The Checkpoint Charlie EP is two tracks totaling 14:30 in length. This first release of 2015 by producer and composer Christopher Bono’s Ghost Against Ghost project is a dramatic, dreamy experiment in lush, dark, romantic harmonies and grating, head-splitting noise featuring a 46-person string orchestra, noise experimentation, vocal stacks, drums, percussion, electronics and synthesizers. The full orchestra was recorded in Prague with members of the Czech Philharmonic and Prague Philharmonic. The rest of the album was recorded in upstate New York at Bono’s Apollo 37 Studios. 

Checkpoint Charlie is a piece from Ghost Against Ghost’s upcoming Dark-Romantic conceptual album, Oia. A two-hour saga , Oia is a meditation on love and separation from love. The album outlines a vast, emotional arc that examines the nature and definition of love, moving from the heart-wrenching experience of separation—a result of love fixated on one human or object—to the realization of a superior form of love discovered through empirical in- sight and liberation from fixation. 

Checkpoint Charlie marks the darkest and most melancholic point on the album but is soon resolved on the full length release. Part 1 is a lush, beautiful and psychedelic piece, unique in its use of the orchestra against synths, vocals and ambience. Drawing on the influence of late romantic and neo-romantic composers alongside psy- chedelic, progressive and post-rock influences, the movement is a fascinating fusion of orchestral writing and post- rock tendencies. 

Part 2 “The Descent” portrays the psychological descent into hell that is experienced when one is cut off from a fixated object of love. The consistent, dissonant, droning waves of “The Descent” are designed to voice the sense of persistent darkness that abounds in the experience of despair once the terror of heartbreak sets in.