Any serious drug trip is parabolic in nature — albeit a strange parabola, one composed of more textures, colors, and feints than a mimic octopus — and prone to swing into a rather uncomfortable climax before eventually subsiding; from the moment that a mind-altering substance is ingested, the steady knowledge of the near-inevitability of this outcome, despite being almost always challenged by the addled mind, am I going to be this way forever? is, for the most part, the shining causatum that any experienced drug user will cling to, sometimes easily, sometimes desperately, to steady themselves when the Fear cranks up and shit begins to get savage.

Near the top of the apex there often resides — and this seems to hold especially true for dissociative trips — a moment where the Fear takes on a manifest form, changing from a general unease or anxiety into one distinct notion, which is often the idea that one is going to die. This feeling of impending death can vary greatly, from being seen as something of a lock and brushed aside as the user continues to ride the great parabola back down the mountain to sweet sobriety, or can be as dark, abyssal and lonely as space itself. In either instance, one finds themselves confronted with this unsettling apex, be it for a fleeting moment, the duration of a particular song, or what seems to be a terrifying eternity, and then one finds themselves freed of it, unburdened. The music found on Team Ghost’s Dead Film Star EP would be a fitting soundtrack for that moment.

Founded by former members of M83, Team Ghost’s sound is similar, albeit with a different edge, something a bit more dark and organic. The shoes here are less gazed at, more shuffled and tapped, and the electronic instrumentation often finds itself balanced out, or even slightly overwhelmed, by the drums and guitars and bass. “Away” begins with sweeping instrumentation, like sunrise in a black sky, dawning upon shimmering synths and Benadryl fog vocals that in turn give way to pounding drums and guitar that slowly builds and winds before eventually whipping its way across the track, prodded along by a feverish rhythm section into a controlled fury, Beautiful Violence which eventually fades as the song slowly, gracefully dies.

Exceedingly disparate but no less enthralling, “Dead Film Star” combines post-punk bass lines and low, heavily burdened vocals with shining lights and lilting notes, like New Order on designer drugs, then ground to a fine pink powder and scattered amongst the stars. It is as attractive and accessible as it is melancholy, a tight piece of pop song craft devoid of saccharine sweetness but not quite so deeply stained as goth pop, as perfect a piece of high school art class music as one can find outside of Robert Smith, Suicide, The Pastels, et al, with the sweeping danceability one expects in a time where electric dance music is synonymous with top 40 radio.

Rounding out the disappointingly short EP are two remixes of “Dead Film Star,” both fine exemplars of the form for their fitting, graceful reinterpretation (as is the case of Para One and Tacteel’s treatment) or the dramatic breakdown and complete overhaul of the source material that Tepr approaches the source material with. Para One and Tacteel play to the original’s down side, down in this case meaning its delightful melancholia, keeping the prominent bass and flat vocals and juxtaposing them with electric plinks and plunks that noodle and dance brightly.

Tepr chooses instead to hack and slash, then reanimate with a silky precision that retains a similar atmosphere as the original, but rendered as a throbbing, pulsating collection of pieces stuttering, epileptic, into one another, within a framework that pays homage to the pop sensibilities present in Team Ghost’s version.

Dead Film Star is brief, a cursory glance at a world that seems to combine the best of the dreamy, shoegaze drones of M83 with the dark gloss currently coating most all forms of music and the rain soaked embrace of post-punk found in artists like Charli XCX and This Many Boyfriends. It is this painfully short existence that is its shortcoming, albeit an ironic one, since the brevity of pleasure is but one of the realities of the human condition that the band seems capable of making art of; my suggestion is to simply listen through its four tracks as often as one needs to.

(Wsphere, Paris, no address provided)