I’m not one to blindly peruse the graveyard that is myspace nowadays, but I came across tracks from the Swiss producer/electronic artist Ghostape that sort of blew my mind. Layering enough African rhythms on top of one another to smother you to death on his demos, Ghostape successfully weaves together monotonous snippets of two measured drum beats into an cohesive ensemble of sound (rather than the cacophony you would expect). In his more polished pieces, which you can find on his People In the Sky released EP entitled Many Stars, Ghostape’s pendulum swings from tribal to electro — opting to exchange romping drum lines with the more standard digital “bloops & bleeps”.
After peeling back all the pieces of one of Ghostape’s original tracks, you’re left with a myriad of elements that can be reconstructed in very interesting ways. Danish DJ Screen Tests did just that with the song “Allez Allez” making it, as the label puts it, “an alt. disco slow burner”. Take a listen to this track as well as one of Ghostape’s older demos for the song “Sometimes”:
