Album Review: Space Ghost – Private Paradise
Album Review: Space Ghost – Private Paradise
June 16, 2022
Tom Marsi
The newest member of our editorial team graces our website with her review of Space Ghost’s Private Paradise, an album that “invites listeners to venture into a spectral realm of one’s thoughts: those of the past, present and proceeding. Private Paradise asks: What does your paradise look like? And what does it taste like? Smell like? Feel like?”
Album artwork via Bandcamp
Space Ghost – Private Paradise
released March 31, 2022
Oakland-based DJ and Producer Sudi Wachspress— musically known as Space Ghost— steps his listeners into the search for celestial rejuvenation on his latest album, Private Paradise. An 8-track, mind bending collection of music, and the first album released by label Pacific Rhythm in 2022, explores what it is to know and experience paradise.
Private Paradise dedicates itself to its recording origin in Northern California where Space Ghost traveled to in order to get away from the chaos of the early stages of the pandemic. With over 10 albums and over a decade of musical output, Wachspress is no stranger to tapping into the beats of the time. Through crafting momentous representation of the calm we are all chasing and trying not to take for granted, the producer aims to capture optimism, restoration and a need for recharge before reentering the world.
The album from front to back invites listeners to venture into a spectral realm of one’s thoughts: those of the past, present and proceeding. Private Paradise asks: What does your paradise look like? And what does it taste like? Smell like? Feel like? The ethereally ameliorating record poses all of these questions, all the while providing the soundtrack to what paradise sounds like.
“Something to truly trip out and relax to.”
Upon embarking on this album, one might feel something akin to that of a psychedelic transcendental experience. This is no coincidence, as Wachspress opens up about micro-dosing psychedelic mushrooms during the creation of this album. The truth of these musical-spiritual connections can be found and felt in the reverberated musical themes of space, time, reality, and existence. Incorporating natural soundscapes such as the songs of forested birds, the chirps of sunlit insects and the swaying of the wading trees, the audial sphere of Private Paradise flies past traditional instrumentation in its musicality and finds a way and a rhythm to give melody to the many creatures we find in each of our envisioned idyllic glens.
Private Paradise is available for purchase for purchase via Bandcamp, and you can continue to follow and support Space Ghost on Instagram.
Below are specific reviews of some notable tracks from Private Paradise:
Track 4- “Sounds of Peace”
Sights of an eternal dusk encircle the uplifting drumbeat. A jungle wooded with lightness that candles the cresting night serenely with care and consideration for this euphoric stage of the album.
Remnants of “The Fountain of Dreams” from 1993’s Kirby’s Adventure video game come to mind. A technicolor painting of iridescence with a wit for optimism and spirit for goodness— encapsulating that of Space Ghost’s intentions for the album.
Track 5- “Time Station”
The opening to the latter half of Private Paradise serves as a reminder that paradise isn’t just a, ‘where’, but also a ‘when.’
The detail of the track is spotted with non-lineal crystalline synths and chimes that dance their way into multidimensional space where then is now and after is as before as it was then. If the ‘when’ is all of the time and perhaps also none of the time, paradise is not somewhere to find but moments that have already been and continue to be found.
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Tom Marsi (She/Her) is a musician, audio engineer, and HRT-fueled DJ. Tom's output is heartened by experimental noise-making, intertwining old commercial audio into dance music and most things transexual and trashy.