Ghost Power are a new duo featuring Stereolab legend Timothy Gane alongside Jeremy Novak who have made this album of instrumental synth music in Berlin and New York.
The album opens with Asteroid Witch that has a funky analogue synth tropicala feel to it, like it should be playing at a 1960's idea of a sci-fi futuristic bar as all the squiggly noises should accompany some funky cocktails.
Panic In The Isles Of Splendour has a motoric beat and insistent tambourine and other worldy sounds and keyboard snatches, that build to some sort of melt down, as you realize nothing is really as splendid as you'd wish it was.
Lithic Fragment is the soundtrack to finding a 2 million year old fragment that you stumble across, this has almost early 70's cartoon feel to the music.
Inchwork crawls across the speakers slowly developing with light semi classical synths and some odd brass parts making this a sort of space age lounge piece.
Zome Primer has the sort of odd musical shapes and the feeling that they are trying to make a musical ziggurat taking olde English folk elements and translating them into a modern analogue synth tune that feels oddly out of time and yet perfectly in time too.
Grimalkin sounds nothing like as spiteful as the title suggests, with some good crackly interference sounds cutting through the sounds of ray guns firing and gentle synth washes. In the middle of the tune we hear some glass breaking before it builds gently back up and then slowly breaks down to a calm ending.
Heavy Bubbles has some babbling water sounds and ghostly synth noises that are rather atmospheric. Vertical Section is cymbal led synth backdrop to doing everything you can to remain Vertical.
Opsimath has quavering strings and a gently building tone to the gorgeous synths on this aspirational tune as I would love to be known as an Opsimath.
The album concludes with the 15 minute plus Astral Melancholy Suite that has all sorts of weird synth noises and a reasonably sparse drum pattern that shifts and mutates as the sound of an almost heavenly background choir gives into the tones as they ever so slowly add textures and tonal color to the duo's Astral Flight as you eventually get the sounds of take off as they leave for the stars and beyond. Once it properly takes flight the pulsing sounds increase as you get up to warp speed. The latter part of the suite feels like you are floating in space and staring at the stars trying to figure out where to go next.
Find out more at https://duophonic.ochre.store/release/293268-ghost-power-ghost-power https://ghost-power.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-power https://www.facebook.com/stereolabgroop
