Holy Ghost Inc
What a very strange outfit Holy Ghost Inc were! They first drew media attention in a very early Mixmag magazine feature on Intelligent Techno along with Mixmaster Morris, The Future Sound of London and Earth Leakage Trip (!) This was before WARP's canny yet elegant re-packaging of The Aphex Twin, The Black Dog, Autechre, B12, Speedy J and Richie Hawtin in the Artificial Intelligence series. Poor old Holy Ghost Inc though, they really missed the boat. It took until Tresor released a couple of their LPs "The Mind Control of Candy Jones" (1996) and "The Art Lukm Suite" (1997) for them to escape internal exile on their own label. If I remember those LPs were well received but fell through the cracks.
Quietly Holy Ghost Inc managed to put out a whole brace of classics which were, seemingly oblivious of their over-arching label identity, adopted by hilariously disparate scenes. Perhaps most improbably their foray into deep house "Walk On Air (Sun and Moon mix)" was picked up by David Mancuso and became that hallowed thing, a "loft classic", even going so far as appearing on Nuphonic's brilliant 2nd box-set compilation dedicated to enshrining Mancuso's vision. And it gets weirder, none other than Sven Vath was the most celebrated champion of the drone-Techno masterpiece "Mad Monks on Zinc" although it was also played to death by the London Techno Jocks Andy Weatherall, and "The Colins" (Faver and Dale). Given the generic breadth to this music that this already suggests, I suppose it's nothing short of remarkable that "Nice One Boy!", "Magnet" and "Psycho Missus" were staple choons on the Ardkore-dominated pirate airwaves.
This might imply that there was a stylistic breadth to their work. Not so! Each of these different tracks were but subtle tweaks on their sonic blueprint. Some are "heavier" the beats accented with harder breaks, some are "warmer" scored with piano riffs and featuring vocals but they all share similar sonic signatures, most notably stroboscopic riffs (often chopped-up vocals). However, What's instantly recognisable about Holy Ghost tracks is their extremely unusual feel for space-time. They appear to be more blank-eyed, more focussed on the infinite horizon than any other electronic music of their era, even their break-beats obey gravity. "Minimal" might be a misnomer given the hefty punch of these tracks, but they do succeed into tapping into that oneiric trance-like state independently of whatever mix they're embedded into, and usually it's "in the mix" that you'll find such states fostered. Only the Basic Channel tracks, which were released later, managed to cultivate the same atmosphere. Given their washing up on a Berlin label I suspect that Germany was listening closely.