Ghost Dubs - Damaged (2026 Pressing) Ghost Dubs

Back in print on vinyl for the first time since 2024. Available on CD for the first time.

Ghost Dubs, real name Michael Fiedler, aka Jah Schulz, announces a rebirth with Damaged, his first album for The Bug's PRESSURE label.

Having recently dropped two criminally overlooked experimental dub LPs with his Dub Over Science series, the German producer/bass specialist now stretches his own parameters of outwardness still further with these twelve fresh explorations of dub deviance. For those who feel the fusion of dub techno and ambient drone had creatively ended with the demise of the short-lived, Berlin-based Chain Reaction label, Ghost Dubs now upgrades and extends that legendary blueprint's abstract methodology even further and deeper, floating away upon a wonderfully warm sea of hiss and static bliss.

This is dub so atomized that it disintegrates within your eardrums. It's music where the machines take over and virtually all traces of humanity are erased. But thankfully, the warmest soul still oozes seductively from the pores of Fiedler's robo riddims. Relentlessly hypnotic, seriously sedated, Damaged celebrates the point of departure within its mesmerising low-end grooves.

Album opener "Chemical" provides an opiated slo-mo skank, which sounds like Plastikman's Consumed era pulsations drenched heavily in sub-aquatic FX. A triumph of surface noise surfing and subwoofer-testing relentlessness, it provides the perfect intro to this compellingly immersive album.

For batty shakers and headtrippers alike, there's added thrills aplenty, as Ghost Dubs' Richter-scale tremor rhythms remain impressively massive, and the atmospheric depths of Damaged appear tantalisingly oceanic. Throughout the duration of the dreamy selection, there is an obsessive balance of bewitching ambience and heavyweight bassbin shaking.

The lead single "Thin Line" itself provides a missing link between African Head Charge's early percussive body probes and Rhythm & Sound's addictive radiance, with the slightest hint of Burial's doomed romantic hauntology added for good measure. Alternately, and no less gracefully, "Dub Lobotomy" bizarrely resembles Miles Davis' Get Up with It chopped, screwed and relocated to a futuristic Kingston Town.

Impressive indeed, Fiedler's mastery of live dubbing on his mixing desk shines across the duration, giving the album an improvised edge and sense of peripheral chaos. Elsewhere, spooked steppers ("Hot Wired"), haunting house ("True to Life") and 4th World psychogeography ("Undone") combine to ensure there is a forever-changing mixture of flavours percolating within the admirable consistency of the overall sound.

With a tip of the cap and nod of the head to Pole ("Second Thoughts"), it's no surprise then that PRESSURE would turn to the great Berlin-based producer Stefan Betke to master and cut this collection at his infamous Scape mastering room. And a fine job he did too, as high-quality sound and levels are definitely maintained throughout.

If you like your melodies submerged, your dub narcotic, your basslines obese and your beats evaporating, Damaged provides the perfect prescription and entry point into Ghost Dubs' spectral soundworld.