Nostalgia Now: Hauntology's Specter
The longing of nostalgia has turned to a lulling. This is so much the case in music that the idea of retro, which still seemed clever ten years ago, is now second nature. Enter into this dreamless sleep an unlikely buzzword — "hauntology" — and the musical contrarians it describes.
Cecile Schott was 13-years-old when she first heard the Beatles' "A Day in the Life." If you consider the hours and years Schott has since spent looking for, reading about and, of course, listening to records, it wouldn't be the hyperbolic stuff of VH-1 weekend programming, or a Pitchfork review, to say this particular song changed her life.
The record was a borrowed copy of the soundtrack to Imagine, the John Lennon tribute film, which Schott put on the family hi-fi one Saturday afternoon in Paris. Schott was struck by a feeling of profound happiness mixed with a distinct melancholy. Otherwise indescribable, it was the same complexity of emotion which she regrets is often missed by critics of her own records made under the alias Colleen. Schott's elation, expressed as both a teenage Beatles fan and then a twenty-something recording artist, should be familiar to her listeners. It epitomizes our first contact with the things which shape our minds. Such moments, whether they happen in a car cruising an Indiana stripmall or in Schott's childhood living room, have always been popular music's promised stock in trade, regardless of its actual follow-through.
In the London suburb Hertfordshire, about ten years before Cecile's revelation — sometime before Margaret Thatcher's reign and a little after Marc Bolan's — pop first caught 14-year-old Simon Reynolds's attention in a similar way. In the preface to his postpunk history, Rip it Up and Start Again, Reynolds describes the appeal pop — in the form of punk — made to his early-teenage sensibilities.
"My younger brother Tim got into punk first. There was always this god-awful racket coming through the bedroom wall. One of the many times I went in there to complain, I must have lingered."
Britain at this time was nearing the Winter of Discontent, the labor crisis which holds the title for the hinge event in its recent political history. The irreversible shift that occurred in the Thatcher '80s, away from Labourite Clement Attlee's post-war consensus, got its thrust from the series of strikes and bungled press conferences which characterize the period. There is a pop analog from several winters before in late 1975, when rock 'n' roll's second generation began to stare down its own dark tunnel. "No future" was the slogan turning up in photocopied ink, spray paint and spit around London at this time. Punk's appearance on King's Road was branded by Malcolm McLaren, clothed by Vivienne Westwood and ferociously pitched by Johnny "Ever get the feeling you've been chea'ed?" Rotten. The headiness of the times was viscerally felt by anyone within earshot, even those who might have lacked the experience to fully appreciate its significance.
"More than the naughty words themselves," Reynolds recalls, "it was the vehemence of Rotten's delivery — those percussive 'fucks,' the demonic glee of the rolled rs in 'brrrrrrrat'," typical of the new music.
In the years since, Reynolds has sharpened his sensibilities as one of the most perceptive music journalists in print, writing for Melody Maker, The Guardian and the New York Times among others. His view for most of a career that spans a quarter-century (or, to measure it in the terms of his purview — three record-industry slumps, two format revolutions and one wispy-banged next-big-thing after another) comes from pop's periphery, where he has watched and classified a number of trends in British indie-rock and dance culture. Recently, he noted a "curious slowness" to the past decade's rate of change, a point emphasized in "Bring the Noise," an anthology Reynolds edited of the last twenty years of hip-hop and indie-rock journalism.
Last year, Reynolds made several investigations into an unlikely collusion of events taking place not in the familiar capitals of English avant-pop — Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and London — but in the imaginations of a select group of artists. His writings offered this phenomenon the philosophically-loaded name "hauntology," a term which currently sits in the middle distance between mere buzzword and full-on genre in music writing circles and the blogosphere.
One of the clearest, if not most concise, hauntological statements is Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, a four-hour, six part collection of 78 rpm records smeared beyond recognition and into a rich atmospheric cycle by The Caretaker. In an interview with Fact magazine shortly after its release, Caretaker creator Jim Kirby spoke about some of the associations he started to make after purchasing the records from a 78 specialty store in Manchester.
"I started to look into the background of some of these musicians such as the singer Al Bowlly, who was killed by the explosion of a parachute mine outside his London apartment during the blitz. He, to me, is the most haunting of all the singers of that time; his material formed a perfect base to work on the initial idea, which was to record an album of haunted-ballroom audio: the ghosts of these musicians coming back to croon hauntingly for one last hurrah."
"I don't think it's a genre as such," Reynolds says of hauntology, "more like a convergence of interests both cultural and sonic. Analog synths, a certain canon of maverick electronic pioneers, echoes of early '90s rave/techno/IDM, a certain approach to sampladelia that is oriented towards the quirky."
At the center of hauntology's own canon is Ghost Box, a small label artfully administered by Julian House and Jim Jupp. Through Ghost Box's packaging, band names, song and album titles, stills for imaginary films and a periodical called Folklore & Mathematics, House and Jupp have constructed a parallel world to the rockist one the rest of us inhabit.
Breaking down this world goes far towards identifying some basic elements of hauntology. Ghost Box isn't populated by people so much as by references, and in this case they are extremely selective, mixing the overlooked 20th century British strains of occultism and high bureaucracy. For the occult, Aleister Crowley is too obvious a representative. In his place, Ghost Box offers horror writer Algernon Blackwood. The bureaucracy stems directly from the countless examples of socialism-lite Prime Minister Attlee oversaw; the most relevant to Ghost Box's aesthetic being the New Town movement of Brutalist architecture, the 20th Century's last try at a utopian internationalist style. Belbury Poly's two full lengths exhibit these references in different ways. The Willows (2004), as Reynolds put it, "marvelously conjures the weird energy that sometimes emanates" from a Blackwoodian English countryside. And the art work for The Owl's Map (2006) includes a guide to Belbury, a fictional place adopted by Ghost Box from CS Lewis, in a layout recalling urban planning textbooks from the '60s.
A HAUNTOLOGY JUKEBOX
memory twenty six
Plant Room
Interesting Results
Painted by Children
Wildspot
Activity and Scales
Dashwood's Reverie
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Instead of an infrastructure, House and Jupp's world and its inhabitants are supported by a network of half-remembered BBC programming from the 1970s. The name "Ghost Box" itself is a reference to television and the way early experiences with this medium can haunt one's real-world experience well into adulthood.
These influences are incorporated into each of the nine releases on the label — from House's own project, the Focus Group, to Jupp's Belbury Poly, to the recent reissue of a strangely prescient record, "The Seance at Hobb's Lane" by Drew Mulholland's Mount Vernon Arts Lab ("a lost classic of British electronics" as the web site boasts of the 2001 CD). Jim Jupp is delighted by the ways in which their vision have spiraled both outward and inward. "The richer and more subtle this cross-referencing becomes the more reality the fictional world seems to take on," says Jupp. "This isn't unique in the world of literature or comic books, but I suppose it's new territory for a record label."
Of all the records fixed with the hauntology tag, Mordant Music's "Dead Air" best illustrates the sticky relationship to the past implied by the description. The audio itself has the feel of a lost radio documentary — or at least a spoof of one. The concept takes a double-edged approach to the title: Yes, "Dead Air%2