Today’s offering comes from the UK. Michael Plater brings us his latest full-length release, ‘Ghost Music’. The Belgian magazine, Peek A Boo once called Michael’s music, “beautiful and timeless… music that breaks your heart”. Sounds pretty accurate…
At first listen we’re greeted with a track, “Gathering Feathers” that has the tonal and repetitious qualities as well as the vocal delivery similar to Death In June, at least in the main verse part until later in the build up when some heavier guitar sounds come in.
If you look on Bandcamp at the credits and the list of instruments used on this album, you might imagine that you’re about to hear these dense, lush, multi-track landscapes. But really most of the compositions here are fairly minimal leaving a very “loner folk” or bare-sounding feel which is really nice and incredibly effective. It allows for the listener to be in somewhat of an intimate listening room with just the artist and their raw lyrics.
There’s really a sense of purity about ‘Ghost Music’ that’s been rarely seen since Johnny Cash did the series of Rick Rubin-produced releases. There are some neo-folk elements without it being a whole “neo folk” sounding album, partially because there’s a lot of variation among the songs in spite of a unifying atmosphere.
But then you have a track like “St. John’s Eve” which just does an amazing job of crushing the listener with a massive wall of sound that drowns out the bare atmosphere of just the singer and his guitar. It might sound out of place sonically, but I think what they are trying to do here is present a crushing emotional dynamic… like you can have similar reactions to the bare minimal or the massive wall of sound.
There is one track, however… “The Lost Keepers” which is almost one complete wall of noise. However it’s one of those cases where it’s not simply a harsh noise wall created by random linkage of distortion pedals and sound banks. This seems to be a dynamic, well-thought out piece of work that once again, is focused on atmosphere as if in a different chapter in the same book, if you will
I feel this record is really well-thought out and probably took a lot out of the artist emotionally. A lot gushes out on this record so it deserves a few listens to soak in. But definitely worth checking out if you are looking for something outside the box that combines acoustics and noise
https://michaelplater.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-music-2
The Noise Beneath The Snow 
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