Regular visitors to Ban Ban Ton Ton, I’m guessing, will have a very good idea of who David Harrow is. Making, performing, and releasing music since the early `80s, via countless collaborations, David’s had a hand in a huge list of “alternative” and / or “Balearic” dance-floor smashes. Most famously, I suppose, partnering poet Anne Clark on classics such as Sleeper In Metropolis, Our Darkness, and Moonboots fav, True Love Tales, then becoming a member of the ON-U Sound family for the first half of the `90s, before teaming up with Andrew Weatherall, under the aliases Deanne Day and Blood Sugar. 

Now relocated to Los Angeles, David continues to produce and release music, largely on the down low, via Bandcamp. His most recent missives, a trio of tracks led by the titular Ghost Signs, are described by their auteur as “Future dubs from the modular monster.”

These new musical manoeuvres are creations of complex, convoluted, rattling and shimmering, sound design. Born out of reggae’s big bass-lines, sure, but warped and mutated, via the more “avant” aspects of ON-U`s output – African Head Charge, Missing Brazilians, and Creation Rebel`s seminal, Starship Africa. Slo-mo beats thud, sending out seismic vibrations. Packing the visceral impact of a super-heavyweight punch. Trippy test-tones vie with fractured, echoed, steppers keys and nyabinghi congas. Melodica is reduced to a mist. The filtered percussion coming on like a bloody good shake of a sci-fi rainstick. The bottom-end booming like stoned, sedated, bleep. 

David Harrows Ghost Signs can be purchased directly from  Bandcamp.

The cool cover photo is by Mike Weston.