1. Background and packaging

I’ve known the original Bass Communion album which deserves an in-depth review of its own. Created by Steven Wilson, the man behind Porcupine Tree, No-Man, Blackfield and many other fantastic musical projects, Bass Communion is the tube for his most experimental offerings. Some recordings are very silent and calm, others tend to strike with noise and heavy distortion. All in all, most of them can be described as still, eerie, calm, structureless, long soundscapes. I was not let down with “Ghosts on Magnetic Tape”, and found all the high-profile Bass Communion features on the album.

The CD I’ve got is a reissue of the double CD version which includes Andrew Liles reconstruction disc. The package is a cardboard gatefold, with dark photographs that are a reminiscence of the Exorcist cover, and other horror pictures. Not much else is there in terms of artwork and other non-essential things. This actually helps focusing on the main part of the product which is the music itself. As the package contains two CDs, I will review each of them separately.

2. Track Analysis

2.1. Original Ghosts on Magnetic Tape

As Steven Wilson’s own website tells us, the fourth Bass Communion album was created primarily from processing 78rpm records and piano sources and was inspired by electronic voice phenomena recordings (spirits communicating with the living through the use of tape recordings). Understanding the concept for the album and its contents requires some knowledge on the subject. This renders “Ghosts” very challenging in reception because it is fairly easy to shallowly listen to the music without paying enough attention. The EVP theme is a hint that the record hides an additional meaning...

Part 1

The album starts very gently, with crawling bass notes creating the atmosphere. While working on the analysis I decided I won’t go as far as to try revealing the source of each sound, this is Steven’s domain. Nevertheless, describing them in analogies helps revealing the aura of the song. The bass notes sound like an e-bow bass guitar or processed bass piano notes without the attack phase. In the background, a subtle brown noise of a vinyl or magnetic record hums, with some ambient sound sources. Soon the deeply reverbed theme for the part comes in at 1:27. The atmosphere builds up gently in the way of a Japanese horror movie. Suddenly, at 4:01 some out-of-place cracking takes place, supposedly as a message from the other side. Some other subtle fading noise effects come in soon thereafter. When the piano theme returns the whole atmosphere is climaxing. The piece flows steadily until at 8:20 a new kind of “breath” is introduced and at 9:12 another record noise (a particularly loud one) can be heard. This sound escorts us to the end of the part when at 11:28 some silent symphonic theme enters. This is a frequently used design in Wilson’s work, where the “coda” of a piece is formed by distracting new material.

Part 2

Starting with unison female voice, the piece soon expands to more voices. The atmosphere reminds of a cathedral, what do the voices sing? It would require heavy audio processing on my part to actually reveal any message in this and other voices appearing on the album, so I discarded the idea of actually trying to decipher the contents. At 2:17 some background noise comes in, it’s probably record hiss, but very reminescencing of water. Some short loops of processed piano sounds can be heard and soon some feedback buzzing. The real climax for the delicate part is at 4:25 when the piano gets to the background. At 6:05 the voices get silenced and only the piano and recording hiss remain, except for a few metal hits and some more piano delay work, which concludes the piece.

Part 3

This part starts with an eerie low-frequency hum. Soon some steps, cracks and a padding piano ambience come in. After a while, the hum gets louder, actually loud enough to remind of the sound that a stone block makes when pushed. This is enough to wake associations with tombs. Then at 3:03 some crackles appear that are so vocal-like that I am close to actually think that Steven included an actual EVP in this part. The other parts are not as obvious as this one, where the voice returns a couple of times again. In the middle of the piece another noise creeps in, this time a white one, preceding the main theme of the track: an echoed processed guitar texture. At this moment the piece reminds me much of Brian Eno’s “Ambient 4/On Land” album. The last evident voice transmission starts with the cancelling of white noise at 7:37 with the climax at 9:25, soon to be left only with cracks.

Part 4

The piece begins with two layers of record white noise at the beginning, soon followed by brass samples known from No-Man’s “Slow It All Down”. This is actually interesting since Steven often recycles his work but more often the other way round (e.g. “Drugged” from “Bass Communion I” became later the basis for one of the most brilliant pieces of all time - “Together We’re Stranger” ). Going back to the piece, at 2:00 a silent bass drone creeps in slowly, making the atmosphere much more dense. There is a delicate bass thumping in the background and the brass sounds start to overlap with some woodwinds (clarinets?). The track goes very calmly from there, and the hidden voice can easily be overlooked (can be heard from 5:51) as another crackling static. In overall, the composition sounds like an interlude between the first three parts and the last one.

Part 5

This is the longest track on the whole album and can be considered a finale. Some listeners even call it “the real deal”. As for the music progression, it starts with a very cold and deeply reverbed record hum, spiced up by bass notes of unknown origin (I'm on the fence whether it's processed piano or an old orchestral recording). The noises get louder gradually, accompanied by a silent flute from 2:55. In less than a minute further, some delicate voice (or another flute?) starts mimicking the first flute. Later at 4:40 some cracking noise appears and is growing gradually until at 5:29 some very subtle voice/breath can be heard through the crackles. To that point there is little actual music going on but from that moment on some spacial atmospherics creep in, probably a processed piano. The music gets wider and more evident as some clarinet work is introduced at 8:58. From that point the piece gets its full aura, in many ways similar to previous Bass Communion albums. But the eerie recording hum with potentially hidden voices is still here, making the dreadful nature of “Ghosts” ineradicable. The background noises soon start sounding more like a boat floating on water but that’s maybe just audio processing playing with me. Steven is playing with the listener the whole time, especially when at 12:17 and 12:30 more EVP material appears suddenly, very much like the ones on part 3. But this doesn’t change the mood of the piece, it is very dreamy and in a strange fashion - calm. It presents later the already introduced samples in some other configurations and gradually fades out, leaving a certain degree of suspense and insecurity, while the listener identifies that today’s world is far from being silent and some of the hisses and hums actually come from his own surrounding. Are there any voices inside them, too?

Summary of Steven’s work

The album is a fascinating piece of ambient music. Its apparent calmness and the constant feel that there is something underneath add much to the sounds themselves. This is one of the rare examples where the theoretical album concept impacts the reception so deeply it virtually changes the way the listener approaches the music. Steven must have some concrete devotion to this kind of work, achieving a record that is at the same time pristine ambient and far from boring.

2.2. Andrew Liles Reconstruction

To be honest, I did not know anything about him until the purchase of this album. The net is full of various information about the artist, plus infinite interconnections with other off-stream musicians like Steven Stapleton, David Tibet, Edward Ka-Spel, etc. Like other interesting topics, web browsing itself can take many hours of constant new discoveries...

Part 2

Andrew switched the first two parts in the reconstruction and I can see why he had. This part starts very gently, roughly speaking identical to Steven’s version. The differences are mostly in filtering and haunting reverse reverberation. One interesting effect is the pitch shifted vocal at 3:18, and soon after that the noises and eerie crackles creep in. At 4:05 vast amounts of interference hiss effectively get the listener’s adrenalin going. The same occurrence returns at 5:30, soon to be followed by the “voice” of the track at 6:07. This phenomenon is quite convincing and sure can cause some goose bumps appear. The atmosphere calms down eventually and at 7:43 we can almost believe the nightmare is gone and silence will prevail but just seconds later, the voice and ephemeral background noises return. The track seamlessly revolves to part two.

Part 1

The track starts very harshly with some noise of door slamming or the like. Soon a loop of the piano theme comes in with the bass lines at a significantly higher frequency than the original. There are some atonal additions and filtering to build an atmosphere of doubt and anxiety. Eventually at 4:36 the “voice” appears, with another one on the left channel ten seconds later. This is only the start of the madness: some notes on a detuned piano break the calmness completely and it only gets a while before the left voices return. Suddenly, at 6:30 a very frightening switch of themes occurs. There is a lot of background voices of all kinds: water, instruments, birds, the bass theme from the beginning (also at the same high frequency). The tension declines somewhat but the piece of mind is once more broken as we hear someone coming at 8:16 breaking the recording equipment and doing another harsh switch of themes, this time leveraging the symphonic coda theme of Steven’s version, with EVP voices galore. The part is closed with the return of the sounds from the beginning of the piece, fading to the sound of water.

Part 3

At the beginning, the structure is very much like the original piece, the only significant difference being the avid tonality of the humming noise. It does not take long however for the trademark dread to creep in. At 1:20 the music fades out leaving only the raising hum. Just moments later, dull bumps appear and with them, a voice. It plays with the fear of the listener for a while, just to be suddenly switched to another theme with a short but loud hiss thrust. The second theme invites other tonal noises with piano processing. The echoed tonalities get clearer in time, and another voice can be recognised. The peculiar thing about this piece is the usage of humming samples as a bumping beat, which can be heard from 4:35. Some frightening bursts of crackle appear in different panning a couple of times, followed by industrial gear noises and dog whines. 6:24 makes the listener’s hair curl as another harsh switch of themes is done, going back to theme one - this time with the guitar samples as well. Andrew is using Steven’s voice samples without much confidence, in fact just as another source of noise, and does not add any particular meaning to them, as he is using his own EVP voices. The piece concludes with a coda consisting of flute samples and whistling noises.

Part 4

The track starts with a slow fade-in of a loop consisting of record noise with orchestral music on it. I'm not sure whether it's really a sample cut from Steven's version or a fresh one. One way or the other, a haunting tomb reminiscence is presented by some spacial ambient textures in the background. After some time the loop gradually fades out and a bass sounding thumping starts. The loop is eventually absolutely silenced at 2:30, when the thumping becomes one long bass drone. A couple of seconds later (2:53) the record noises are dropped while another noise loop starts. A peculiar way of building anxiety is applied by briefly silencing the new noise loop just to resume it again momentarily. This phenomenon can be heard at 3:22, at 3:52 and at 4:26. The whole time the bass drone grows and up until 5:00 it can easily be treated as the centre of the composition. Then however it meets Steven's brass and woodwind samples. Beyond some unusual metallic hisses presented at 6:20 with disturbing dull banging (like someone at the door or window) the piece goes uncommonly calmly for a Liles feature. I guess Andrew also used this piece as an interlude for the final part.

Part 5

From the very start it is clear that this is the climax of the whole work, the finale. The first sounds already start playing with your attention and doing tricks with volume and panning. Indeed, this is a climax in a very much horror-like way. The voice of the track comes in at 1:51, soon doubled and tripled. This is no more a single EVP communication, it seems more like a conversation between worlds. At 2:45 we have the obligatory Liles’ harsh theme shift, this time utilising silence and clear male voice. The other theme uses a very low bass sequence loop, probably of a string origin. The bass gives this part a more dramatic mood (in the cinematic sense). At 5:01 there is another conversation (in the left speaker), and soon afterwards a very frightening theme switch is performed, sounding like something attacking the listener and ripping him apart. After the shock the third theme starts. It is very calm, using flute samples and atmospherics from Steven’s version. After a time Andrew adds some forest imagination along with bird singing and a stream. The tension relaxes and just when it does decline to an acceptable level, some voices creep in. The samples are heavily processed and sound like cellphone call artifacts. But these are only to distract your attention, the stream and forest sounds are getting louder just to hide the really hollow voice whispering from 9:25. This one is however not particularly harsh and soon fades out leaving only spacial bass sinewaves and some chimes, very much like some of Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works II” pieces (“Lichen” comes to mind). After a time an evident out of place sine sound can be distinguished and it’s playing with the listener’s curiosity. The part would not be complete without a last voice message, and after that the track fades out.

Summary of Andrew’s work

After the first listening I was pretty disgusted with the reinterpretation. Andrew’s version is not ambient anymore, in terms of Brian Eno’s definition (“Music that rewards attention but does not require it” ). At moments it’s very crude, startling and fear arousing. For the need of this review I searched information on Andrew on the net and learnt a lot about his background. In an extensive interview I found he said intriguingly:

“I think anyone who creates ‘serious’ music is constructing a message, an image of themselves for themselves. It’s up to the listener to identify with it or reject it – it doesn’t really matter to me what people take away from it.”

This encouraged me to calm down with my judgements and give Andrew’s version another approach. It seems that Andrew Liles tried to incorporate as many possible ways of storing a voice message within the music as possible. He doesn’t claim to watch many movies, and yet his reconstruction is directed using very cinematographic designs. His work is far less approachable, as he somewhat sacrificed the musical side for the concept. In Andrew’s shoes, EVP takes over the whole album. Having that in mind and treating the reconstruction as an experience, and not a traditional music record, makes it actually worthwhile and satisfactory.

3. Summary

No, in this review there will be no rating with stars or percentage. Each and every one of the albums mentioned on this website is a masterpiece in my opinion so there’s no point in grading their excellence. Instead, I would like to point out some of my observations below.

3.1. Piano usage

One of the biggest reliefs while discovering “Ghosts” was that its usage of processed piano presents a radically different approach than mine. So not all is lost in the battle for uniqueness! While doing Photosynthesis I try to treat the filtered sound as a whole instrument, Steven however used the samples in a very analytical and atomic manner, building music from small chunks. This way he is able to achieve much more control over the final result. On the other hand, his sound engineering craftsmanship becomes more vital, rendering the compositions more electronic in nature. Andrew’s processed versions blur the origin of the sounds even further, taking the result away from associations with piano ambient like e.g. Howard Budd / Brian Eno.

3.2. Comparison of both versions

Steven presented us the material in his traditional pristine production manner. The EVP concept, while a good starting point for ambient explorations, was taken mostly figuratively. It is no surprise then that eventually someone came and asked: “Hey, what if this record actually presented EVP?”. And so Andrew Liles decomposed the album to make it fit this idea. On one hand this is a well executed idea, but on the other it’s sometimes a pain to hear the musical cohesion sacrificed. Liles’ version seems more like a one-time experience for me and he himself supports that view by saying:

“What’s done is done. I think it’s healthy to let things go.”

The real question however is: how would William Basinski approach “Ghosts on Magnetic Tape”?

3.3. Conclusions

“Ghosts on Magnetic Tape” by Bass Communion is a splendid piece of work, worthy of analysis far more detailed than this one. For one thing, I’m tempted to think that there actually are message to be deciphered somewhere in the audio waves. Besides, the album seems to work especially well while being received in a silent environment since there is much meaning in the details to be discovered. To wind it all up, this is one of the rare recordings that are, using Steven’s own wording, “louder than the silence they break”. Highly recommended.

The album cover qualifies as fair use under the following conditions:

1. It is used in an educational and encyclopedic manner on a website used by a nonprofit organization.
2. The image doesn't serve to detract revenue nor attention from the artist, the band, or the record label.
3. The image can be found on several websites, including but not limited too: review sites and the band's own website.

Tags: steven wilson, ghosts on magnetic tape, bass communion