Анонимный проект Ferries выпустил второй альбом, соединяющий эстетику краутрока и дуба

Ferries do not deal in certainties. At present, the project is anonymous, electing not to reveal their identities, or any personal information, nor do they play live. The band’s former label Bergpolder liken them to “quickly vanishing” ghosts, their default mode to “exist without existing”. Even Ferries’ album titles, Eye Flutter (2025) and now Eye Wander, evoke a middle ground between earthliness and detachment, stasis and motion, that feels uncanny: a perfect analogue to the type of music they make. I’m beguiled and conflicted by the group’s second album. Eye Wander spends its runtime drifting in and out of consciousness. Prickly basslines, squealing guitars, and high pitched vocals grow legs of their own, sauntering into strange new territory on longer tracks. But what is striking about Eye Wander, no matter how much I listen to it, is the record’s likeness in sound to Damo Suzuki-era Can. This results in a project that threatens to teeter towards banal nostalgia rather than originality. At best (which is most of the time), the pendulum swings towards the latter. At worst, things can get a little pastiche-y. ‘All At Once Again’, the album’s second track opens with lone vocal chops, before drums crash into earshot, their dry sound and repetitive style no doubt pulled from the Jaki Liebezeit playbook. A bassline that oscillates octaves across multiple strings grounds the rhythm, while a high keyboard line bobs around somewhere in the mix. When the jam reaches its most intense, the interjection of heavily modified, near funky guitar stabs, combined with the sleekit bass and motorik drums, create a neat simulacrum of Can. The band rarely slip into parody save these shorter – dare I say, filler – tracks. The moments where it feels like they aren’t channelling their forebears so directly and engaging in broader musical conversation is when things start to get interesting. This is chiefly done through drawing upon dub music, an influence which pervades the record. Listen out for the liberal use of tape delay across the entire project, or the stuttered, hard pan vocal chops that back-end ‘I Swear I Left It Right There’. Similarly, the way in which tracks like ‘Knightville Brawl’ seem to degrade in fidelity as they go on, points to dub. It’s an effect which replicates the way original dub mixes cut to tape would wear down with every use. Drawing on sounds from a bygone genre or epoch is one of those deceptively tricky things to get right as a musician. It involves an element of looking back, abstracting a sound’s symbolic power, in some ways similar to the art of translating a book from one language to another. What Ferries forfeit in orthodoxy sometimes they make up for in the inventiveness of their genre hybridity, which lets me overlook some moments of clear magpie-ing. Their music highlights the fascinating connections between krautrock and dub that quickly become evident through listening and research but are rarely realised. Dub and krautrock themselves share a similar sentiment: both styles are about artists dealing with fraught landscapes through ruination, deconstruction, and construction. Artistic movements like Trümmerfilm (‘rubble film’) and Trümmerliteratur (‘rubble literature’) came after the war. Through an aesthetic choice to depict ruination – not lionised, Pyramid of Giza ideas of ruin; more the idea of things that have actively been ruined, post-war or post-colonial landscapes for example – artists in Germany could use the past to look forward in an attempt to reconstruct their nation. Many influential German bands were called ‘krautrock’ by the press, but for tQ’s own Darran Anderson, ‘rubble music’ might have been a better term to describe Can’s objection to toeing the line musically. Dub performs a similar act of ruination. Artists take fragments of existing forms (such as roots reggae) and combine them with technological innovations and experimentalism, forming a strange new music in the process. In the writer Joe P.L. Davidson’s view, this ruination is a deliberate act, itself a response to a post-colonial Caribbean landscape that is characterised by a lack of ruins, an “architecture that fails to speak to the catastrophes of slavery and colonialism”. What Ferries sometimes lack in the nuance of their execution is made up for by the ways in which their music uncovers and decodes this conversation, looking both back and forward simultaneously. Krautrock and dub are so often used to point towards one another in discourse. It’s exciting to find their links actualised as two poles that inspire each other. The connection between Ferries’ tracks ‘Don’t Stop’ and ‘Don’t Stop Again’, one instance of two where they connect tracks, is an example of this idea in motion. ‘Don’t Stop’ is driven by a high male voice that is slowly stretched apart and chewed like bubblegum against a pulsating beat. The track ends with a modulating solo refrain – before going into a dub-like remix of itself. The phrase “don’t stop” is repeated and slurred, sitting atop a swirly ambient synth. It’s a kind of psychedelic reload. Moments like these, when they work, are inventive and powerful. They’re a sign of a band willing to experiment with form and find their own voice. In a world where krautrock and dub are so often treated like prized commodities, not to be fucked with by future excavators, it’s a rare treat when Ferries hit that sweet spot: nostalgia evoked, but not for nostalgia’s sake. Faceless music, built from the rubble of the world.