How might one expect a band with the name Ghost Tapes to sound? Like a group of musicians possessed by the spirits of the elite, postmortem rockers of the world? All of them set out to procure a tape so perfectly rocking, soulful, and cerebral that it simply had to be paranmormal? That actually comes pretty close. Started back in late 2014 by Will Carman and Nick Moulds, the goal-oriented band is set to release their second album, F.I.G., with the first EP release, Ichumi. The five-part band is composed of Will on the drums, Nick on guitar, Evan Ballinger on keys, vocalist Ishka B. Phoenix, and Zeke Kyoku on bass. But their live ensemble is made complete by their producer and record engineer, Vago Galindo. The George Martin to their Beatles, he has been an integral part of the recording process for Ghost Tapes helping them embrace the crunchy distortion found rocking throughout this new album.
With their debut and self-titled album having been released in 2017, it’s been nearly 3 years since they’ve released content. “Moving slowly—I think that’s been the theme—like don’t try to force anything,” Will said. In those three years, they focused on honing in on their songwriting. “When we started [the band], the whole purpose was to just make one album,” Nick mentioned, “one good album that we could be proud of and that if we wanted to keep going we could. But that was the goal.” While that first album was fundamental in developing their sound and forming a relationship with Vago, they still felt they weren’t finished. Will added: “Nick and I wanted to do a band that was more focused on the record than our live experience. We didn’t really pull that off with our self-recorded album, but we let Vago know, who mixed our first album, that we wanted a production heavy second album. [We] kind of gave him free reign.” In recording each song, they would play all together, then individually track with Vago—bring his own artistic style to the mix both figuratively and literally. “We got our alone time with dad,” Ishka said. The shift in sound from their debut album to even our first taste of F.I.G. in this EP is unmistakable. While their self-titled album grooves within a cleaner, jazz-funk realm, Ichumi introduces a chaotic collision of acoustic and production qualities that feel electrifylingly alive.
This awesome embrace of musical lawlessness seems to suit Ishka as a vocalist too, who has embraced the potency of anger as a creative harness for her lyrics: “My mood throughout writing all of these songs was just bitter as fuck. It’s kind of a double-edged sword. I find that I write best from a place of anger. For me, that’s where I feel most motivated. But also carrying that is painful,” she said. Even with that pain, she describes her lyrics coming from almost an alternate persona, one that champions advertence to past conflicts while still being self-confident. “When we create these songs, it [her lyrics] sort of adds these layers of—kind of a fictional character that isn’t where I’m necessarily at right now, but it’s more envisioning where I’d like to be. It’s a character that I play, but to run deeper—my ideal self.”
F.I.G. as a thematic album is conceptualized as evolution within a cycle—the full stages of development within an entity that is not finite. As Will put it, releasing the EPs is “...releasing themes, feelings—like a birth, and growth, and celebration, and death—and that death is the entire album, and you get to look at the whole thing like a life story.” Having stage-based releases was part of “having this feeling of evolution or at least cyclical behavior,” he continued. Ishka joined in saying it was “all encompassing too—not just like a snapshot of a mostly developed being growing into a more developed being, and that’s the end of the story, but from conception all the way through to death,” she said. “And rebirth,” Will joined back in. Ichumi as an introduction to the album is a birthplace, raw and disrupted, and the following two EPs before the album release covers it’s development: “It’s the album ripening,” Will said, “it takes a while for something beautiful to grow out of it.” Vago and Will had landed on the track order with what Will had considered to be his most “counterintuitive” order option. But what is very intriguing is that the full album’s order will be different from the EP’s. The album will be the full experience, rearranged. “Much like life, it’s all very convoluted,” Ishka laughed. F.I.G. as a name not only represents the fruit—holding the symbolism of stage based growth—but also an acronym for “Fucks I Give.”
Breaking down the tracks of the album’s first thematic release, Ichumi’s self-titled opening song is a revived track that had been “sent to the dumpster” in 2016, as Will reported it. But just as tracks cycle through for many artists, it was raised from the dead as a great way to start shows, and it found itself workshopped and dropped into the album. Will said the original sound was a lot jazzier—more reminiscent of their first albums sound—but in its revision they embraced the gnarly distortion that Vago brought to the table.
The second track “Nekkid,” slides into an immediate grove of upright bass and percussion. The drums feel both strikingly acoustic and produced. Will reminisced on the process to make that kind of sound saying that Vago had him intentionally offset his playing, and then he went back in during the editing process to quantize some of the playing for a raw but distorted production feel. The crunchy guitar that follows, escalating the song’s intensity, is relentlessly catchy until it breaks into Ishka’s gritty and soulful verse. Nick worked with a Harp VST plugin (virtual studio technology for all unfamiliar), put it through an arpeggiator, cut it up as a sample, and then transposed the line to the guitar for the fiery charged riff that rocks us through the song.
The final track for the first EP release “Remember” is a deeper, cacophonous step into Ghost Tape’s new sound. Opening with an ominous acoustic piano arpeggiation and slowly pulsing synthesizer swelling up, the song breaks into a more dissonant groove as Ishka drives forward with her lyrics. Ishka’s aforementioned relationship to her songwriting persona was embraced headon for this song: “I write from a very vulnerable perspective,” she said. “I use my music as this exoskeleton. Here’s the trauma I’ve felt, and here’s my response to it; here’s what I would have said in that moment if I had had any sense—from a place that wasn’t emotional. So I put it into the hands of my persona.” While the centers around one chord for a majority of the song, Ishka’s lyrics inspired the climactic embrace of a harmony rarely used by their group, which centers around a I-IV-V progression (for all who do not know, the progression is one of the most frequented in popular North-American music). “It has this massive impact ‘cause we never go to that space. To me it felt like such a great last stand for that song,” Will said. He also mentioned the song’s malleability in a live context: “When we’re playing it live, depending on how we feel about the audience—we usually do it in a dark chaotic way—we forcefully crash-land the song into dissonant insanity. But occasionally we do it in a beautifully ambient way.”
It may be some time before we can hear them make that choice between a chaotic and calm rendition of their songs. With the unfortunate crash of the live-music scene along with many others during this pandemic, Ghost Tapes had to scrap an entire summer tour. “We were really depending on getting in front of some new people,” Nick said. Now their album has become an even more vital component in their engagement with music-loving communities and current fans alike. The bright side is: they rock. They have a sound that’s easy to dive into, and with two more upcoming EPs before the grand release of their album, there’s a lot more on the way to look forward to. Check out Ghost Tapes with the link below, and start rocking till they return to stage.
Check out Ghost Tapes’s latest EP on Spotify and be sure to sign up for their newsletter on their Website.
Written by Tommy Clift
Photo by @mernejudsonthethird
