Audiopile Review: Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin crops up a lot in our newsletters. He’s been an astonishingly prolific artist since circa 1990 and has never really let up. And he’s also been an unerringly enthusiastic curator of other peoples’ work. This started in the late 80s with his Pathological label and continued through classic early-90s compilations like ‘Macro Dub Infection’ and ‘Isolationism’. More recently, he started the Pressure label, mainly to showcase Bug beats. ‘Damaged’ by Ghost Dubs (German producer Michael Fiedler aka Jah Schulz) is, as far as we can tell, the label’s first non-Bug-related release. While it evokes the texture of The Bug’s dancehall demolition dub sound, it’s a great deal chiller, with plenty of room for smoky atmospheres. Haunted hiss, percussive synth stabs, and big chasms of dub space are all present and correct. And sooo muuuch baaass. It’s like a punk rock take on the classic Rhythm & Sound dub techno template. Absolutely no surprise that ‘Damaged’ is amassing critical plaudits everywhere it’s heard. Great to see Kev championing this kind of gritty, spacious, bass-heavy business.

Ghost Dubs, real name Michael Fiedler, aka Jah Schulz, announces a rebirth with Damaged, his first album for PRESSURE label. Having recently dropped two criminally overlooked, experimental dub LPs, with his Dub Over Science series, the German producer/bass specialist, now stretches his own parameters of outwardness still further, with these twelve fresh explorations of dub deviance. For those who feel the fusion of dub techno and ambient drone had creatively ended with the demise of the short lived, Berlin based Chain Reaction label. Ghost Dubs now upgrades and extends that legendary blueprint’s abstract methodology even further and deeper, floating away upon a wonderfully warm sea of hiss and static bliss. This is dub so atomized that it disintegrates within your eardrums. Its music, where the machines take over and virtually all traces of humanity are erased. But thankfully, the warmest soul still oozes seductively from the pores of Fiedler’s robo riddims. Relentlessly hypnotic, seriously sedated, Damaged celebrates the point of departure within its mesmerizing low-end grooves. For batty shakers and headtrippers alike, there’s added thrills aplenty, as Ghost Dubs’ richter scale tremor rhythms remain impressively massive, and the atmospheric depths of Damaged appear tantalizingly oceanic. Throughout the duration of the dreamy selection, there is an obsessive balance of bewitching ambience and heavyweight bassbin shaking. Impressive indeed, Fiedler’s mastery of live dubbing on his mixing desk shines across the duration, and gives the album an improvised edge, and sense of peripheral chaos. With a tip of the cap, and nod of the head to Pole (“Second Thoughts”), it’s no surprise then that PRESSURE would then turn to the great, Berlin based producer Stefan Betke, to master/cut this collection at his infamous Scape mastering room. If you like your melodies submerged, your dub narcotic, your basslines obese, and your beats evaporating, Damaged provides the perfect prescription and entry point into Ghost Dubs’ spectral soundworld. FFO: Pole, Rhythm & Sound, Mika Vainio.