In both cases, roots music can exude the fragrance of social archeology. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between reverence for these cultural artifacts and a fascination with them as kitsch. Today, we’re practically inundated with music that evokes the hills of Appalachia, the neverending Western sky, the hallowed halls of the Grand Ole Opry, and so on. As tumbleweeds continue to blow across the screen of modern fashion, musicians have increasingly yearned to connect with the mythical America that reverberates in vintage sounds. Ostensibly, Ghost Box achieves what Holmes was aiming for, but it also accomplishes much more. The goal, in a nutshell, was to create ambient music using traditional instruments - a kind of reverse-engineering of Holmes’ longstanding conviction that electronic music is today’s folk expression. So it required quite a bit of stabbing in the dark for Holmes on mandolin, guitarists Pat Irwin and William Garrett, pedal steel player Jonathan Gregg, and synth looper Gary Lieb, to arrive at a blend that felt natural. One of the album’s charms, though, is that the rest of SUSS didn’t necessarily see it that way. Ghost Box, then, embodies “ambient country music” not as novelty or mashup, but as the organic offspring of forms that, in a sense, were already conjoined. And in reverse, what is twang if not a form of ambience? In that light, you can trace the melancholic sprawl of classic titles by both of those acts back to Hank Williams. The catalyst behind SUSS, Holmes views electronic acts like Boards of Canada and shoegaze icons like My Bloody Valentine as more recent avatars of the “high lonesome” vibe that we typically think of strictly in terms of traditional roots music. For multi-instrumentalist, cowpunk pioneer, and digital media entrepreneur Bob Holmes, that connection has been hiding in plain sight for decades. That world, as it turns out, is the one we already live in - it just took someone to make the connection. More than a literal reconstruction of an imagined collaboration between Eno and Morricone, Ghost Box opens a door onto a world where ambient music and country-western make for natural bedfellows. Lang, David Bowie, John Cale, Ed Sheeran, Wilco, Norah Jones, The War On Drugs, Burt Bacharach, the Nickelodeon network, The New Yorker, and countless others. What would it sound like if ambient pioneer Brian Eno had produced the Western film scores of Ennio Morricone? We’ll never know, but we’re now a step closer thanks to Ghost Box, the debut album by SUSS, a quintet whose members have worked in various capacities with Lydia Lunch, the B-52s, k.d.
Originally self-released on February 2nd of this year, Northern Spy is now proud to present this fantastic album on CD for the first time, with four never-before-heard bonus tracks.
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