Biography
Guilty Ghosts makes music fit for rainy days, everlasting evenings and melancholy moments, meant to render even the most banal of everyday moments into something more cinematic, reaching toward wonder.
Taking inspiration from both guitar driven and sample-based music, they attempt to merge the instrumentation, experimentation and atmosphere found in both with electronically derived beats, all in a style they call "ambient alternative". Guitars are treated with delay, reverb, and distortion. Arpeggiated riffs serve 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 surrounding them. Musical phrases are looped like mantras, building until they break, or fading away into the ether. Not quite songs, not quite interludes, something in between.
At times, it 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 mixed with Massive Attack, a doomy take on The Album Leaf, or a mini Explosions in the Sky filtered through bedroom DIY.
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 as they listen.
Discography
The Witness
Digital - June 2015
(Bandcamp | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify)
Trespasser
CDR, Digital - October 2012
(Purchase CD | Bandcamp | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify)
asentimentalsong/Guilty Ghosts Split
10" Vinyl, Digital - March 2012
Harding Street Assembly Lab
(Purchase Vinyl | Bandcamp)
Veils
Digital - October 2011
Limited Edition C60 Cassette Bundle - May 2012
Words+Dreams
(Purchase Cassette | Bandcamp | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify)
Enigma Variations
C20 Cassette, Digital - May 2010
Words+Dreams
(OUT OF PRINT | Bandcamp | Soundcloud)
Guilty Ghosts
CDR, Digital - April 2010
(OUT OF PRINT | Bandcamp | Soundcloud)