RhaD – ‘Ghost Music Library’ – Unexplained Sounds
RhaD has always been the place where Raffaele Pezzella lets the wires show. Under his Sonologyst name, he’s meticulous, almost architectural in how he builds sound, but RhaD is the opposite impulse. It’s the part of him that rummages in the dark, grabs whatever is humming, and sees what happens when you let instinct outrun theory. The project’s acronym, Research of Historical Audio Documents, sounds like it should belong to a dusty academic department, but Pezzella treats it more like a mislabelled drawer in a basement archive. You open it expecting order and instead find tapes that shouldn’t exist, machines that shouldn’t still be running, and noises that feel like they’ve been waiting for someone to notice them.
Track one presents an empty building pretending it’s anything but. The place has ideas above its station. Noises slide down a wrecked chimney like they’re late for an appointment. Doors creak where no doors exist. Something in the cracked toilet is attempting to play a musical instrument, though it’s unclear whether it’s the instrument or the toilet that’s out of tune. There’s a doormat to wipe your feet on the way out, but not on the way in. You might have been here before, but certainly not when you were alive. It’s the kind of room that feels like it’s waiting for you to leave so it can get back to whatever it was doing.
Track two shimmers like it’s trying to materialise, then loses confidence at the last second. Shapes form, hesitate, and evaporate before they can commit. A church organ is being drowned in a bath, but it’s putting up a good fight, wheezing and bubbling like a Victorian ghost refusing to go quietly. Things want to appear, but the medium is unreliable. Track three brightens the palette, though not in any way that suggests clarity. Voices almost appear, enough to make you lean in, but they stay as indistinct as Charlie Brown’s waffling teacher. You can nearly hear the conversation, but it’s like eavesdropping through a wall made of warm bread. Behind them, there’s a fizzing, crackling backdrop where someone is clearly having a great time, though it’s not entirely clear that we’re invited.
Track four offers its own version of the afterlife. Anyone expecting prancing through rainbow meadows with wings will be disappointed. Instead, you get gloopy oscillations, spongy pulses, gluey whirring. The whole thing feels like walking through a corridor lined with damp mattresses. Not unpleasant, just not the brochure version. It’s an afterlife where the clouds have been replaced by slowly breathing machinery and the angels are on their lunch break.
Track five shifts into steely walls and hunting horns, a glacial emptiness that somehow feels enormous. The space is cold but not unfriendly, like a cathedral built by someone who had only ever heard descriptions of cathedrals. The horns echo across impossible distances, bouncing off surfaces that may not exist. It’s a landscape of metal and frost, a place where sound behaves like weather.
Track six is a tidal wave slowed to a crawl, catching the light beautifully but towering over you. Water as a creature rather than an element. It moves with the patience of something that knows it will reach you eventually. The track glints and heaves, a vast body shifting its weight, deciding whether to engulf or simply observe. You can almost feel the spray on your face, except the droplets hang in the air like they’re waiting for permission to fall.
Track seven arrives like a bout of inner‑ear trouble that’s decided to express itself musically. Everything is dizzy and shuffled, as if the sounds themselves are trying to regain balance. It has that peculiar sensation of needing to get the water out of your ears, except the more you tilt your head, the more the room tilts with you. The whole thing knots your neck muscles and mutters its disapproval when you fail to keep up, a kind of sonic side‑eye that suggests the track is doing the listening, not you.
Track eight is another of those deceptive ones, the kind that leans in with twinkly twonkly charm and pretends to be harmless. It’s the audio equivalent of those old internet jump‑scare clips, except here the fright doesn’t come from volume but from shape‑shifting intent. What starts as a wolfish howl becomes something trying to lick your neck, which then dissolves into a sepia photograph of the bloke from the village who was said to interfere with cows. You know the one. The track has that same unsettling humour, the kind that makes you laugh first and question your safety second.
Track nine is the album’s moment of sunshine, though it’s the kind of sunshine that glints off something slightly cursed. Shiny objects everywhere. Things you can put behind glass and feel safe about, even if you probably shouldn’t. A music box with a dead crow spinning inside, feathers long gone, but the mechanism still determined to perform. Simian hands offering you three wishes. It’s cheerful in the way a carnival is cheerful when you realise the rides haven’t been serviced in years.
Track ten goes full dream machine. Uncontrolled madness, flat orangeade syringed into your ears, parsley sauce poured into your eyes. It’s a sensory assault that refuses to explain itself. The whole thing feels like a ritual you weren’t meant to witness, and if you nip for a wee, you have to repeat the entire process again, but upside down, as if the track resents being paused and insists on punishing you for the interruption.
The final track, ‘The Cat in the Drone Box’, behaves exactly as its title suggests, which is to say it behaves unpredictably while pretending to be perfectly normal. If there is a cat in there, it’s remarkably well behaved, purring in long sustained tones, although the crying baby sharing the space seems far less impressed. The whole piece feels like a test of patience between two trapped creatures, one resigned, one furious, both vibrating at incompatible frequencies.
Across all of this, Pezzella isn’t resurrecting 70s library music so much as misplacing it, corrupting it, letting it leak into rooms it was never meant to enter. The nostalgia is there, but it’s warped by the knowledge that these sounds feel like they were never meant to be preserved. They’re the scraps that fall between catalogue cards. ‘Ghost Music Library’ feels like a tribute to imperfection, but also to the idea that mistakes develop their own ecosystems if you leave them alone long enough.
It doesn’t behave like a library. It behaves like a building that remembers you even if you don’t remember it. A place where the lights flicker not because something is wrong, but because something is awake.
Daz Lawrence
