*50 copies limited edition* Dusty Ballz (UK) and WV Sorcerer Productions (FR) join forces to present two new releases by Beijing-based noise/drone/doom metal group, Ghostmass. In Chinese, “big ghost” is a phrase sometimes used to convey a sense of utter out-of-placeness. If you see a big ghost, you find someone who walks the corporeal world in their own preposterous ways. A big ghost is not a ghost, it does not terrorise, but neither does it belong. It occurred to Li Weisi that this speaks to the very essence of outside music making. One of these days, he started saying “I saw a big ghost playing last night” after going to a very good gig.
Ghostmass, then, are a collective of such big ghosts doing music together. Started in 2021 as an improvisation unit based in Beijing, the project gathers kindred souls who share the vision for an open musical space where ghosts feel at home. To this day, the lineup has evolved into some kind of a supergroup of the capital’s music underground: Li Weisi and Li Qing are known more widely as the retro-manic electro-acoustic duo Soviet Pop, and as two thirds of the cult alt-rock act Carsick Cars; Yan Jun has been a veteran experimenter of sounds, words, and ideas for decades across various scenes; the most recent addition to the group was Yang KuKu (YKK), a professional aquascaper who plays music in a band for the first time.
While the project grows from a joint passion for drone, doom, and extreme metal, each ghost attends its own duties in building and rebuilding the collective sound of Ghostmass, which stumbles across a trackless delta of harsh noise and free improvisation. In 2023, Ghostmass recorded an improvised session for Dusty Ballz on a hot summer day. The label was told that they would do something jazz. The two tracks on Side B are titled to pay homage to the legacy of late Coltrane. Side A presents an array of ghostly references from an everyday Chinese context: a martial arts fiction masterwork of the Taiwanese “ghost school”, an ancient Taoist master heralding from the ghost valley, a French DIY-music wizard who wanders in Beijing hutongs calling himself “ghost uncle”, and the famous ghost caverns in the Wuyi Mountains where smoky dark oolong tea grows – these references have warrantably turned into ghosts themselves, paling under translation.
In a time when being human gives way to humanism, perhaps being ghost promises a more real living reality. Perhaps hell is what we live in right now - who the hell knows - perhaps this is what jazz music should be.
