On his 2019 album Grass and Trees, Jacob Long stripped much of the techno push from his Earthen Sea project, subtracting the majority of the rhythmic elements and leaving behind meditative skeletons more in keeping with the digital dub of the Rhythm and Sound label than the minimal pulsations of his earlier work. Ghost Poems is similar, but veers in a slightly different direction, retaining the sparse atmospheres and hypnotic production while interspersing splintered, barely there electronic drum patterns and samples of ambient sounds collected from Long's living space. Composed in New York during the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ghost Poems has an undercurrent of housebound energy that comes through when Long works the clatter of silverware, the splash of a bathroom sink, or the occasional dropped plate sound into his spacious tracks. Juxtaposed with these sounds of the everyday, there's an industrialized hiss that bathes many of the tracks. The drifts of tape echo repeats, strange staticky hiss, and delay-coated clicks and pops that all blur together on "Snowy Water" are reminiscent of early Pole, but absent of the deep rooted bass that often pushed Pole tracks into more decidedly dub territory. Earthen Sea's sounds here often float amorphously, with drum patterns so slow and fragmented they feel almost random at times. Moments like the water drip and desk thump beat of "Rough Air" is as close to pop structure as the album gets, that pleasant track in particular sounding like the slightest imaginable reading of city pop under heavy dub manners. Long takes things to more shadowy places on "Slate Horizon" and loops a somber piano figure, subtle bass notes, and more water sounds as rhythmic suggestions on the slowly-building "Ochre Sky." Ghost Poems is a new page of Long's work as Earthen Sea, reaching past established parameters of both minimal techno rhythms and ambient textures to create interesting and often uneasy landscapes built of unfamiliar sound combinations. It's not as easy to box the album into the haunted dub or abstract techno categories of his earlier work, but trying to unpack the uncommon construction of the album is one of the best things about it.
© Fred Thomas /TiVo