Alternative
Peace World Records · 9 October 2026
“Escapism”, three forty-five, opens the record on the sound of kids playing in the street and a synthesiser rising underneath, and once the slow bass line and the arpeggios come in what it really resembles is loading-screen music. Space Ghost says as much himself: the model is PlayStation 2 soundtracks, startup screens and save menus. “System Reset”, two thirty-three, is exactly that, an alternate console boot-up, and “VGM”, four zero five, a stage-select screen for a game that doesn’t exist.
A second layer pulls the record towards the club without ever arriving. “Sugar Cube”, four thirty-four, is trip-hop with a jazz tint; “Floating Soul”, four fifty-four, brings out a rubbery bass and handclaps that end up carrying a heavily slowed house feel; and the title track, four forty-one, opens side B with a touch of dub and pads flickering around the beat. The producer is from Oakland, the label is his own, and he took the cover photograph himself driving the port at night.
The two best pieces have no drums at all. “Visit Water”, four ten, is the longest of the ambient tracks and starts on the sound of actual waves, and in its second half synthesiser chords arrive that lift it out of waiting-room territory. And “Invisible Pulse”, three thirty-nine, closes on a stream, frogs and crickets and a melody with something of “Final Fantasy VII” about it and something of the grey of “Twin Peaks”.
The trouble is formal. Three of the eleven tracks (“Dare To Dream”, two three; “Blurred Vision”, two thirty; “System Reset”, two thirty-three) work as joints between the tracks with beats, and taken out of sequence they go nowhere: heard alone they’re what he himself says he wants them to be, music designed not to be listened to. Forty-two minutes written across five years on the way home from a day job, which is his own account of it, give you a record that never raises its voice, and that’s a success of tone and a limit at once: the moment “Floating Soul” looks like deciding to take off is also the moment the album turns the volume down.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre