SL03 Dollboy Ghost Stations /
Geisterbahnhöfe
TRACKLISTING:
Down Street
York Road
South Kentish Town
British Museum
Brompton Road
Bull & Bush
Strand
Warschauer Strasse
Jannowitzbrucke
Potsdamer Platz
Oranienburger Strasse
Unter Den LInden
The name Ghost
Stations (Geisterbahnhöfe in German)
refers to the abandoned metro stations of London and Berlin. Those in
London were shut down at various points during the 20th century and
remain closed. You can see their traces – ox blood red arched facades
revealed here and there at street level or phantom platforms glimpsed
through the shadows as you rumble through tunnels at speed. The Berlin
stations were closed during the Cold War period, keeping silent vigil
in the no-mans-land between East and West before being reopened after
reunification.
The music on Ghost Stations
finds Dollboy conjuring the haunted spirit of these stations, basing
his atmospherically charged compositions on field recordings captured
at sites on both the U-bahn and the London Underground. As he says in
the accompanying notes: “I have
tried to imagine the spirits of those that might have passed through:
commuters, revellers, spies, worshipers and the decaying remnants of
ghostly dance orchestras.”
The results are nothing less
than sublime; the music (actually a melting together of 12 individual
tracks, each inspired by one or other of the titular stations)
unfurling in one long, dream-like ‘train ride’ suite through the
psycho-geography of two cities whose ambiguous histories remain
immutably bound up with notions of ‘the underground’. It’s a curious
but compellingly procession through an echoing mosaic of half-heard
parlour pianos, gauzy electronics, mournful trumpets, preternatural
throbs and even a baroque fragment of The Rolling Stones’ She’s A Rainbow, blown into our
ears through tunnels of yesteryear. It’s eerily beautiful in the
subtle, yet emotionally charged manner of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic or Brian
Eno’s On Land, yet, for all
that, a unique and compelling sound world that’s all its own.
As with all Second Language releases, Ghost
Stations is not only collectably limited edition and intimately
hand-crafted but also comes complete with a range of commodious inserts
(London and Berlin tube maps, customised Dollboy train ticket, etc).
Dollboy is the alias of London-based musical polymath Oliver Cherer who has released
three albums (of both electronic music and more orthodox song-based
material) under that moniker for the likes of Different Drummer, Arable
and Static Caravan, as well as a host of other collaborations and
projects. He is a regular on the stages of the Big Chill, the Green Man
Festival and their ilk.
150 copies only • SOLD OUT
Fluid
Radio review
For further information on Dollboy:
http://www.myspace.com/dollboycouk
http://www.dollboy.co.uk
For further information about ghost stations
http://underground-history.co.uk
.