TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE ÆTHER

Guilty Ghosts makes music fit for rainy days, everlasting evenings and melancholy moments. Its music made to render the banal into the wondrous.

Layers of guitars, samples and electronically derived beats, are all combined in a style they call "ambient alternative". Arpeggiated riffs are treated with delay, reverb, and distortion, serving a role that vocals might in a standard pop song. Skeletal drum loops create momentum while grounding the listener in the rhythmic and emotional possibilities of the musical ideas they sit within. Each phrase is looped like a mantra, building until it breaks, or fading away into the ether. Not quite songs, not quite interludes, something in between.

At times, Guilty Ghosts can sound meditative, plaintive or in a kind of awe. At other moments, it trembles, simmering with a controlled yet mounting intensity. It's a result that is unconventional yet familiar, as if Mogwai were remixed by Massive Attack, a doomy take on The Album Leaf, or Explosions in the Sky filtered through an MPC.

Guilty Ghosts is originally from Brooklyn, where they spent their formative years catching movies, eating deli sandwiches, riding the subway to concerts, and thinking about life… all set to a rotating soundtrack of commercial rock, ambient, experimental, hip-hop, and heavy music. All the while, they were dreaming of ways to contribute to the culture, and pay homage to the alchemy of emotional expression, sonic experimentation, and audience connection that his musical heroes accomplished – from The Cure to The Durutti Column… The Fragile to “I Will Follow”... Brian Eno to Chino Moreno.

Metalogues is the seventh release from Guilty Ghosts. It is dedicated to both Ryuichi Sakomoto (DOD 3/28/23) and Taylor Hawkins (DOD 3/25/22), both of whom passed during the majority of the recording. The dedication is a sincere acknowledgement of (and respect for) both artists’ contributions to the musical traditions Guilty Ghosts merges, purposefully presenting them with shared hierarchy and equal influence in spite of the differences in their discographies – a fitting way to summarize the elegiac textures and ecstatic rhythms found on the project.

Taking its name and conceit from anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Metalogues is the first in a series of thematically-linked works that attempt to reconcile (and bear witness to) complex emotions, memories and subjects.

It is an invitation for listeners to do the same.

Discography