Bad Death Ghosts

Bad Death Ghosts (2022) is a sonic spell woven for a detuned spinet and a spectral lap steel guitar. The piece draws from a forgotten microtonal tuning system: the xenharmonic lower keyboard of Nicola Vicentino’s 16th-century archicembalo — a ghost-instrument with nineteen notes per octave, split keys, and hidden tones nestled between familiar semitones.

To adapt this ancient labyrinth to a modest spinet from the 1960s, the octave had to be stretched across a widened perfect fifth, bending time itself so that an old A returns to a new one. Within this magnetic field of rare harmonics, thirds shimmer with crystalline purity while fifths tremble and beat — as if music were breathing between pulses.

The guitar speaks only in open strings, tuned to the spinet’s harmony: Ds, As, an E, and a B-sharp — a strange logic rooted in Vicentino’s ratios. No frets, no fingers, just natural harmonics: echoes from another world.

The piece is built around a single, repeating chord — a heartbeat. But this chord shifts: notes are added, removed, revoiced. Through these subtle mutations, the listening space slowly unfolds into a circular perception — what composer Catherine Lamb calls “a feeling of something rotating. Something that is not quite linear. Something more total. You could be looking around it.”

Recorded in the composer’s Sheffield studio, Bad Death Ghosts is a spectral song — a sumptuous fading.