Description
Ghost Funk Orchestra – A Song for Paul – Green Vinyl Record
A Song for Paul gives Ghost Funk Orchestra’s hazy soul a deeply personal foundation. Seth Applebaum dedicated the album to his grandfather Paul Anish, and the music’s fragments, voices, and changes of atmosphere give that dedication a shape beyond a line in the credits. Released in 2019 through Karma Chief, the Colemine imprint, it introduced a carefully constructed studio world in which heavy grooves sit beside short interludes and half-remembered sounds. The title suggests a single tribute; the album builds a whole environment around it.
Applebaum wrote, arranged, and performed much of the music, then brought in singers and instrumentalists to expand its colors. The result has the coherence of one producer’s vision but the variety of a much larger ensemble. Guitars arrive with fuzz and reverb, drums carry a deliberately gritty presence, and the horn arrangements cut through the softened edges. Recorded to tape at Ghostload Sound, the album makes texture part of the composition. Its roughness feels selected and shaped, rather than incidental to the recording.
“Walk Like a Motherfucker” is an especially direct entry into that sound, with Laura Gwynn’s vocal set against a tightly wound groove. Gwynn also appears on “Slow Down,” while other singers change the character of the later songs. Megan Mancini, Romi Hanoch, Adrii Muniz, and Gabriela Tessitore contribute to a record that never depends on one lead voice to establish its identity. Applebaum’s arrangements provide the connecting thread, allowing the vocals to move between foreground melody and another layer of the atmosphere.
There is more going on here than a recreation of vintage funk. “Seven Eight,” co-written with Bettina Warshaw, announces an interest in rhythmic shapes outside the most familiar soul patterns. “Broken Boogaloo” and “Skin I’m In” pull the music toward different corners of its groove vocabulary, while horns, woodwinds, and strings give the arrangements room to bend. The brief “Spirits in the Distance” and two interludes matter to that design: they make the album feel assembled from connected scenes rather than simply a stack of singles.
“A Conversation,” co-written with Julian Applebaum and featuring Pearl Anish’s voice, brings the family connection into the recording itself. It gives the tribute an intimate detail after the album’s more outwardly cinematic passages. This green vinyl edition contains the complete fifteen-part program, including its opening and closing pieces. For listeners drawn to psychedelic soul, instrumental beat music, and funk with a slightly unstable edge, A Song for Paul offers an unusually specific combination of studio craft and personal memory.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
Intro
Walk Like a Motherfucker
Kaddish
Modern Scene
Slow Down
Interlude
A Song for Paul
Spirits in the Distance
Seven Eight
Broken Boogaloo
Skin I’m In
Isaac Hayes
Interlude II
A Conversation
Outro
