Machines, Ghosts & Harmonies: More Ghost Than Man’s Stunning Debut LP

My favorite album of 2015 was DJ Krush’s Butterfly Effect. I haven’t found an equal in 2016, but it shares a spiritual kinship with the dazzling self-titled debut from the new project More Ghost Than Man.

In both, a dark beauty is shot through like a shock of black ink in clear water – a claustrophobic array of samples and the disorienting effect from structured beats that appear, captivate and vanish again. I imagine some flea market of your dreams where Krush and MGTM wander through bins, finding the perfect four second clip of a woman singing something completely nondescript and building a song around that, some Hip-Hop beats and a jacked-out pitched-up laser beam effect from a 1996 sample CD.

Describing records like this tangibly, as a grocery list of sounds, draws away and diminishes the overall effect. It’s like a dream of other dreams: big booming beats and crystalline tones, lustrous keys and voices from a demon haunted radio. These broken voices and fragmented lyrics are what TS Eliot’s The Waste Land would sound like in the 21st century had he been given a copy of Ableton and a vast library of records to sample from rather than pen & paper or an old Olivetti. Guaranteed you’ll be stoned on this shit by “Anger Sessions”; if not, keep listening, it might take a few songs to get it but you most certainly will get there.