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 prolific St Leonards-On-Sea-based musical polymath, Oliver Cherer, who has released albums, of both electronic music and more orthodox song-based material, under his own name, as well as various other monikers. At the time of press, he currently operates as Gilroy Mere and as a member of Aircooled and the Miki Berenyi Trio.
SOLD OUT
Note : this release was re-issued in 2013 in a black, 8-panel concertina sleeve as SL026 and is still available here
Live recording of ‘Ghost Stations’ in the Thames Tunnel Shaft, Brunel Museum, Rotherhithe, London, 5/9/2013 here