Dollboy ('Ghost Stations' live, Thames Tunnel Shaft, Brunel Museum, 5/9/13) by Second Language Music

In 2010, Hastings-based musical polymath, Oliver Cherer, aka Dollboy, embarked on a journey to conjure up the haunted spirit of the “ghost stations,” the abandoned metro stations of London and Berlin.

Those in London were shut down at various points during the 20th century and remain closed. You can see their traces – ox blood red arched facades revealed here and there at street level or phantom platforms glimpsed through the shadows as you rumble through tunnels at speed. The Berlin stations were closed during the Cold War period, keeping silent vigil in the no-mans-land between East and West before being reopened after reunification.

Basing his atmospherically charged compositions on field recordings captured at sites on both the U-bahn and the London Underground, the results, collected on the album ‘Ghost Stations’ (or ‘Geisterbahnhöfe’) were nothing less than sublime. Eerily beautiful in the subtle, yet emotionally charged manner of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic or Brian Eno’s On Land, the music unfurls in one long, dream-like ‘train ride’ suite through the psycho-geography of two cities whose ambiguous histories remain immutably bound up with notions of ‘the underground’

For the very first time, Cherer and his accomplices re-created the soundtrack to these ghost stations in the no more appropriate setting than the Thames Tunnel Shaft, a huge, cylindrical underground chamber deep beneath the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe, London where, as you sit 50 feet underground, trains can be clearly heard to pass beneath your feet but never seen – ghost trains, as it were.