- A journey to the deepest, most ambient depths of dub techno.
- Even dub techno stans will usually admit the sound hasn't changed a whole lot over the past 30 years. Those early records from Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald, the Berlin duo behind both Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound, set a blueprint that has never really needed tweaking. That's partly because the sound is timeless. Its signature moods and atmosphere resonates with too many listeners, too deeply, to lose its lustre. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, Ricardo Villalobos went so far as to suggest dub techno reminds us of being in the womb. "Your heartbeat, the heartbeat of the mother, all these gastric waters surrounding you," he said, "together it sounds like Basic Channel."
A simpler reason for dub techno's enduring appeal is artists like Rod Modell, who over decades have, if not reinvented the sound, come up with captivating new visions of it. Modell is the Detroit producer best known as DeepChord, a duo he founded with Mike Schommer in 1997 and a solo act since 2002. He's a prolific artist with a long catalogue full of beautiful records, from DeepChord's early techno thumpers to last month's cruelly hard to find Red Hair Girl At The Lighthouse Beach (a split with Gigi Masin). There are countless highlights in between, including 2007's Incense And Blacklight or his one-sided 12-inch for Modern Love from the same year, my personal #1 dub techno club weapon.
For the past decade or so, Modell has found a cosy home for his music on Astral Industries, an excellent London ambient label run by Ario Farahani, which launched in 2014 with a DeepChord album called Lanterns. Like that record, and so many on Astral Industries since then, Ghost Lights comes as four long pieces, each about the length of a side of vinyl—a format that, thanks in part to the beautiful artwork by Theo Ellsworth, is clearly core to the Astral Industries' vision (though all their music is available digitally, too).
Ghost Lights shows us Modell's sound distilled to its purest essence. It dispenses completely with basslines and beats, but maintains the misty warmth that is central to his sound. (In other words, though it has the sonic signature of dub techno, it's quite purely ambient.) The rhythms, unmoored by drums, drift so weightlessly you barely notice them. The chords are pure magic, a celestial backdrop to impossibly tactile found sounds and field recordings.
Crackles, drips and barely heard crowds swirl through the mix, teasing the mind's eye with images that never fully form. You might be reminded of the rainy soundscapes in Monolake's Hongkong, or Donato Dozzy's reinterpretations of Bee Mask. But Ghost Lights is more ethereal, more out-there, than either of those records. It has what you could call musical events, like the arrival or disappearance of certain sounds or chords. For the most part, though, it creates a space and invites us in—a psychedelic cocoon to shelter in for 70 lovely minutes.
Tracklist01. Side A
02. Side B
03. Side C
04. Side D