Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

Ghost and Tape: Ghost and Tape
Schole Records

As the name suggests, Ghost and Tape's sound is refracted by a lo-fi production approach, with its dozen tracks often sounding like they're swimming in an ultra-thick bath of vinyl crackle, pops, and static or playing through a decades-old radio rescued from someone's attic. The self-titled album is the debut full-length from Barcelona-based Heine Christensen under the Ghost and Tape moniker. Put most simply, a typical Ghost and Tape piece embeds layers of chiming acoustic (and occasionally electric) guitar melodies within surface noise textures, and often elaborates on the basic sound by adding atmospheric vocals, crunchy beats, and treatments of various kinds (phasing effects, reverb).

Many of the songs—“Onesome” and “Automatic,” with their scratchy textures and sleepy guitar melodies, are two such instances—are of the gentle and lulling persuasion, and the album's bucolic side is accounted for handily in tracks such as “It's Morning” and “Science of Sundays.” But Christensen paints outside the lines in a number of the tracks. A slightly more experimental approach seeps into “Cradle” when a female singer's voice is shredded into fragments alongside the playing of Christensen and guest keyboardist Akira Kosemura. “Ghostday,” featuring Christensen's own smooth vocal harmonies in a contrapuntal arrangement, is pop song in melody and form but also draws upon country music in its laid-back lilting rhythms and even shoegaze in the density of its attack. There's a little bit of a post-rock quality in places that suggests affinities to an outfit such as I'm Not A Gun, the duo project of John Tejada and Takeshi Nishimoto; “Bless the Blind,” with its interlaced electric and acoustic guitar melodies presented at a mid-tempo gallop, could pass for a track by the group, for example. It's worth noting that, on this satisfying debut album, Christensen manages to reference such diverse genres without losing sight of the fundamental Ghost and Tape sound.

December 2010