Back in 1994, tasked with curating the fourth volume of Virgin’s , coined a new subgenre when he dubbed the compilation . Less a hard-and-fast category than a general air of desolation that might crop up in any number of contexts—drone, post-rock, industrial, and more—isolationism cast a long shadow across subsequent decades of dark ambient. Yet Martin himself didn’t linger there.
Though he has made many different types of music under many different aliases over the years, he became most closely identified with the industrial-strength dancehall that he records as . That range makes Michael Fiedler a natural fit for Martin’s Pressure label. Using aliases like Tokyo Tower and Jah Schulz, the Stuttgart producer has been turning out dub reggae for nearly two decades.
But in 2020 Fiedler began putting out a series of drone-driven ambient albums under his own name, tapping into the claustrophobic dread that haunted the original comp. The two sides of his musical persona now come together on his debut album as Ghost Dubs, a distillation of ambient dub into a wispy, wraithlike form. Fiedler has been moving toward this sound for a while.
On 2020’s , he slowed his tempos and muffled his bass, luxuriating in the murk. But on , he takes that process to new extremes. This is dub compressed to the point of abstraction, everything extraneous stripped away.
A uniform palette carries across the album: ultra-low sub-bass pressure, hi-hats sanded down to silvery streaks, an omnipres.