Spatial Awareness

Instrumental explorers Ghost Notes have expanded their loose approach to expansive soundscapes on second album, Hidden Horizons, with a deliberate emphasis on warmth and space, opening up new avenues for the five-piece to investigate. They've had a while to hone their focus…

“Some of the songs were done before the first album (double LP, By Cover Of Night) came out, and that was two years ago,” drummer Cameron Smith concedes. “We played two songs at the launch that are on this record. Last year we didn't really play many shows; we decided that we wanted to focus on writing. We knuckled down and wrote a dozen songs, and last year we recorded them all in two sessions. That's ended up being two albums of which Hidden Horizons is the first.”

Having that wealth of music and time, Ghost Notes have been able to collate an album Smith believes showcases the band in another light, effectively driving home their unique artistic vision whilst providing a new perspective. “It's intentionally a shorter album because we wanted to use the limitations of forty minutes to throw up new challenges, because we are a band that traditionally works better over longer periods of time. The challenge was to make something that was substantial enough within the 12” LP parameters. We're a band that tends to unveil slowly within a song and an album. We also had some different mindsets sonically. We placed down some restrictions, so there is no double tracking or much overdubbing of anything; there's no instrument that we aren't playing right there, everything there is something that we play live. Yet we've done things like running things through distortions and delays, big reverbs so that it was more stylistic.”

It's evident from the slow build of tracks like Esperance and King Wave that the peeling back of layers is a delicate, intricate factor in how Ghost Notes functions as a band, and the added space that this deliberate approach has provided has allowed Hidden Horizons to plumb new depths for the band.

“I think the album is mellower than By Cover Of Night. Even the songs that are loud, like Pinnacles, aren't really aggressive. We are a loose band, and deliberately so, but there was an emphasis to how we could work as a unit, because we had all this time to write and we wanted to push ourselves into places we hadn't been in before. The song Esperance was one of the first songs we wrote and the last that we got down, because it was by far the hardest thing to perform and write that we have ever done. It's essentially one chord for ten minutes, without any real signifiers for change; it just slowly goes from one thing to another. To not overplay it, to keep things sparse.”