Berlin’s William Bleak Returns With the Disorienting “Ghost Waltz”

Berlin’s William Bleak has a new single out on Breathing Records, and it sounds exactly like what you’d expect from someone who’s spent years sharing stages with She Past Away and Clan of Xymox — which is to say, it sounds like controlled collapse.

“Ghost Waltz” was born out of a stretch of late nights with analog synthesizers, pushing the boundary between human and machine until neither one wins. The result is dense, disorienting, and deliberately overwhelming — a wall of layered noise that doesn’t so much build as accumulate. Bleak describes it as a “digital demolition of the senses,” and he’s not overselling it.

The track comes ahead of his debut LP on Breathing Records, which promises more of the same scorched-earth territory: industrial, EBM, gothic electronics sewn together with live instrumentation and whatever aggression’s left over. For anyone already deep in that underground, William Bleak is not a new name. For everyone else, “Ghost Waltz” is a fine place to get lost.

Categories: Music