Ghost Tapes by Dead Gum

PHR-137
2021, Phase!
Edition of 100 copies on CDR w/ fold-out sleeve with obi strip.

"A portable reel-to-reel flea market score came with 7 reels for free to boost the sale. All of them had their carton boxes filled with sender/receiver addresses and stamps, audio letters from a Greek immigrant studying in Maryland, USA sent back to his family in Athens, Greece during the Greek junta.
Some of these reels were messed up for good and the audio couldn’t be surfaced (at least with my own means), and some “juicy” segments were intentionally left out so as to avoid possible perplexing situations and preserve anonymity. Several years in the making – with an excerpt debuted on 2018’s “META” – “Ghost Tapes” is a haunted audio book in a dreamlike narrative. There is no specific story to be told, it’s just amplified scattered thoughts with minimal accompanying music and low fidelity embracement.
A rendering of my image of a well but lightly dressed man sitting in an empty living room midday, recording on the dinner table and expressing his confusion between freedom and homesickness, muted weep and silent laughter, loneliness and self-sufficiency."

- Panagiotis Spoulos, Athens, 09 April 2021

This album is dedicated to BeaTol, Angelos Kyriou & Costis Drygianakis.

Panagiotis Spoulos (Wham Jah, Reverse Mouth, also labelhead of Phase! in Greece), as Dead Gum, mainly uses guitar and voice through minimal effects to create instant songs, psychedelic collages and direct, stripped-down bursts. The music itself –partially improvised but fully psychographic– has anthropocentric characteristics and lo-fi character and flirts with punk, bedroom pop and analog noise.