Scrolling through Ghost Kwini’s Youtube channel is an intense experience, his new work divided among a series of untitled tracks accompanied by digitally manipulated visuals of flowers, born again Baptisms, microscopic organisms and more, marking a path through paranoiac 8 bit grime, bizarro dembow and the sort of abstracted beat work championed by the likes of TCF, Arca and Gatekeeper. Since releasing the Dark Address EP in June 2014 on Sonic Router, the channel has been the best way to keep up with Ghost Kwini’s output and in the process has marked the way his sound has developed and mutated. Whereas Dark Address tracks like “Black Google” and “Netscape Navigator” wouldn’t have come across as out of place on a Boxed compilation, invoking many of the weightless grime tropes so popular today, the new work is far more difficult to pin down, throwing trance, glitchy noise, dancehall and more into a polyglotic mass.
Hailing from a small coastal town in the Netherlands and currently residing in Berlin, Ghost Kwini’s music resides firmly in the web space and despite wishing he could occasionally hear his music on club systems, its sonic makeup and visual accompaniments seem to fit far more comfortably inside of a Youtube stream. And like a users ability to leap from one section of the internet to another, Ghost Kwini doesn’t appear to be held down by any genre or rhythm constraints, freely jumping from one sound to another in a fashion that is as engrossing as it is hard to follow. Likewise, his Astral Plane mix hardly follows a set template, jumping from gabber, hardcore and grime to a series of infectious bubbling tunes, all tied together by an abiding digital aesthetic, an aesthetic that seems to drive forward with reckless impunity as it simultaneously crumbles. Ghost Kwini doesn’t have an official release planned as of yet, but keep an eye on his Youtube channel and follow his words on Twitter. Hit the jump for a short interview with Ghost Kwini as we discuss his relationship to grime, club music and the internet.
The Astral Plane 