BABY GHOST: Jordan Sand's Debut LP to Arrive via Hallow Ground

Jordan Sand has announced her debut album, BABY GHOST, set for release via Hallow Ground. Alongside the announcement, Sand released the first single and accompanying video, Baby with the Sail. The album, described as a spectral song cycle exploring the transition between life and death, takes its title from a 1972 children's book about a baby ghost heard but not seen by humans. Sand, a string player and vocalist known for drawing unconventional sounds from the bowed double bass, developed the material after an extended period away from music following a move to Trondheim, Norway. She has said that period reshaped her approach to playing, pushing her toward improvisation and abstraction rather than predetermined form and lyrics.

For a while, Jordan Sand couldn't listen to recorded music at all. She wasn't much interested in playing it, either. 'It was totally overwhelming, almost enraging, to listen to music, much less play it myself,' Sand recalls.

This was a peculiar thing, since Sand is a musician by profession. A string player and singer who specializes in extracting unusual sounds out of the bowed double bass, Sand grew up playing folk and church music, trained classically, and then spent her twenties as a freelance instrumentalist in New York. Sand took joy in serving somebody else's vision and participating in myriad different types of gigs, ranging from film scoring sessions to appearances on SNL and NPR's Tiny Desk Concert. But her own creative inner world—and interest in making a solo album—lay dormant.

After an extended absence from music following an isolated move to Trondheim, Norway in 2020, she gradually returned to playing music but with an approach to improvisation and sound that were profoundly altered. The music became more abstract, more impressionistic; predetermined form and lyrics took a backseat to the instinctual flow of the bass itself.

'I started to hear what the voice and the bass have to say to only each other - when they have no one to talk to but each other,' Sand recalls. 'I got really interested in how my playing and what I hear on this instrument fuses inward—splitting the string open into a whole environment, rather than using the string as a conduit to perform musical roles I'd inherited from my training.'

These new modes of performance reach their full expression on Sand's quietly captivating debut, Baby Ghost, a spectral song cycle set within the transition space between life and death. The album is out October 2nd, 2026 via Switzerland label Hallow Ground. The album borrows its title from a bizarre 1972 children's book in which a baby ghost appears on the doorstep of a museum, heard but not seen by humans.

Today, Sand shares the first single and video 'Baby with the Sail' in which calm vocals bleed into bouncing, sinewy strings that erupt in a dissonant climax. Sand cut the video herself in collaboration with the Berlin-based photographer/videographer Juliane Schütz, where a visual world for the album is sketched out. A sequence of ghostly, celestial images—a sprig of delicate white flowers, a slow reveal of the person holding them against a bright light, a woman's hand fading like a candle against the curtained window—summon the magnified memories one might carry from life into the next state and a sense of crossing into the unknown.

The album is available for pre-order at this link.

Baby Ghost is a showcase for Sand's particular style of solo playing, which blends high female vocalization with the bowed harmonics of the double bass. Drawing upon influences as varied as the bass-and-voice minimalism of Nat Baldwin, the radical free improvisation of bassist Joëlle Léandre, the avant-garde chamber jazz of Christian Wallumrød, and genre-bending songwriters like Kate Bush, Arthur Russell, and Joni Mitchell, Sand merges forms with ease and, on this recording, shifts from the semi-composed chamber songwriting of her past work to a more impressionistic, freewheeling modality.

Recorded in single takes—freely improvised, sans overdubs or edits—and conceived as a series of scenes of tableaus, Baby Ghost is haunting and abstract. It is beholden to no preconceived structures but unflinching in its curiosity about the liminal, end-of-life state, that which a Buddhist might call the Bardo, a Catholic might call purgatory, and a doctor the surge of gamma waves in the brain at the flatline. Throughout this piercingly original solo debut, Sand emerges from the shadows with a compositional vision that's distinct and daring and entirely her own.

Sand cut the video for Baby with the Sail herself in collaboration with Berlin-based photographer and videographer Juliane Schütz, building a visual world of ghostly, celestial imagery to accompany the album.

Photo Credit: Juliane Schütz

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