Ghost Mind – 13 July 2017

Ghost Mind consists of Jon Andriessen on guitar, kalimba and effects, Pete Robson’s horns and Stuart Wilding on percussion. All this combined with a background of found sounds gathered from around the planet. Essentially, Ghost Mind is a four-person trio, the fourth member being the titular “Ghost”.
The concept of Ghost Mind was devised while the members were playing together with the Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra. The idea was to carry on that experimental, improvised sound with an added backtrack – the Ghost – in a more compact trio replacing the Orchestra and creating a soundscape with a space difficult to create in a larger group.

Having formed in 2014, the band, based in Cheltenham and London, have played across the UK and recently returned from a tour of Germany where they also collaborated with Gottingen trio, Brainville Desperados.
Further collaborations with the likes of Rothko, Emi Watanabe, BeiBei Wang, Saltings, Lee Boyd Allotson, Chris Cundy and a long list of poets and performers has seen Ghost Mind establish themselves as a unique and completely indescribable force on tour.

In 2017 they collaborated with Johny Brown (Band of Holy Joy) and actor Tam Dean Burn, adding an hour long improvised soundscape to Browns adaptation of the Bill Drummond play, “Bill Drummond is Dead” live on the radio for Resonance FM.

“Magical!” Ernst Reijseger

‘The thing about Ghost Mind is they don’t just improvise with instruments toys and objects but through the sounds they process through the Ghost Mind machine it seems as if they are improvising with our very pasts, with our memories and dreams to conjure a beautiful and vital sometime orchestral sometime post hauntological but always inventive sound’ Johny Brown, Band of Holy Joy

“Wonderful diffused Percussion sounds from another world… From the urban world to nature, into a bed of birdsong and back again… The band is obviously not afraid to sound experimental.” Göttingen Tageblatt
“Fantastic, inventive, dazzling, humorous and yet serious at turns.” Tony Broad, Impress Festival

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/clear-spot-the-cherry-blossom-quartet-20th-march-2017/
https://vimeo.com/162428635
https://thecherryblossomquartet.tumblr.com/post/158644147673/bill-drummond-is-dead-with-tam-dean-burn-and
https://pinealreverie.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-deepspaceworks-2016
https://pinealreverie.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-mind-live-at-2pigs-2016

Reviews:
“With roots in the Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra, Ghost Mind is an experimental soundscape collaboration currently consisting of trumpet player Pete Robson, percussionist Stuart Wilding, and Jon Andriessen on heavily-treated guitar, combined with a background of found sounds gathered from around the planet. They present themselves as “a four-person trio” (the fourth member being the titular ghost). Live, they’re a magical concoction, with Stuart’s percussion exploits recalling the startling, fleeting and unforgettable work that Jamie Muir brought to various Derek Bailey bands and King Crimson in the 1970s, Pete’s trumpet journeying from jazz-mute musings and trombone impressions to free-improv mouthpiece splutters, and Jon’s heavily-processed guitar creating dense architectural fabrics and noise blocks but sometimes rising up with plangent, momentary clean licks.
“Working together, Ghost Mind create aural experiences which suggest both the world traveller and the documentary edit suite. Their instrumental illustrations and interspersed field recordings link temples to shopping precincts or treetops hung with birdsong, or link toyshops to ping-pong matches; while further human-driven sounds flicker briefly through the mileu via interjections of harmonica and glockenspiel, water-warbling bird whistles, drum notes to shoe-scrapes and miscellaneous tickings. The fact that it all sounds musical throughout – as compelling to children and casual attendees as to dedicated deep listeners – is another of their creative triumphs.”
Dann Chinn, Misfit City