On Ghost Songs, Toronto-based composer Bekah Simms has written music made of flying sparks and haunted echoes. The JUNO- and Gaudeamus Award-nominated composer often explores all-consuming atmospheres through visceral textures and nervous energy. Ghost Songs follows this trajectory, creating a constant push and pull from dissonance to consonance while making use of dark, engrossing textures.
The album is centred around three of Simms’s Skinscape pieces, each featuring a solo instrument paired with electronics. The instrument plays a melody, often using unique crunchy techniques, over a bed of churning electronics that occasionally shoot transformed versions of the solo back into the atmosphere. All of the pieces follow this structure, but each takes on a different character. Skinscape II, which is written for oboe, opens the album with a loud, shuttering buzz and a low pulse, while Skinscape I follows with a fluttery, breathy flute. Time seems to stand still in these pieces, which jump from section to section at their own pace. The music feels amorphous, moving like a large, undulating mass of sound.
At its heart, Ghost Songs showcases Simms’s ability to create transfixing atmospheres. On the album’s final track, “Jubilant Phantoms,” Simms pares the music down to a series of increasingly anxious drones. With every strike of a new chord, the tension rises. It’s the essence of her music distilled into eight minutes—a feeling that becomes more and more real with every chord.
Vanessa Ague is a violinist and music writer currently studying Arts and Culture Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She runs the experimental music blog theroadtosound.com, and her writing has appeared in The Wire, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Tone Glow.