- Generation-spanning R&B tracks twisted and melted into sumptuous UK garage and dubstep shapes.
- Ghost Phone began as a bit of a trick: Sean Kelly wanted to bring R&B to the dance floors he frequented by combining it with underground house and techno flavors. The formula worked, and now Ghost Phone's catalogue stretches from sweltering breaks to smoggy almost-garage and pitch-black dubstep, suggesting a roster of (uncredited) producers who cover a kaleidoscopic array of club music styles. But they've got the radio on, too. So far, each Ghost Phone EP has been built around well-worn R&B and rap tracks, whether they're decades old or currently lighting up the airwaves. This approach is by no means unprecedented, but the range of sounds makes it consistently exciting—decades of musical traditions collapsed into each other then shrouded in a late-night haze.
Ghost Phone 005 opens with one of the label's most incisive matryoshka dolls to date. "Hotline" mines Erykah Badu's "Cel U Lar Device," which is itself an interpolation of Drake's "Hotline Bling," and its sound recalls both early dubstep and bass-blasted breakbeat. It's a canny combination: drums shuffle atop dizzy synthesizers, and Badu's vocals ricochet off the walls all the way down. "Hotline" is built around just a few words—"you used to call me," repeated into infinity—and the rest of the EP is similarly haunted by missed and tangled connections.
"Come Over" takes a lush Aaliyah track, all unrequited come-ons and pleas for companionship, and laces it with snapping drums and delicately laid synth pads. The Bryson Tiller flip at the end is an effective mirror image, a self-lacerating meditation on a failed relationship atop ghostly keyboards and chest-rattling drums. (In this context, "Hit Diff" stands out: it's the record's clearest nod towards the dance floor, with vocal chops and junglist snares that bring to mind New York's current crop of genre-agnostic producers.) No matter the form, though, Ghost Phone 005 is impressive. Each track balances the thrills of an anything-goes dance floor with the hushed intimacies of a night in. The result is heartrending and surreal: four R&B edits that enshroud beating hearts in a wall of smog.
Tracklist01. Hotline
02. Come Over
03. Hit Diff
04. Blame