RhaD :: Ghost Music Library (Unexplained Sounds Group)

With Ghost Music Library, Raffaele Pezzella (aka RhaD) fractures memory and signal into a dense, hallucinatory archive where lost transmissions feel disturbingly alive.

Archival echoes turn ominous

Raffaele Pezzella (aka RhaD) is a multifaceted sound artist whose practice combines collage techniques, field recordings, ominous droning atmospheres, and sampladelic textures. Sonologyst is his main project, and he is also the founder of Unexplained Sounds Group and Eighth Tower Records, both well known to our readers. He has collaborated with numerous artists, including industrial music pioneer Maurizio Bianchi. Years ago, I wrote a book about Bianchi and the circle of artists that surrounded him when he returned to activity after a long hiatus—an experience that, ideally, deserves an updated edition.

RhaD (Research for Historical Audio Documents) is a side project of Pezzella, characterized by cryptic, mind-altering sound collages shaped like radiophonic transmissions, along with manipulations of pre-existing music immersed in reverberations and other sonic effects. A previous album, Metamusic, was released in 2021.

This new release follows a similar stylistic path, developing a complex dialogue between blurred mnemonic fragments and neurotropic, transportive electronic waves. The result is a collection of obsessive, cathartic, and menacing soundscapes that lead the listener into a parallel world—one linked to the paranormal and to a hauntological landscape populated by ancient, vanished spirits.

Sound archives, paramnesia, inner sentient movements, and shifting haziness emerge as the central themes of this hypnotic, retromaniac orchestration. Although the work transports the listener into an eroded, meditative audiosphere, its material and archival approach invites comparisons to artists such as The Caretaker, Demdike Stare, Philip Jeck, and the label Ghost Box Records. However, here the spectral timbres and ominously resonant signals are pushed even further, making the overall result more abstract, hermetic, and clouded. This dusty audio editing and dreary, ghostly tone could easily serve as the soundtrack to films such as Carnival of Souls.

All in all, this is an essential addition to the already substantial catalog of Unexplained Sounds Group.

Ghost Music Library is available on Unexplained Sounds Group. [Bandcamp]