’’.
Always of the moment, incandescent with the essence of a human being, of blood and bones, a lonesome orchard in a factory continues to zigzag back and forth on the same patch of dirt, Hot Wired unleashes unto the flesh in an explosion of mutant dub techno. A spasmodic reef of biomechanical spores and sensitive liquids vibrates wildly in the stagnant wind. Ricochets of riddims both spin planets into particles or slow them down until they harden and crack as hammers hit marbles. Insect chirps echo throughout – the insurmountable bass waltz wreaking havoc throughout with its molten wobble, a volcano rudely awoken from its slumber. Elsewhere, Thin Line’s thick globules of dub bass, spooked shaman atmospherics fresh from worship scrape their staffs against metal fences as a carnival of sabresonic ska cuts through any wires or vines in sight.
There’s an attention to detail here that could be the spiritual manifestation of Black Ark colliding at some mishap with a psychogeographical arrangement whereby the temporal plates of interchange collide into Kling Klang, where the Trojan sunset drops behind the roof of Tresor. It makes one wonder how these songs come about. As ever with Dub, its focus is to make the experience of riding an atomic bomb into Point Nemo palatable on an infectious, everlasting and granular level, but done so exposed to the conditions of a live space. Do Fiedler’s myriad projects change tact according to what project is next on the list to deliver certain goods?
”All pieces were created with a certain live feeling. This means either classically, as is usual in Dub. One take on the mixer, or recorded live track by track, including all errors. My goal was to capture the authenticity and raw charm of live recordings’’ he explains. ”I have many different projects. The approach is often similar. I experiment with loops, noises, and interesting samples that are modified… and depending on where it develops, I then assign it to a project’’ Some of the tracks on the album are brand new. But there are also some things that are older’’.
”Chemicals, the opener, is a very important track. Even though I’ve been doing all this for a long time, I’ve often been plagued by self-doubt about the quality of the music and whether what I want to express comes across. This was also the case with Damaged’’ Fiedler comments. ‘’Shortly before I handed the album over to listen to it for the first time, doubts arose again, that evening, late at night, Chemicals was also created and suddenly everything made sense. For me, it’s a very important piece because it puts the listener on the right track straight away’’.
True To Life is a revisited piece from 2016. ”Too bulky’’ the first time round, a stray dog never quite finding its place on an album, its time became right again when being recreated and mixed by Fielder, suiting the all-encompassing mood of the album wonderfully. A lo-fi industrial dub beat rustles and fusses outwards from a radio transistor perched on an old chair in a remote shack. It pounces with hot throbs of recoiling sonic objects, peppered by elasticated echoes, the voice of a siren sings from the speakers, a shimmering threshold spinning into itself. Meanwhile, shivering with post-apocalyptic monsoons of gargantuan jungle belches, jaunty as they begin losing their cool, but then regaining some sort of stable composition before unspooling completely, Soul Craft utilises dubplates dissolving in a Turkish bathhouse filled with acid, a frenetic litter of ping-pong balls and bullets bounce against the compressed aluminium ceilings of outer space that expand and snap back into shape.
An album of travel, of venturing into the unknown, a waking dream walking through a psychedelic wilderness, a trip on top of underground passages, the industrial and the spiritual converge at an interchange, Undone is as close to hauntological dub as one could hope for, a table of disembodied voices and electric whispers chatter amongst themselves below a mercury and aluminium reaction of unsettling ambient pangs, narcotic thuds and pulses, an ephemeral dub beat rasping against the room, soon to be devoured by something else and sucked into a different dimension as one moment evaporates into another.
”Dub has something mystical, ghostly about it. We play with spaces and levels’’ Fielder says on the idea of dub as being more about magic and manipulation than merely an exercise in sonic force. ”A lot of things happen by chance in my work. The combination of these two terms evokes associations with fleeting, almost tangible moments and sounds that appear and disappear in music and the creative process’’.
No truer is this on the Dub-titled tracks that permeate the album. So much more than intervals, the Dub Lobotomy noted earlier, Dub Battle and Dub Simulation are daring experiments with dub as a tool to tilt the earth off its axis, dislodge order and interrupt the natural directions of flowing rivers that belong to time and space, the real and the unreal, the known and anything but.
As well as being a series of tracks, spawned and snagged from the same culture, connected to the same post-rock, drone-imbued pipelines that still superchargers and pumps through Fiedler’s testament to treating the pieces: the phantom fragments and deserted samples drawn to water then drowned, the unsettling voices, the lurching rhythms, the specks of dust, the flecks of blood, the goo-oozing grooves, bonnet-breaking, booty-bending basslines containing more depth charge than a man accustomed to low-end can humanly handle and stacks of alien linguistic practices, snatched from being recited from the 4th World, are tracks that reinforce dub as being a dark art grounded to the desire to document the erosion of the moment. Dub as a method of translation, a stamp of transition between one state, one phase and another, warts and all (keep the warts, leave the wounds alone, let the heart breath) to make peace with what has past as Fiedler and his fellow dub professors and the pioneers that paved the way to explore this realm before him detect something otherworldly floating in on the radar screen, summoning something up to suddenly cause the floorboards to start swelling as though the warehouse floor was inflatable – turning life, once captured by its chimes, it charms, its spells, its empty jars, to feel free to exist as a ghost, an echo able to exit when a door or window is opened, eternally reverberating against the walls of time.
Unpolished. Imperfect. Yet well-cared for and curated by a delicate dub technician- appointed spiritual engineers and industrial, meticulous studio sages keeping the vibe of what’s been let loose intact despite the ravages of what machines continue to chew on chunks of human flesh by the pound, the Dub term venerates as well as vaporizes what it targets, uncaring about any temporal parameters or corporeal blockages: a coalescence of whatever gravitates towards the magnet in the middle of a moment, harnessed by human hands, antenna erect as dream catchers fetch signals from the airwaves, dub this techno-fried (or techno this dubified) creates, as well as collapses, all that it feels the need to record, to remember, to resolve, and to rebel against.
Dub Battle then, locates a last-standing bunker and strips it to its bare bones. Something heavy swaggers into life, disintegrating the more it develops, crawling from the deep abyss canister, shakes the bolts loose, sucks on them and spits them out like pellets into a parade of bison. Dub Simulation is a head-melting djinn electronic skronk, a molten trove of unearthly spectral soundscapes, snarling from a globular cocoon, dub on thin ice dancing on top of deep water, dripping with grit and grime, tar and oil, primitive tape hiss and raw-dog techno clicks, jagged-edged rhythms churning within the bowels of the deep, throbbing blob and irresistible acid darkness.
”It’s suddenly there, disappears again… hopefully they’ve recorded it now’’
Whoever ‘they’ is, I salute them for recording ‘it’ – whatever it might fucking be. Live on humanity.
~
Michael Fiedler | Website | Bandcamp | Instagram
All words by Ryan Walker
Photos by Thomas Bieniek ©
We have a small favour to ask. Subscribe to Louder Than War and help keep the flame of independent music burning. Click the button below to see the extras you get!
