The 555-5555 Hauntological Society

#21

@ehg yer ‘edenic and sinister’ is a great way of putting it. And yes, the aesthetic quality is also an important feature that hasn’t been discussed yet. The artwork, sleevenotes etc. are almost as important as the music itself.

No apology necessary. Most of the (depressingly few) conversations I have with people on this topic are just fans so it’ll be great to get a musicians perspective!

Also worth pointing out to the uniniated that not ALL hauntology stems specifically from the pre-thatcher era… many people have made music carrying the hauntology tag evoking the death of 90s rave culture, burial being just one example.

#22

hypnagogic pop – you are correct that this movement captured so much of the elusive post-modern essence of American yesteryear.

I think that was continued a bit in the lo-fi movement techno/house movement still running along quite nicely. Some of it is quite derivative, but some is great (esp the american stuff, like Huerco S, Terekke etc).

#23

New mix from the advisory circle on radio belbury, in anticipation of his new album out tomorrow.

#24

@chava perhaps, and you might be onto something with the Huerco reference…his recent (and quite peculiar) foray into audio “mining” speaks to the very American concept of post-colonial Western expansion and all that goes with it (exploration, discovery, “back-to-the-land” sustainability, commodification, etc.).

but, back to North American, hypnagogic extensions of long-lost futures, I don’t think anyone tops the master of this domain, 0PN…

#25

Phillip Jeck and William Basinski should be mentioned if not already

#26

I’ll edit the top post and add a mention for basinski… the disintegration loops is a masterpiece.

#27

Who are the other people out there evoking rave culture?

I wonder about the potential of taking a living-as-if, expansive approach to imagined utopian futures, rather than an elegiac one. As if you’re living in that lost possible future, and making music from that perspective. Without falling into the retromania time capsule sort of thing — doing it as a vital, living sound.

What would that be like? Is there already plenty out there like this? (Afro-futurism, for one thing.)

#28

@S.A Mordant music’s dead air is the first thing that comes to mind. I interpret it as an abstract concept album… as though you’ve accidentally tuned into a public service broadcast station that’s stuck in a time anomaly, being run by a mysterious organisation with ill intent. I’ll definitely have more to say about this album in the future but I highly recommend it, one of my faves in the hauntology canon.

If that’s to your liking, I’d also check out Baron mordant’s project with ekoplekz, emmplekz. Sounds like a surrealist, defeated sleaford mods,
they’re brilliant.

More recently there’s creaking haze and other rave ghosts by assembled minds. It’s like an ancient druid gathering scored by rave tunes. One of my fave albums from the past few years.

I’ll get back to you on that second point.

#29

@S.A @blank what about the mythical Drexciyan alternaverse? they seemed to have successfully imagined a complete utopian rave future. I suppose that veers into sci-fi away from hauntology, though…

#30

So using this lens im curious about folks opinion of Jamie XX’s In Colour and the grief he received by some for creating music that was referential to a time he never experienced with clips and layers of quotes. Bicep have done this on their latest album a bit. Sort of a false nostalgia, maybe there is a hauntologial typed term for this? If not anyone want to make one and expand on how it might vibe with hauntology…

#31

Couldn’t disagree more. In Colour is an awful album, it just picks a couple of vague signifiers and bolts them on without any kind of deeper meaning or context.

The criticism wasn’t that he was referencing a time he hadn’t experienced, it was that his approach to doing so was half-baked, inaccurate and kind of exploitative.

This review nails everything that’s wrong with it:

#32

I think perhaps this may be outside of hauntology’s remit. One of the main prerequisites for a work of art being open to a hauntological reading is having a sense of time distortion – ‘the past inside the present’ – and/or representing ’nostalgia for lost futures’, either in a literal or a more existential sense. A personal example would be that I either wasn’t alive or a very small child during many of the time periods that hauntologists mine (60s psychedelia, 70s popular modernism, 90s rave etc.) though much of the music still evokes a sense of loss, an eeriness and melancholia… a feeling of being born too late or having had some cultural heritage taken from me.

I think it’s through this that hauntology avoids being mere pastiche and I find it difficult to imagine a ‘new’ utopian sound that uses music from the past to evoke this, not falling into this trap. I’ve not listened to the Jamie xx album that’s been mentioned, though it seems that this is what exactly has happened in this case.

Worth pointing out that I’m not a musician, so I’m speaking purely from the perspective of a writer/theorist (though I’m also neither of those). Interested in hearing opinions from people who are trying to make music in either a hauntological vein or music drawing from the past but avoiding the pitfall of pointless nostalgia.

#33

Great thread! I’m not particularly involved with or knowledgable on hauntology as a topic save for enjoying some of its output, but I will rep endlessly for Mark Fisher’s writing. I’ll also throw in a recommendation for “Ghosts of my Life”, and I don’t think anyone’s mentioned “The Weird and the Eerie” either, which is strongly recommended too.

#34

definitely worth mention Sophia Loizou’s work at this point

#35

New album out today! https://boomkat.com/products/irregular-territories

#36

Also what’s are ppls thoughts on Vaporwave in the Hauntology canon?

#37

Can’t wait to listen to this! Sophia taught me at uni so I owe a lot to her musically

#38

I see vaporwave as being more of a continuation of hypnagogic pop than being strictly a hauntological phenomenon. Though tbh I’m not too keen on vaporwave beyond the odd track and haven’t really explored the genre in great detail… love it’s originators though (opn, ferraro etc.).

#39

Yeah, I guess what I was thinking of couldn’t be called hauntological because it wouldn’t have that vibe of loss. It would be about making those past visions an actual reality in the present — a version of the Situationist living-as-if tactic via music. I’m also thinking of the unrealized celebratory record that Burial once mentioned as a follow-up to Untrue, particularly the last track. (Sort of, without reference to whatever intent that might have had.)

Anyway, a bit off topic…

#40

In terms of why the UK’s such a hotbed for this stuff, I think the underlying reason as others have mentioned is that abolition of the welfare state which existed pre-Thatcher. Both in the sense of a lost future, but also because that memory lines up very neatly with the nostalgia everyone feels for their childhood: seeing things pre-1979 as an entirely different time, both Edenic and a bit sinister.

I’d be interested to learn how anyone younger than 30(ish) views the genre of hauntology/wobbly British electronics. I was saying to someone last week (discussing Gerry Anderson SUPERMARIONATION series’) that there’s a cultural lexicon built up prior to the introduction of satellite/cable TV in the UK, which really took off around 1990. There were a lot of re-runs, and I recall a fair few bleak, dubbed Scandinavian children’s dramas, more than any American imports. With limited choice, we all watched the same things, and those things were creaking, grey and water-damaged.

There’s also an aesthetic parallel though, with things like the Radiophonic Workshop, public information films, etc: a really rich vein of publicly-funded, publicly-minded art which were really experimental in form while being familial / civic in intent.

I’m by no means a scholar on the subject, but it seemed that creatives in post-War Britain pushed and strove to create something unique, which in its weird way spoke to the national character; no longer the head of an Empire, but a kind of injured, bewildered giant grappling with its new future, both excited and terrified.

With the sword of Brexit dangling over us, and the inevitable turmoil, I doubt we’ll see any such renaissance of the public weird; it just isn’t in us any more. We broke that questing curiosity, and sidelined it from the mainstream. Even Doctor Who is all big orchestral scores and glossy production values.

Whatever the next decade holds, it’ll be bleak af, but in a dead-eyed Stepford kinda way. I can’t foresee anyone being nostalgic for the artistic output of the 2020s (mostly because we’ll all be dead in water riots, yay).