JUST WHAT IS HAUNTOLOGY?

JUST WHAT IS HAUNTOLOGY?

God knows this piece is by no means definitive, but I’m writing it in response to a question someone asked me the other day – namely: “Just what is hauntology, anyway?”, and my response, given in the manner of an urbane, suavely sophisticated French gentlemen of the Charles Aznavour variety who, upon being asked “Just what is Cointreau?” is this:

Hauntology? Ah, hauntological music is a musical genre that takes as its starting point a peculiarly British interest in its recent recorded past – notably, a time-period set somewhere between 1958 and the early 1980’s – although I think this has as much to do with the age of the artists involved as anything specifically resonant about this particular period - it contains within those years the last time that England was any good, an imagined golden age in these homogonized times when England was still different.  Common to the genre is its fascination with the pioneering electronic music that accompanied British public service radio and television in this time period, and in particular the work of the BBC’s ground-breaking Radiophonic workshop; old library music; samples from television shows of the 60’ and 70’s;  musique concrète; music for schools; voice-overs; tape warbles; English surrealism in general and a swarm of esoteric pop-cultural references to create a parallel reality built upon memories of a very British past.

In this sense, the term hauntology can also refer to photography, television, story books and even architecture - anything that evokes half-remembered memories, of something present only in our recall of it, in many cases made known only by its absence, and the often unsettling feelings these memories call forth. 

                                     

I first came across a reference to hauntology in Rob Young’s’ ELECTRIC EDEN, a history of folk music in England, in which he describes how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free-festival goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. - and that how hauntology, in its championing of nostalgic reference points, cocktail jazz drums and marimbas, voice snippets, daytime TV,  low budget Hammer movies, analogue synthesizer burbles straight off an Open University physics lecture or wild life documentary; snatches of Vernon Elliot’s whimsical, folksy incidental music for Oliver Postgate animations such as the Clangers and Pogle’s Wood; and naturally, The Wickerman soundtrack, has, within it’s aesthetic, the quality of folk memories. 

Simon Reynolds, a British music journalist and one of the earliest commentators on hauntological music, in his book RETROMANIA, compares hauntology to the action of memory and its ability to allow thoughts to pop up unbidden; to linger; to fade; and to slowly disappear like ghosts, and points out that many of these memories are culturally specific.  The most noticeable thing about the UK school of hauntology is the genres’ use of exclusively British voices: often creaky thespians and plumy poets from spoken word LPs, or snippets of dialogue from vintage mystery or horror television programmes - Hammer horror films turn up quite a lot - and the use of these samples creates a very British set of memories. (In America, the reference points are so dissimilar as to create an entirely different sound. Ariel Pink’s approach to making music, for example, is defined by his lo-fi recording techniques in which he replicates countless 70’s and 80’s glossy pop productions, tape hiss and fragmented sequencing, not unlike twisting the dial on a clapped-out wireless and alighting briefly on reel-damaged tracks by Hall & Oates, ELO and Fleetwood Mac). In fact, one of the earlier but unadopted names for the genre was memoradelia, but it never caught on. 

I’m a big fan of the genre; me. I grew up in that time period, watched the same television programmes, read the same books, saw the same films, listened to the same radio shows and, what with being psychedelically informed and all, completely get the reference points, and unashamedly enjoy the feelings of nostalgia and atemporality they bring up; but I often wonder how someone who didn’t grow with all of these reference points (like, someone listening in New Zealand, say) must feel about it all. I’m also a big fan of the sound of hauntology, the way these threads are often stitched together. In its appropriation of disparate elements, its cut ‘n’ paste techniques, its use of sampling; it’s as if hip-hop had been invented in a haunted garden shed, somewhere in post-war Home Counties England by an eccentric amateur inventor, tinkering around with old radio valves and a soldering iron. The overall combination of all these elements is, in keeping with the name, often spooky and very trippy - It fits my own Mind De-Coder aesthetic (tripped-out music for the discerning head) like an old glove. In fact, after hearing BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE WITCH CULTS IN THE RADIO AGE for the first time, one of the landmark hauntological albums released in 2009, whose use of vintage electronics and spectral snippets suggest a garden party of ghosts on drugs, I thought that it more or less made the show redundant – how could anything be trippier than that, I wondered? 

The term ‘hauntology’ was first coined by French philosopher and post-structuralst Jacques Derrida who, in his book, the enticingly entitled SPECTERS OF MARX: THE STATE OF DEBT, THE WORK OF MOURNING AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL, published in 1993, proposed that Marx would continue to haunt history, just as the ‘spectre of communism’ was said to be haunting Europe in the opening chapter of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. It’s also a play on words – if one says ‘hauntology’ in the manner of that same debonair Frenchman it will sound like ‘ontology’, the philosophical study of the nature of being; this is exactly the sort of joke that your post-structuralist philosophers engage in with each other and explains why you don’t meet more of them at parties.  The idea suggests that the present only exists with respect to the past, and describes the problematic ontology that such spectres, in their incessant haunting, pose for discourse on history. This sort of observation also explains why post-structuralist philosophers don’t get invited to too many parties. 

Derrida’s original use of the phrase, wherein there is a sense of ‘threading the present through the past’, so that the present is, in fact, haunted by the past was picked up on by Mark Fisher, blogger and author of CAPITALIST REALISM back in 2006 to describe an emerging field of music released by Ghostbox, the record label most identified with hauntology. The label’s founders Jim Jupp and Julian House describe their label as a home for a group of artists exploring the musical history of a parallel world. Their manifesto of influences, compiled in 2003, includes music for schools, cosmic horror stories, library music and the dark side of psychedelia, although the Ghostbox aesthetic extends beyond the making of music into design and graphics. Each of the ghost box releases are fully realized packages that come with their own distinct styles based upon 60’s Penguin book covers designed by House in homage to the iconic Penguin image. They have released 18 albums so far by artists such as Jim Jupp’s own Belbury Poly, House’s The Advisory Circle, Pye Audio Corner and The Focus Group – all of who regularly appear on Mind De-Coder - as well as exquisitely packaged singles known as The Study Series that work as something of a cultural exchange between Ghostbox acts and other artists working in the hauntological field. Truly, there’s a whole world to explore – all of it haunted.

A brief trawl of the internet demonstrates that, as a stylistic approach, the term can also be applied to art, literature, photography and architecture as well and if your interest has been piqued, I’ve supplied links to three blogs in which hauntology is discussed in far greater detail, but I shall finish my own contribution with a brief Mind De-Coder guide to five classic hauntologically inspired albums:  

BELBURY POLY     THE WILLOWS

"It's the sound of their world, the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow. But, if you listen, carefully, you'll find it's not above so much as around us. It's in the willows."  

                                                          ‘The Willows’, Algernon Blackwood 

The Willows was, in fact, the first album to be released on the Ghostbox label, back in 2004 and pretty much lays out the template for what was to follow - a blend of influences, ranging from old library music, 1960s-inspired psychedelia to soundtrack, folk and public information films. Jupp’s interest lies in incorporating the mundanity of life in the 1970s with added eldritch elements simultaneously in his music as well as acknowledging a debt to the great Welsh author Arthur Machen, whose tales of supernatural horror are an obvious inspiration. The name Belbury comes from the fictitious market-town of Belbury in which spooky goings-on take place in the novel ‘THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH’, by C.S. Lewis. In the book, first published in 1945, Belbury is the name of the town where the menacing National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) is based, a scientific and social planning agency secretly trained by alien-super beings aiming to wipe out humanity. Jupp has re-imagined this imaginary place as suffused with an uneasy mix of old and new (the perfect Ghostbox metaphor).  The polytechnic, one of the town’s new modern style amenities houses the music dept. from which we imagine THE WILLOWS emerged, circa 1973.  This electronic music played as incidental music for The Open University, but underneath the, churning synth sounds and enchantingly off-key melodies lies a darker, ghostly, element which Jupp would take even further in his guise of Eric Zann, under which he releases an altogether more unsettling experience, which is, perhaps, what you’d expect from a pseudonym based on a character from an H.P. Lovecraft story. In keeping with the Ghostbox aesthetic, the album is named after a short story by Algernon Blackwood, a prolific writer of ghost stories in the early part of the 20th century – and a whole new genre is born.

Check out the very fine Belbury Poly website here

THE ADVISORY CIRCLE     OTHER CHANNELS

The Advisory Circle, making the right decisions so you don’t have to.

The Advisory Circle is an alias of Jon Brooks, a prolific musician, to say the least, who also releases under the pseudonyms The King Of Woolworths, Georges Vent and D.D. Denham, as well as his own name (his 2013 release SHAPWICK is a big favourite of mine). He describes the sound of The Advisory Circle as "Everything's fine, but there is something not quite right about it”, which captures perfectly the surreal soundtrack/library LP-mimicking fragments from his album OTHER CHANNELS, released on Ghostbox in 2008, whose music visits the sort of hallucinogenic public information broadcasts and educational films that, at times, borders on the malevolent. On "Frozen Ponds PIF", a TV announcer warning parents to mind thin ice for their children during the winter is interrupted by a huge cracking sound and an echoing shriek. Elsewhere Brook’s ear for a tune weaves vintage synthesizers, wind and string instruments between snatches of musique concrète, manipulated field recordings and library music in classic hauntological fashion.

Check out his website here

MOON WIRING CLUB     A SPARE TABBY AT THE CATS WEDDING

Of all the artists working within the hauntological genre Ian Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club is my favourite. Whilst ticking all the right boxes - making use of half-remembered childhood memories, public service broadcasts, children's programming and all sorts of televisual oddities – Hodgson doesn’t actually release his work through Ghostbox, but through his own Gecophonic label which, in true hauntological fashion, seems to be located in the fictitious town of Clinkskel, located in amongst the cold and misty moors of Northern England. 

You can check out its website here

A SPARE TABBY AT THE CAT’S WEDDING is Hodgson’s fourth album, released in 2011, and rather like the town in which it was created, there is much to explore here. In Clinkskell, the iconic idiosyncrasies of English life, such as “teashops, stately homes, ruined buildings”, become fertile ground for exploring the odd, uncanny and magical. Under Hodgson’s eye, teapots, antiques, and matrimony take on warped second lives, voices tumble over voices creating a cloud of half-heard words, and VHS-tainted synthesizers bubble up beneath them, dragging us right back into a world of thick-knit sweaters and Old Spice aftershave. It's a record that truly succeeds in bringing our ever-more-distant memories to some kind of focus with the use fantastically trippy collages (he’s all over Mind De-Coder) created by sampling vintage British films and television, and charity shop spoken word and children’s LPs, from which he takes snippets and reassembles them with other samples to form his own dialogues and characters, all done using an (I’m told) archaic Playstation 2 (a very hauntological act in itself).

There are two versions of the record: a CD and LP version, which are not the same, but share track names and a cast of characters. The LP version works as the dream version of the CD version – that is to say the version you dreamt you were receiving while waiting for the much anticipated version proper to arrive. The idea is to do the CD first and then the LP. The LP version is the dream mix-up of the CD. So, by the end of listening to the CD you’ve fallen asleep, and in your sleep you’re trapped inside the LP version. Beady Eye never pulls off stuff like this.

THE CARETAKER      AN EMPTY BLISS BEYOND THIS WORLD

AN EMPTY BLISS BEYOND THIS WORLD is mind-bending album from James Kirby, under the name THE CARETAKER, all though he appears to be slightly better known as V/Vm, under whose pseudonym he once released a 7’’ single of the sounds of pigs feeding (the concept ‘better known’ as used here being relative at this point). As The Caretaker he conjures a quieter, more introspective spirit, lost in his mind; an observation given weight by his album AN EMPTY BLISS BEYOND THIS WORLD, released in 2011, on which he creates music that mimics the fragmented and inconclusive ways our memories, and therefore our sense of self, work.

Inspired by a 2010 study that suggests that Alzheimer patients have an easier time remembering information when it’s placed in the context of music, Kirby has re-edited a stack of pre-78’s, complete with surface noise, crackles, hiss and jumps, and produced an album that actually mimics the effects of Alzheimer’s on the listener. Tracks jump, are looped, several stop in what feels like mid-thought; snippets of other songs find their way into different tracks; songs are repeated; cut-up; moments of lucidity are cut short. It’s all very confusing, but at the same time hauntingly familiar, very beautiful but often too painful to listen to, the sounds aching with loss.

THE FOCUS GROUP     BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE 

        WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO AGE

Strictly speaking, Broadcast were never a hauntological band in and of themselves but their use of vintage electronics, amorphous samples, analogue dissonance and singer Trish Keenan’s poised 60’s style delivery transmitted through heady echoes gave the band a retro-futuristic feel that meant they moved in many of the same circles as people that did.

The Focus Group are Julian House – co-founder of Ghostbox, electronic musician and graphic designer. It was perhaps inevitable that his indebtedness to library music produced in the 1970’s, public information films, sound collages, clockwork bird melodies, hobbyhorse percussion and fragmented melodies would fit so neatly into Broadcast's otherworldly approach to what people thought the future would sound like.

The resulting album, BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO, released in 2009, is a truly trippy collage of analog synths, distant beats, guitar arpeggios, spooky interludes, brittle chamber music and backwards vocals, often all at the same time. The sound is entirely psychedelic, but without any ‘rock’ embellishments, owing much to the highly experimental sound of The United States Of America  - imagine tuning in to a paranormal frequency on a shortwave radio, perhaps while strolling the grounds of a decrepit Edwardian children’s nursery and you’ll have some idea of the noises you’ll hear on this album. Possibly one of the trippiest albums I own, which, I hope, is saying something.

“…and that is 'auntology”

“Oh”.

Those links I mentioned earlier:

 There's an excellent interview with Julian House, co-founder of Ghostbox here

A very fine introduction to hauntology here

Something of a scholarly review here

And one of the original introductions to hauntology by Simon Reynolds here

There's a good argument against hauntology here