Grief, as Arvin Dola reminds us, is not a thing to overcome - it’s a room you learn to live inside. O Ghost, his debut album under this moniker, is a work of quiet hauntings, the kind of record that doesn’t try to exorcise its specters but instead lets them hum gently in the walls. It’s not so much “about loss” as it is about the acoustics of absence - how a voice echoes after it’s gone, how a father or a dog might return as static, as a hum, as a warm crackle in a tape loop.

Dola - Madrid-based composer Daniel Mesa - has a background that leaks subtly through every trembling frequency: classical training, choral discipline, the discipline of breathing in time. He once sang early music, now he writes after it - as if Bach had been digitized and uploaded into a dying hard drive. He’s also worked in cinema and theatre, and O Ghost feels staged like a film you watch in your sleep: dim, elliptical, yet unnervingly coherent.

The opening track, “Geology of Absence”, is an ambient seismograph - tectonic drones rising from under layers of dust and delay. The title track (or its unspoken ghost) drifts nearby, while “Resurrecting the Father (Canon)” takes the form of a sonic ritual - something between a requiem and a malfunctioning prayer wheel. The most politically charged moment, “Rafah”, doesn’t sermonize; it murmurs. The track’s mournful drones stretch like the silence that follows catastrophe - what remains when words are no longer useful.

There’s a philosophical skeleton here, clearly: Derrida’s hauntology and Mark Fisher’s cultural necromancy are not just references but coordinates. Yet Dola handles these heavy concepts with tenderness and tact - his ghosts are not academic; they’re intimate. O Ghost works precisely because it refuses to distinguish between the personal and the political, between one man’s father and a thousand collective losses.

Musically, the palette is restrained but rich: analog synths, processed guitars, and field recordings (some captured during his time in Iceland) merge into a kind of suspended time. Everything flickers in and out, as though composed from the threshold of sleep. The production, mastered by Lawrence English, is immaculate yet fragile - clarity and blur coexisting like candlelight through fog.

If there’s humor in O Ghost, it’s the black kind - the grin of someone who’s spent too much time talking to the past. “Specters of Me” could almost be read as Dola mocking his own sentimentality: a looping self-portrait in spectral feedback, a ghost trying to haunt itself. And yet, there’s beauty in that absurdity - a recognition that memory, for all its pain, is an act of creation.

By the closing piece, “Act of Heresy”, the listener is left suspended in a kind of moral and sonic half-light. The heresy, perhaps, is daring to imagine that ghosts can still be loved - that they might still be listening.

In a landscape where ambient music often dissolves into decorative mist, O Ghost is startlingly embodied. It hums, trembles, bleeds; it remembers. It’s the sound of time, folded and breathing - a séance conducted not for the dead, but for the living who refuse to forget.