Hello. Hello. I'm sorry there's not enough seats to go around. We didn't know it was going to be this popular. I'm going to put my glasses on now. Anyway, good evening. Welcome to the Wire Salon, which is the first in a new monthly series of events here at Cafe which will be happening on the first Thursday of each month, probably for the next six months or so, hopefully. It depends how well they go. We're calling it the Wire Salon because it's been put together by the people from the Wire magazine. And we want to try and create a salon-type environment here with these events, basically, where we're going to sit around
and talk about music. Not just that. the idea is to basically put together events which kind of riff off some of the ideas and issues that are sort of up in the air with regard to the kind of music that you might read about in the Wired magazine or that you might see presented live here on stage at Cafe Oto on most of the nights of the week and to put together some events not just including panels but basically we're going to show some films We'll have some kind of low-key live performances, DJ sets, and so on. But basically, the centerpiece of every event is going to be a panel debate, a discussion, a talk, a reading,
involving some of the major players, the movers and shakers, the critics on the scene. This first event is called Revenant Forms, the meaning of hauntology. Now, hauntology is a term that has kind of seeped into the lexicon of music criticism in recent years. It was originally coined by the French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1990s to describe a particular sort of atavistic theory of history of his, which I won't particularly go into because we'll probably get around to that a bit later on possibly. But basically when it first emerged, probably about five years ago, when it was started to be used to describe the kind of music that was being produced
principally by the musicians and artists associated with the Ghostbox label, groups like the Focus Group, Bellberry Poly, and so on. And in recent times, the term hauntology has become something of a fairly flexible piece of critical shorthand, basically referring to lots of different types of music which is not necessarily associated with ghost books, such as dubstep, hypnagogic pop, most recently, but also being kind of retroactively applied to lots of other types of music, especially things like original 70s dub mixes, sample-based hip-hop, and so on. So the idea is that this idea is up in the air critically,
and we thought it seems to get dropped around and about a lot. So one, the attempt of this particular salon, if you like, is to try and understand what this term means, what it might be trying to say about the music it is discussing and so on, and also to maybe give some examples of it here tonight. So obviously we have up on stage with us here three critics or theorists, all of which have written extensively on music which is now being discussed under the sort of umbrella term, Hauntology. But before I introduce them, I should say that later in the evening, we're going to show three films made by Julian House, who is one of the founders of the Ghostbox label. The films are, there's two short films,
and there's a 20-minute film called Winter Sun, which is, I think, the most famous film associated with Julian House's work. And this is the first screening of this film with a new soundtrack, which has just been recorded by the focus group and Bellbury Poly. And then round about, probably about 10.30, quarter to 11, we're going to have a live set by Moon Wiring Club, which will also have an audio-visual component. But the point of this is to talk about music, so that's what we're going to do now. So up on stage with me, I have, from left to right, Mark Fisher, who most famously blogs under the name K-Punk. Next to him, Adam Harper, who blogs at the Rouge's Foam site.
And at the far end, Joseph Stannard, who writes for various music titles and runs the Outer Church Club Night down in Brighton. So it seemed a reasonable thing, as we have these experts up on stage with us, to ask them to begin by giving a brief definition for them of what the term hauntology means or in terms of how they apply it in their writings and so on. And in terms of seniority, Mark, I think we'll begin with you. Don't put the pressure on that. No, but I'm going to ask you to bring that microphone a bit forward. Okay. That's working, yeah? Okay. Yeah, well, if someone had told me in 1996 that I'd be interested in a term from Derrida,
and I've probably been quite surprised to be honest but yeah so I think it is Ranabout was as you say Tony about five years ago as I think you remarked when you did your posts on hauntology 2006 was the great year for writing about hauntology and why was that? well it did feel like a zeitgeist a series of things that had come together by confluence rather than influence, I think. A number of artists, in particular music, and music is the center of hauntology as I understand it now, who, from completely independent paths, had started to explore similar themes
and similar approaches to sound. As Terny said, the most obvious example of that is the Ghostbox label, who had started to come to prominence in 2005, 2006. And of course, Simon Reynolds' big piece in The Wire, which centred on the Ghostbox label, was sort of central to the sort of emergent discourse of hauntology. What you had with Ghostbox, one of the many interesting things about them, was this sense of a lost future.
The craving of the revival, the mourning for a lost future. Now clearly, there's a nostalgic dimension to what Ghostbusters do. Yet, I think there's a paradox, a number of paradoxes involved with the kind of nostalgia that ghost books are involved in. One of which is, you know, we're in an era dominated, increasingly dominated by retrospection and pastiche. And one of the ways I'd like to position hauntology really is as a challenge to the conditions of post-modernity.
Post-modernity there meaning simply a culture that has given up on the future, has contented itself with retrospection and pastiche. the ghost box aesthetic and it's a kind of synesthetic given that it Julian's sleeve designs and the inlays into the CDs etc the stuff that's up on the website is clearly integral to the ghost box experience references a period
of popular modernism in Britain really this is what it draws on really from the 1945 up to 1979 I think Ghostbox themselves talk quite specifically actually about a period from about 1957 to about 1978 we might we could one way we could date bookends we could put on them on the Ghostbox era perhaps or the era that they're referring back to is the Quatermass films the first of which the Quatermass series, the first one came out in 1957 on the BBC and the last one appeared in 1980 actually on ITV I'm sure Joe will talk a little bit about that kind of thing later on
but what what we had with Ghostbox was a kind of re-dreaming of that period where things that were actually disparate at the time such as secondary school textbooks, the open university, penguin paperbacks, weird tales and weird fiction such as you might see on the late night on the BBC, suddenly melded into one thing and condensed together as in the fashion of a dream work. I think this posed a challenge really to a retrospective culture. So this is what I meant by one of the paradoxes, the paradoxes of a nostalgia for modernism or a modernist nostalgia.
But Ghostbox weren't alone. I mean, also around that same time, Mordent Music issued their sort of deranged concept LP, Dead Air, which drew on similar sort of themes of reviving, exhuming the kind of audiovisual sonic uncanny of sort of televisual past. and then from a completely different direction but related was the burial record the first burial record which I think when I first heard it it already felt like to me one of the records of the decade
and I think so it proved here we had I know Adam might disagree a little bit on my talk on burial But with Burial, we had a kind of mourning and melancholy for a very recent past, which was the dance music of the 90s, which he kind of spectrally revisited. you kind of heard the references in in his music to jungle garage two-step but you also heard the kind of distance from those musics so how I positioned Hauntology then was a kind of acknowledgement of a certain kind of impasse that had been reached
in culture and probably specifically music culture I think those of us of a certain age expect music to be the engine of change in culture, really. And also expect it to be able to, in a way, date music quite precisely. And as time has gone on, that historical marking of music seems to have waned. and I think that one of the symptoms of this really was that we saw this quite recently when people tried to write their reflections on the last decade and it's a flavourless decade in lots of ways
I know more about the difference in music between 1973 and 1974 than between 2003 and 2004 and I could give you don't ask me to do it but I could give you off the top of my head a kind of crazy of what 1974 music was like but what was the sound of 2004? It's very difficult to retrieve that. And so in that sort of dehistoricizing of music in that sense of music losing that place as the forward engine of culture rather I think hauntology
is a challenge to that it both acknowledges that this has happened but is not satisfied that that is all that can happen I'll leave it for that it was interesting that you mentioned people of a certain age there because one of the criticisms of hauntology from the ghost box possibly has been that it is a case of a bunch of 40 somethings pining for the kind of lost sort of TV utopias of their childhood. But against that, I think possibly the point you were making is that certainly for Ghost Box, it's not nostalgic, it's actually dynamic. It is about trying to retrieve a utopian vision of the future
that was embedded in the 1960s and 1970s, not necessarily in culture, but in, as Mark was saying, architecture, the brutalist architecture which the art world is now trying to reclaim but anyone who's actually lived in high-rise flats in London or Manchester or whoever will probably have a kind of roll their eyes at any kind of attempt to reclaim brutalist architecture as some kind of benign form of social engineering. But certainly there was I think within the mediascape of the 70s there was a kind of a sort of pedagogic or if you want to put it in a kind of positive way or a paternalistic approach, certainly from the BBC, as Mark said, the Open University is possibly the best example of that. And I think the people who are
interested in Ghost Box do claim it more as a dynamic force rather than a nostalgic one. Trying to retrieve these past futures which have been completely obliterated by, as Mark said, post-modernism, the neoliberal project that has overtaken British politics and so on. And trying to retrieve these things and bring them back into the present, which partly links it into Derrida's ideas in terms of the way history impacts on the here and now. But, interestingly, like I said, that's all about people of a certain age, which is possibly mine and Mark's age, and also the Ghostbusters people. But Adam is obviously a completely different generation, so it'd be interesting to hear what he has to say about it. It could completely contradict that, it could completely complement
it, but Adam. Yeah, well, I'm in my early 20s, so I certainly didn't live through utopian 60s projects. But I've loved Ghost Box ever since 2006. And for me, it is the utopianism, the idealism of that era. It's very easy to key into. And there are traces of it all over the place still these days. I mean, you can recognise it as something very distant in your memory. I mean, I went to primary school in the 90s, but we still were shown educational videos from that era. So it's something that, you know, it's a trace. And I think that's what hauntology is. And you can pick up on that trace, you know, whatever age you are, I think.
But maybe there's an extra dimension if you did actually experience that as a child. but I don't really like to think of of hauntology as something that's tied to a specific era I think that the utopianism of it, you know there are many different types of utopia in history and especially in the 20th century more than utopianism I'd say that what hauntology aims at is an idealism an idealised image of something I don't think it's a coherent music genre, I think it's more of a way of reading. It's more of a theme, more of an aesthetic, if you like. For me, it's a lot broader than just British socialist intentions, pedagogical intentions from the 60s. I would definitely put
people like Ariel Pink in with that, hypnagogic pop. I see a whole ontological text, because because it can work with art as well, a whole ontological effect in art is when the work strikes you in two layers. I mean, the first layer is this idealised image. It can be something utopian. It's usually something from the past, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that. But it's something idealised, this utopian image. And then on top of that, there's a second layer, which is kind of wrapping the first layer. And that's a layer that ironises that idealism, that utopia, that problematises it, it compromises it, and it obfuscates it.
It interferes with the message of that idealism. It's post-idealism, really. It's post-utopianism. And that's why, perhaps in a slightly different way to you, Mark, I would describe it as really quite a postmodern way of expressing this kind of almost a tragedy. I mean, it's not always a tragedy, but a tragedy of a lost idealism, because you get this second layer, and that manifests specifically in music through lo-fi effects. Now, that's hiss, crackle, going over the levels when something is too loud and when you're recording it and it crackles, that happens a lot. Lo-fi media, tapes, and that sort of thing. It also gets more complicated than that as well because it's not necessarily just this smoky pane of glass that you're looking at this idealised image through.
You're looking at the past through. It's also a formal thing as well. What Julian House, the focus group, does is really mess up his samples so that they don't seem to make sense anymore. There's this kind of illogic to it. That's what I mean by when it obfuscates the past, it confuses it. It detorns the message. It messes it up and it expresses this dissatisfaction and this confusion and this tragic... It's unable to see anymore what that past was. And that's how the medium of listening is actually written into this hauntological music. I mean, because we should remember, it's not just the music from the past coming back.
It's the music from the past coming back with a specific way of seeing it. The medium of listening is written into this music, especially when you're hearing tapes and some of the things that hypnagogic pop does, which is the more, some people would call it, hauntological. I would. It looks to the 80s. It's an earlier generation thing. It's very much lo-fi tapes. One of the acts at Lamborghini Crystal arranges his records as radio shows that go through. So you're listening to listening. The medium of your listening is written into, and your response to the utopianism is kind of coded in for you. And that's what I think separates hauntology from just any old retro, because it's self-aware, because you show that you are showing.
It's ironic and self-aware. And these are all the postmodern buzzwords, perhaps. well you know I thought I sort of agree with you on that one so yes it's a commentary on the past as it were and that's how it works to alienate us from a normal relationship with history and I agree with Mark on this one it reopens history it labels history it challenges the historicity I suppose of the present and you know how the past has collapsed into the present and I think hauntology is valuable in that it recognises the past as opposed to just mindlessly regurgitates it which is what a lot of music in the last ten years has done so yeah, I think it's a broad category
and I would say that most of what most people consider to be hauntology, I would describe as British post-war hauntology that's ghost box certainly possibly modern music and I agree that that burial is hauntological. You say I would disagree with you, but actually what I wrote was how burial is also forward-looking as well. I certainly agree that there is a lot of fantastic hauntological reading of burial that you can do. But at the same time, I thought that he was actually quite a forward-looking. You can be backward-looking and forward-looking at the same time. I do think that hypnagogic pop very much can be considered hauntological because it has these two layers,
looking at the past through the present, through the lo-fi. And it's got this same idealism, the same transcendental thing. So you might call that Californian hauntology. And I think that Ariel Pink as well, a very, very celebrated singer-songwriter from L.A. who writes lo-fi pop songs in his bedroom, releases them. Very much a hauntological sort of a project there. And I don't even think that it's necessarily new to the 21st century or since the end of history, although that has certainly been a time when it's been particularly pronounced, this hauntological moment.
But I think if you wanted to look, you could find something similar to ontology as far back as people like Charles Ives, the American composer who wrote his very unusual modernistic idiom based on treating 19th century material, 19th century popular tunes and that sort of thing. You see him, again, confusing the past, obfuscating the past, by taking these folk tunes and mixing them up all in mad directions. You might even be able to go even further back than that, to Romanticism. I think that it's got a lot in common with Romanticism. One of the more recent ontological acts to have come on the scene, as it were, is Indignant Senility. Not a name I'm enormously fond of, but it's great music.
because what it is is kind of, it's Wagner. And, you know, I think that's the furthest hauntological reference back that there's been so far to take Wagner, you know, 1876, take those records and then play them hauntologically, play them lo-fi, play them slowed down, crackly. And you hear this kind of utopian romanticism of, you know, Wagner's ecstasy is reduced to this kind of, yeah, tragic spectral accuser, I suppose. I also think that it's got a lot to do with psychedelia. Because what psychedelia does is it treats, just like hauntology, it treats like you treat chemically. It treats the pre-existing materials.
And I think that if you go back to the psychedelia of the 60s, it did rely a lot on pre-war musical idioms and pop music from the pre-war times as well. and there's this, I don't know if I'd go as far as calling it hauntological but there's a lot in common between psychedelia and hauntology and lots of people have called the focus group psychedelic and I think that's very appropriate. Hypnagogic pop as well, also very psychedelic so yeah, that's about it for me on the matter. Okay, thank you well possibly maybe hypnagogic pop is a hauntology for a younger generation in that it sort of It loops back to the 80s as opposed to the 60s and the 70s. But I think it makes the point that possibly what we're talking about here
is music that kind of challenges maybe the official canons of culture. Very often the kind of music we're talking about, whether it's ghost box, looking back to organisations like the radiophonic workshop, library music and so on, the kind of stuff that was treated more as a craft rather than an art. And for Ghostbox, these kind of original documents, which have now become quite familiar to us, but even five years ago, these things were pretty obscure. And then through Ghostbox-affiliated organizations such as the Trunk Label, we can all now listen to records by Delia Derbyshire and so on, or library music archives. And so what they're doing, they're bringing forward this stuff, which previously was just treated as crap, basically. And the same thing is happening in hypnagogic pop, where they're looking back to the 80s,
and all of a sudden the likes of Hall and Oates, Christopher Burr even and so on, are suddenly becoming held up as kind of fetish-type figures. Yeah, exactly. Who would have thought it? But I'm sorry. There's a video on YouTube by Oneatrix.never called Nobody Here. Google it when you get home and tell me if that is not an art of the sublime because it basically samples one phrase from Christopher's Lady in Red. I kid you not. My response when I heard about it was exactly the same. I checked it out and downloaded it to the iPod and I sit there in front of it transfixed. What's interesting about it is that
the comments on YouTube to the video, they actually read like a script from a soft porn movie. They basically do things like, it feels so good. this should never stop. But what that does, what that actually does is it says quite a lot about the appeal of the loop and the sample in both audio and visual art. It basically, and it's promised to suspend us forever in the kind of, the sort of sensual eroticism of a moment. And I think that's one thing that this kind of music is also doing because loops and samples are basically the stuff that it's built from. whether indignant, senility, and so on, as you were talking about in Ghost Box. But again, the lo-fi thing is another thing.
The fidelity is basically also, it's really kind of nasty and cruddy. And through the tape hiss, all of a sudden, something like Foreigner suddenly sounds very strange and alien. And all of a sudden, we can start to hear it anew. And this is, I think, most of the music that we're talking about here. That's what it's about. It's about reclaiming this stuff from the past. this trash that we've thrown out, that the official canons have sort of told us is crap, it's worthless. But it's actually the stuff that we all grew up with. If you're in your 40s, you grew up with this stuff, the radiophonic workshop in the 70s. If you're in your 20s, you grew up with The Breakfast Club, all those kind of movies that we couldn't avoid on TV or in the cinemas. You were told that this stuff was crap,
but now there are musicians operating. You're saying, well, they're kind of filtering it through this strange detritus, this strange kind of new approach to fidelity, which is basically about running it through tape, multiple tape copies so it degrades and so on. And it basically casts it in a completely different light. We suddenly start thinking about it entirely differently, which I think most of the music that we're talking about here, that's what the point of it is. Joe obviously may completely disagree with that. It's funny you should say that, Tony, actually. I find that interesting because it kind of chimes in with something I've noticed about music criticism in the kind of post-sampling era. Because it's often talked about in terms of alchemy, base material into gold.
People taking, for example, you give the Nobody Here track. basically the original source is seen as kind of something trash something trashy beneath serious consideration what I'd argue personally speaking is that actually I think there's more a process of unlocking going on here rather than recycling crap what's going on is dormant potential for the sublime that I think is in this music is being kind of teased out and kind of wrenched from wherever it's hiding in there. And this is kind of, for me, this is partly informed by reading Philip K. Dick, which is a huge kind of
big deal for me as a reader and a writer. Particularly, I mean, for one example, Ubik. Salvation. I won't go through the whole plot because you've probably read it of course and it's quite complex but salvation is found essentially in a spray can or I think at some other point during the book it's found in an ointment or it could be anything it could be any mundane item any household good that's kind of how I see what's going on with not so much I don't think the kind of post-war hauntology that Adam cites. But really, definitely going on in
hypnagogic pop. The potential is being unlocked in these sources. So whether it's Foreigner or I don't know, stuff like Christopher or Bonnie Tyler, knock yourself out, whatever. We all need a hero sometimes. This stuff is being kind of extracted the good stuff, the element of the sublime, the divine spark, if you like, which is in kind of, if you're a Gnostic, you believe this is in everybody and in all creation, in everything that's ever created by creation. That's being kind of pulled out. Now, I think this kind of sheds a little bit of light on,
and actually, ontology as a kind of aesthetic sheds a lot of light on past music. I think when it kind of appeared, when the term kind of crystallised in 2006, it actually, for me especially as a listener, became effective stretching way back. I mean, it stretches, I know Mark has written very eloquently on blues, on the sound of blues records, and also kind of Al Boley, that kind of music that was used in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. with something like for example it actually made me listen to hip hop completely differently and it actually kind of made me think
well actually I'm really not sure this is an act of alchemy I think the artists are actually finding that they recognise something they recognise something that's already present perhaps dormant but definitely present in this material for example there's I think Jay Diller famously on Donuts and he sampled a couple of I think it's two different 10cc songs very good songs actually as it happens but I can't for the life of me think that he thought they were crap, I actually personally think he probably really quite liked those records and actually saw the potential in them and the recycling was kind of
like an act of love but I'm getting off the point a bit here but with hauntology I think that hauntology can be as an aesthetic perceived as an unlocking of magic within music for me music is the kind of closest thing we actually have to magic in the world there's nothing closer it's an incredibly kind of mystical experience really for me especially and I think you can look back at various progenitors if you like although I'd argue that they were always ontological stuff like Kate Bush the strange kind of
journey that David Silvian's ghosts took through again Mark has mentioned this through the Metalhead's track, the Goldie track Ghosts of My Life and also Tricky's Aftermath, I think it was, wasn't it? Yes. In that case, it's voiced by Mark Stewart. I think it makes, it's almost, it kind of encourages a kind of magical thinking as well, as well on a different layer to the kind of theoretical side of things. It encourages this kind of attitude to music which is just supernatural in a way. And I think when Ghost Box arrives, I know for me it was really like a kind of perfect combination of things that really had fascinated me and continue to fascinate me since I was very small.
And also musical technology which came to fascinate me later. It made me realise that all the processes involved in that were like some kind of formative, whatever you want to call it, some kind of conjuring, sorcery. And it made me look at sampling as far back as maybe possibly before with stuff like the Mellotron, but definitely the arrival of the Fairlight in the early 80s, the early sampling technology. And the people who were using that at the time, I think the first two artists to use a Fairlight were probably Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, who were both, obviously Peter Gabriel, most people either associate with Sledgehammer,
pumping his pelvis on stage, or Genesis. Genesis possibly have a hauntological resonance, but we won't go into that, maybe. Yeah, I can see Tony bristling. Yeah. That, for me, was a key hauntological moment. That was the kind of the first... It was really the first mass market sampler that musicians could afford, could have access to, And it opened up an entirely new world of temporal distortion, if you like. People could manipulate time with it. And then, of course, later on, I'm no expert on this technology, but later you had the various other forms of samplers,
which became cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And now everyone can basically do it on their PC. I can even do it on my netbook. It's kind of accessible to everybody. but that for me was the root of a lot of what we're looking at now and Ghostbox in particular from a technological point of view and also from a mystical point of view are immensely fascinating because they represent for me the absolute crossover point between science and magic which you can also you can kind of look back through their influences Things like, really, Quatermass is a really good example because it's essentially a kind of fusty professor applying scientific rigor to matters of supernatural disturbance, really.
And there's an interesting kind of parallel there with what's going on with hypnagogic pop. Because really, if you're going to boil it down to a kind of movie face-off, Hauntology is quite a mess in the pit. Hypnagogic pop is essentially Ghostbusters. It's just two different versions of the same story, which is technology going up against the uncanny. and I was always going to be interested in that really so yeah, a bit rambling perhaps Well I mean possibly the sampler is the place where technology and the uncanny meet I think one problem we have in music, in music criticism
we were sitting around before this panel and I said to everybody don't worry about appearing pretentious on this stage just worry about looking stupid basically, some people may think they are the same things the point about the pretentiousness of it is that so much of the music that we're talking about here has become so embedded in the culture it's become so familiar to us that we stop noticing what is so strange about it and I think the two examples of that are dub mixes obviously the idea of the dub mix originated in the early 70s in Jamaica with reggae. If you think about what's actually happening in those mixes where basically the original voices of the mixes are basically wiped out. They're completely absent
or they just remain as ghostly traces. And that is an approach to producing music which has kind of travelled out from Jamaica right across the board. I mean most records certainly, well when people still released records as opposed to downloads certainly came with dub mixes attached. And the other thing is obviously sample based music. I don't mean Frankie Goes to Hollywood sampling John Bonham's bass drum back in the 1980s but music that is explicitly sample based, which is obviously hip hop is the most obvious example, but all the music that we've been talking about here, but certainly the Ghostbots music is based on samples. And we've kind of forgotten how strange that is. And we don't actually, we don't really register it. So that's kind of why we're up here. We can talk big about these
kind of so-called familiar things. And certainly I think in sampling, that is where technology and the uncanny meet. But I think now we've had a few sort of opening, whatever definitions, whatever you want to call about it. I wanted to sort of suggest some other things that I think might be interesting to talk about regarding hauntological music, if you want to call it that. I mean, you've got to, you know, like I said, we're kind of talking about this from a point of view of music criticism. So it is a trope that has been used a lot. But one thing we didn't mention perhaps specifically is Adam mentioned Indignant Senility, which is an American guy who, as he says, basically loops or records old recordings of Wagner, basically full of vinyl crackle,
then sort of splays them with electronics. But the people before him who were doing that was the caretaker. Now, you could say that his music is incredibly mournful. It's the saddest stuff you'll ever hear. But you could also claim that there's possibly a political dimension to it, in the sense that his records are kind of elegies for the downtrodden and the underclass signaled through his very mournful, sorrowful song titles. So, I mean, one thing we have to ask is, is this stuff worth talking about? What does it say to us about us and our society and so on? So you have to wonder if there's a political dimension to it. So I was going to ask Mark to maybe talk about the caretaker's music and that kind of approach and whether there is some kind of political dimension within all of this kind of stuff. And it's not just about creating poetic utterance,
which obviously is a great thing in itself. Okay. Yeah, I do think the caretaker's recordings are very important. But he's been making those records under that name since the late 90s, James Kirby. and in some ways we can see the kind of duality there between on the one hand a kind of pranksterish post-modernism which James was best known for for a lot of the things that he did in the 90s including there was actually a version of Lady in Red which you can find on YouTube no way it just massively slowed down
and kind of disturbing rather than sublime, I think, that one. But yes, he didn't know he sort of pranks to risk raids on sort of trash pop culture. But alongside that, he started to develop this other project, The Caretaker. A simple conceit initially, which was, okay, given The Shining, the Kubrick film, based on the Stephen King novel, given that we hear one or two tracks in there two or three tracks two of the most famous ones by Al Boli who Joe mentioned who's a I'm sure many of you know a pre-war crooner
also features in Dennis Potter's two really key series The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven so those initial caretaker records were simply an extension of what Kubrick had done in the Shining film by imagining a whole night of this haunted ballroom carrying on but I think as time went on, I think those records are extremely mournful in their own right and powerful but I think one of the caretaker's crucial interventions really was the six CD book set theoretically pure anterior grade amnesia
which came out around the same time as this other hauntological material that we talked about that was emerging as the hauntological canon around about 2006 and by this point the focus has switched from nostalgia to amnesia theoretically pure anterior grade amnesia is the kind of amnesia that is it Leonard in Memento, that's his name isn't it anyway the character of Memento suffers from which is that after a moment of trauma you're no longer able to synthesize new memories and I think this this is
a crucial act of cultural diagnosis really by James Kirby This idea that actually in a culture that's so dominated by formal nostalgia, the problem is actually this inability to make new memories. And all we can do is recycle the memories from the past. And so what we're suffering from is a kind of a form of memory disorder. and I think here we can perhaps connect for me, although clearly the term hauntology comes from Derrida due deference to Derrida, etc the key figure, my theorisation of it
is not Derrida so much but as Jameson, Frederick Jameson whose work I think really connects up the sort of problems of historicity and capitalism. Jameson's most famous book is called Postmodernism, All the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In other words, he's connecting together these aesthetic forms, particularly aesthetic forms, he says, which increasingly have the form of pastiche and retrospection with the nature of capitalism itself. So I think that there's a kind of striking correlation between the music of The Caretaker and the sort of analyses of Jameson.
Jameson famously makes the distinction between the nostalgia mode and nostalgia as such. psychological nostalgia was the proper topic of many of the great works of modernism Joyce with Ulysses producing a kind of massive multi-level simulation of Dublin 20 years after the fact and of course Proust with the massive attempt to reclaim lost time but the nostalgia mode is something different the nostalgia mode is something which happens at the formal level not at the level of content
the nostalgia mode is where things are repeating the past without acknowledging that they're doing so and I think we could see this happen in music particularly in terms of my standard whipping boy indie which something like I guess the most obvious crude example Oasis in a way who so obviously a pastiche yet increasingly create the conditions where they weren't seen as pastiche anymore because the whole historical narrative
started to unravel at that point As I often remark, in the time when Oasis emerged, the 60s seemed far closer than they did in the 70s or early 80s, when they seemed a far distant monochrome memory, really. And then we get even other things. For me, something like Franz Ferdinand. I do think we need to really think about this. Because there's something like 30 years later, 30, three zero years later, i.e., the time between Elvis Presley and Live Aid.
Think of everything that happened in those 30 years relative to the fact that Franz Ferdinand can appear with basically making music that could, to all intents and purposes, have come out 30 years ago. And, you know, this is the syndrome of what I call Pashok. Well, you know, if you imagined beaming that back to 1980, no one would have been perturbed. You might have thought, why are this bunch of losers on here? But there's not a formal problem there. Whereas I think with other musics that we can imagine being beamed back to that time, or being back 30 years, there would be some sense of kind of shock and discrepancy,
to say the least. So I think part of the role is to denaturalise this kind of end of history, which I guess is one of the key sort of junctions between the political and the hauntological. It shouldn't be forgotten that Spectres of Marx was, in many ways, Derrida's response to the then-fashionable theory of the end of history, which was being propagated by Francis Fukuyama, who claimed that a famous leader would reach the end of history after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. global capitalism, liberal capitalism might not be that exciting,
but it's the best we can hope for in all history in any way tends in this direction. I think there's a kind of parallel between that political narrative and the kind of flattening out of temporality in terms of what happened with music. when music was in a forward accelerating kind of mutagenic when it was that engine of culture it was continually denaturalizing the culture around it but when pastiche dominates then a culture can naturalize itself and that kind of naturalization
I think has been sort of crucial to the establishing of the neoliberal order. Okay, shut up. I was waiting for you to shut up actually. I don't want to turn this into a my generation, your generation type thing, but Adam, it would be interesting to hear your take on what Mark has just said, or even to extrapolate some of your own thoughts on some of the stuff that's been said. Right, well, I do agree with Mark that there's been a problem with originality in the last 20 years.
I mean, I don't think that my outlook is completely bleak. I mean, I've commented on some musics that have appeared recently that have had maybe minor, but some exciting new things, I mean if you took some of Zombie for example the dubstep producer, some of his more outlandish tracks and beamed them back to 1982 I think that would be quite surprising but we'll have to try that out sometime but I think there are a lot of, and I agree with you on Franz Ferdinand, I think that there are a lot of bands these days that really it's a shame that they don't invent something entirely new
because the idea that there is nothing but the past. And he's got to the sense now where rock is what Franz Ferdinand sounds like. Dance is what, I don't know, Fat Boy Slim sounds like. Yeah. Well, I think obviously to just keep the conversation focused on where we're at, rather than getting into a kind of critique of indie, which we all obviously would be in agreement with, probably. Obviously, the past is always with us, so talking in withering cliches, but music that we talk about as haunted logical is all about, well, as I understand it, what you said earlier
slightly contradicted it, but it is about resurrecting something from the past. It's about and this relates into Derrida's original formulation, that the past constantly informs on the present and that together they are sort of projected forward into the future. And so, and Joe, you alluded earlier to people like Philip K. Dick. And I think what we've got to think is that this is all, Philip K. Dick is a genre fiction, but as Umberto Eco said about Dick, he puts to shame most of the kind of like so-called formerly experimental European novelists who share the same time frame as him. but because he was working in genre fiction in science fiction he was never taken seriously in his own time and I think a lot of the stuff that we're talking about it's pop culture
it's outside of the official channels of culture and history and so on so it's not canonised it's left to sort of fend for itself on the market but I think we can learn from some of the kind of experiences of those kind of specialised genres and one of the things pulling the conversation back to ghost bots in tandem with their maybe desire to revive some kind of utopian modernist idea about how we all should live in high-rise flats and watch the open university was their interest in early 20th century writers of ghost stories, weird tales, people like Arthur Macken, Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft and so on, M.R. James. And what was going on in the writings of those authors
was kind of a dialectic, I think we can say that, between the ancient and the modern, the urban and the rural, the city and the town and so on. And I know it's something that you kind of touched on in some of your writings on hauntology. I don't know if you've got any kind of interesting or illuminating things to say that we can pull from those kind of traditions to sort of let us know about what's happening in this music, because this is what it's all about. It's trying to understand the music and what it's saying to us about the here and now. Okay, yeah, well, two things that come to mind particularly. one thing that I've been busting to say for a bit actually, the other over the course of the last couple of days I've been kind of re-listening to stuff like Modern Music's Dead Air and also
back to back, these two particularly actually, Belberry Polley's The Willows one thing that I think kind of confounds the reading of, I understand what people mean when they're talking about the utopian an element of this because a lot of things that are looked back upon, such as stuff like the Open University, the general concept of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and improving their lives. That's definitely an element within the music but especially from the kind of couple of hours that I spent listening to Dead Air and The Willows, was just how incredibly creepy they were. I mean, there was The nostalgia was certainly present, but to me it didn't sound comforting.
What was coming through generally, they're both very, very kind of like, kind of unsettling records to listen to, especially on your own in a flat, actually, back to back. but a massive element I think a massive element of these of certainly the kind of British strain of hauntology is the malevolence and actually to an extent it also comes through in the work of James Ferraro and not so much stuff like DuckTales but maybe Emeralds some of the hypnagogic pop artists in the States is that while there is the halcyon vibe if you like, going on in this music. There's also a very distinct sense of threat. There's a track on the willows, and I can't remember what it's called.
It's called Insect... Help me out. Is that it? Insect Prospectus. Insect Pros... Yeah, Insect Prospectus, which is just kind of utterly chilling to listen to. And also, Dead Air has its moments of just... Even the moments when Philip Elsemore is talking, actually, are pretty stabilising. There's a part near the very beginning of the album where you can hear him saying, or some sampled voice from the 60s saying, send your children to the electricity and the mains, the gas and the mains. It's really quite a sinister idea. I really agree with you. I think that you can't say that the ghost box moment is entirely sunny and unproblematic.
It has been compromised. I mean, Bellbury Poly is named after a town in the C.S. Lewis book, That Hideous Strength, where a sinister organisation ruled by demonic super alien beings, the open university if you like of Ghostbuck has been hijacked by these ghostly forces from M.R. James books It problematises that paternalism I think there's a worry there that it's not going to get quite right and in the advisory circle track as well when the cuckoo comes that's one of the favourites for everyone really and it lists all the seasons and what happens in all the seasons but they've cut it up and replaced it so that it's all wrong you know i mean open
university might be uh you know playing into your into your concrete council flap but the information is wrong it's it's worryingly wrong and i think that that's that also links in what you're saying about the moment of trauma there's a sense in which in which the memories aren't coming back properly and you're piecing them together and they've been shattered somehow and they're coming back in the wrong way. It's quite traumatic because also in the advisory circle there's a track called Nuclear Substation. It's all about personal public information films and what you shouldn't do. The album's called Mind How You Go and it's extensively a publishing information film. And then the last track is a kid being electrocuted to death at a nuclear substation.
You've got this lovely 60s music The last words, keep out. Yeah, and then you hear this kid screaming, and then he goes, keep out. It's very traumatic. But it's interesting, actually. Just thinking about it, and thinking about it in relation to underground writers of the 60s and 70s, like Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson, neither of those writers, they were both concerned with ideas of illumination and gnosis, as those who are familiar with their work will know. In Philip K. Dick's Valis and the famous Illuminatus trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, illumination is a very painful process. So I think this kind of lamination of past and present involving also malevolence, perhaps in order to get to a space where we improve ourselves, we're being told, oh, this is going to hurt.
It's a form of ritual. Yeah, absolutely. We've been talking about the mysticism the psychedelic aspect the religious aspect of getting the past in order and I like that you mentioned dialectics Tony because there's a contradiction in all hauntology between what is supposed to be good and utopian and ideal and what has gone wrong the fact that it's either died or it's been invaded by demons or that sort of thing as well and there's a sense in which you're trying to figure that out in the ritual of listening to this music. I do think that paternalism was in a way the condition for certain kinds of affect which are now extirpated from popular culture in a way. Because it was
the BBC that would have put a lot of those things out. A lot of these really horrific things were on public information films. And actually that... It's too scary. John Brooks put a link up on his Facebook site It's absolutely an incredible thing. Ten minutes. Is it the Jimmy Savile? The Jimmy Savile thing. It's a program that Jimmy Savile used to present. It was before Songs of Praise on Sundays. Basically, it's a parade of kind of maimed and mutilated kids. And we would say, you know, this could happen to your child. Isn't it called Kids and Accidents? Or something. You can scarcely believe such a thing.
True, yeah. But of course, I mean, that period from the 50s to the 70s and mid-80s was also the period of the Cold War. And that's something you do get strongly in the advisory circle. But I do think that, as Tony was saying, it's things that have been exiled from our consensual understanding of culture now or the consensual understanding of culture now, not shared by us here, I'm sure, which lops things off at both ends, really, which is both the high culture end and the low end. And it's the circuit between the two that has also become impossible. And I guess that is why something like the Radiophonic Workshop was so important.
This is effectively the state-subsidized civil servants, effectively, employed by the government to produce avant-garde music. This was how the Musée Concrette, etc., disseminated, and it was not just in some sort of pallid, diluted form, it was a mutation with its own merit, it was how it disseminated into everyday life, into the very furniture of everyday life, via radio jingles and theme tunes, etc. One of the things that's happened with a kind of nostalgic consensual culture, with a certain very narrow
bandwidth of affect, of allowed affect, which is often personal emotions. This is the mainspring of culture now. The kind of affects that we're talking about these things are much stranger than that and have been removed. And something like the music in the new Doctor Who is just as good an example of a past shock really as as indie. It's retrospectively impossible. You can't have electronic music
soundtracking a children's show anymore. You've got to reverse it. Something like Delia Darvish's original theme tune from the early 60s sounds far more modern than Murray Gould's music for the current Doctor Who. That's a classic example of Peshok for me. One of the strange effects you have is with the removal of paternalism is infantilization. Oddly, the idea was the kind of neoliberal rhetoric against paternalism is that it's talking down to you, they're not letting you choose and all of that what happens with once paternalism is removed is really that everyone's treated
as an idiot and as an infant who has to be spoon fed this kind of saccharine emotion I like that you brought emotion up because I suppose I see slightly differently. There's just so much irony in the way... You can't really feel sincere emotions anymore, particularly among hipsters and that sort of thing. It's just that any real emotion is... Define that how you like. There's this ironic reaction to emotion. If you're wearing a t-shirt with a mountain and a moon and a wolf on it, and all these romantic motifs and stuff, you're wearing it ironically. Maybe you're not entirely wearing it ironically.
Maybe you love that stuff, really. But I think one of the things in a hypnagogic pop I see, especially in people like Aurel Pink and John Mouse, is that there's an emotionality there, a sentimentality that's sort of seen as a bit false in this decade. But they're bringing it back sort of through the back door, really, in this kind of ironic sense. and finding, I mean, one of the big hypnagogic tunes is supposed to be Don Henley's Boys of Summer, which is a very, very saccharine, sentimental tune. Not really, though. Not really. Well, I mean, melodically. It's quite cynical. Oh, I suppose so. But melodically, yeah. Melodically, it's got... It's not melancholic, though, isn't it? Yeah, well, I think there's a lot... In the 80s, there was this kind of big, inflated emotionality to a lot of the pop music,
which is sort of rejected today. and I think that's why it's sneaking in I want to take up something you said earlier which is this thing about irony really I do agree that it's absolutely crucial to a lot of the hauntological music is this double listening as you described it and one of the things that's one of the functions that Crackle has I think is to produce that alienation effect you know you can't but be aware that you're listening to yourself listening as you said and you're aware of the material preconditions for your hearing etc. Just partly because of what you just said really I'd rather find some other term than irony for that double listening process
because it was partly strategic and rhetorical in that I would associate irony in that sense with that you know hipster kind of you know I think it's a romantic irony, really. That goes all the way back to the 19th century. People like Schlegel. And the difficulty of being able to perceive. The difficulty of being able to respond to the beauty of the wilderness. There's lots of different kinds of irony. Okay. I think now we've got to the 19th century, that's a good place to finish. It's the best. Actually, it's the best place to finish.