People are quick to dismiss guitars an electroacoustic relic of the past – take a listen to the conversations between people loitering outside a gig for a poppy guitar band. “Guitar music has totally been pushed into the underground” they’ll say despondently. “Festival lineups are just laptop artists now – it’s so boring to watch unless you’re fucked up” they’ll remark. “Fuck Ableton” they’ll exclaim. But as with all people who get their news from Buzzfeed articles, you’ll only hear the side of the story that they want to espouse, and their friends will wholeheartedly agree because they too saw their favourite lifestyle blog steal the article.
Welcome to the Ghost Cub club. Steamy dream streams that is the Depths EP below all weekend before its official release on Monday!
The happy fact is that there are hundreds of artists who are using electric guitars in conjunction with electronica, classical and a variety of genres to create something unique, and it’s not new. Screamadelica. Happy Songs for Happy People. Spiderland. Melbourne’s Ghost Cub have just put together an EP that comes at an important crux in Melbourne’s beat scene, what with the awesomeness of Owen Rabbit and Vancouver Sleep Clinic‘s work, both of whom are primarily producers who aren’t afraid to jump on the old electric guitar now and then.
Titled Depths, the album begins as an unlikely refuge for fans of six stringed instruments – opening track Luminous presenting a classic electronic clap to keep time over a lurching synthesised warble. Slowly but surely, ticklings of delayed guitar trickle into the fore on the track, but it’s not until Barotrauma and Hypnic Jerks that the instrument takes centre stage. The reverse and the sliding tones on Barotrauma give the track a looseness, a shifting essence that is difficult to emulate in something purely electronic. Hypnic Jerks is a love letter to delay and reverb and while it’s melding of slowed down vox pops is a little chillwave, this is a song that looks to the future of the eccojam.
Inspired by the surreality of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, it’s the last two tracks Portals//Distance and Adrift that highlight the themes of isolated experience the most, to my mind. Tyler, the sole member of the Ghost Cub club told us “I thought [Wind Up Bird Chronicle] was just a really unusual/awesome concept to write around that struck a chord with the ideas I’d always had about the music. The sound is very cavernous/lush sounding and I wanted it to sound like some weird dream/meditations on my past that were put in the setting of being alone in a cave somewhere away from society, but mostly instrumental and vague enough to be accessible.”
You can stream the EP below all weekend before picking yourself up a legit copy on Monday the 15th of September from his bandcamp. No locked in dates for tours yet (as a live setup for these kind of tunes are a little more difficult that your average band) but keep your eyes peeled later in the year for some launch dates.
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