_machines_-_Tape_Recorder_with_tape_loop_equipment%2c_Beat_Frequency_Oscillator_%2526_EMS_Putney_VCS3.jpg)
Hauntology is amusic genre[1][2] or a loosely defined stylistic feature[3] that evokescultural memory and aesthetics of the past.[4] It developed in the 2000s primarily among Britishelectronic musicians,[5][6] and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1930s to the 1960s, includinglibrary music, film and TVsoundtracks,psychedelia, andpublic information films; often through the use ofsampling.[1]
The term was derived from philosopherJacques Derrida'sconcept of the same name. In the mid-2000s, it was adapted by theoristsSimon Reynolds andMark Fisher.[1] Hauntology is associated with the UK record labelsGhost Box andTrunk Records, in addition to artists such asthe Caretaker,Burial, andPhilip Jeck.[1] Music genreshypnagogic pop andchillwave descended from hauntology.
The termhauntology was introduced by French philosopherJacques Derrida in his 1993 bookSpecters of Marx as a term for the post-Marxist understanding of what is perceived as the tendency ofKarl Marx's ideas to "haunt Western society from beyond the grave".[1] The word functions in Derrida's native French as a deliberate near-homophone to "ontology", the philosophical study of being (cf."hantologie",[ɑ̃tɔlɔʒi] and"ontologie",[ɔ̃tɔlɔʒi]).[7]
In music, hauntology is predominantly associated with a Britishelectronic music trend but it can apply to any art concerned with the aesthetics of the past.[4] The trend is often tied to notions ofretrofuturism, whereby artists evoke the past by utilising the "spectral sounds of old music technology".[8] The trend involves thesampling of older sound sources to evoke deepcultural memory.[9] CriticSimon Reynolds stated in a 2006 article that "this strand of 'ghostified' music doesn't quite constitute a genre, a scene, or even a network. [...] more of a flavour or atmosphere than a style with boundaries",[3] although in a 2017 article he summarized it as a "largely British genre of eerie electronics fixated on ideas of decaying memory and lost futures".[2] A 2009blog post by academic Adam Harper stated that "[h]auntology is not a genre of art or music, but an aesthetic effect, a way of reading and appreciating art".[10]
Hauntological music draws on variedpostwar cultural sources[5] from the 1940s through the 1960s which lie outside the usual canon of popular music, includinglibrary music, film and televisionsoundtracks,educational music, and the sonic experimentation of theBBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as electronic andfolk music sources.[1] Other British influences include obscuremusique concrète composers andJoe Meek's albumI Hear a New World,[3] as well aspsychedelia andpublic information films.[4] Also important is the appropriation of visual iconography from this earlier period, including graphic design elements ofschool textbooks,public information posters, andtelevision idents.[1]
Artists typically use vintage recording devices such as cassettes andsynthesisers from the 1960s and 1980s.[4] Production often foregrounds thegrain of the recording, including vinyl noise andtape hiss derived from the degraded musical orspoken word samples commonly used.[11] Sampling is used to "evoke 'dead presences'" which are transformed into "eerie sonic markers".[11] Artists often mix antique synthesiser tones, acoustic instruments, and digital techniques, as well asfound sounds, abstract noise, and industrialdrones.[3]
In music journalism, Derrida's ideas were invoked by criticIan Penman for his 1995 essay on the production style ofTricky's albumMaxinquaye, though Penman did not use the phrase "hauntology."[12] In the mid-2000s, the word began to be more widely appropriated by writers and theorists such as Simon Reynolds andMark Fisher, who referred to the work ofPhilip Jeck,William Basinski,Burial,The Caretaker, and artists associated with the UK labelGhost Box as hauntology.[1] Fisher attributed this renewed discussion of hauntology to the emergence of lo-fi musicianAriel Pink in the mid-2000s.[13] In a 2006 article forThe Wire, Reynolds identified Ghost Box'sthe Focus Group,Belbury Poly,the Advisory Circle as prominent in the trend, along withBroadcast, The Caretaker, and Mordant Music.[3]
Several elements of hauntology as a musical style were presaged by Scottish electronic duoBoards of Canada.[14] Other progenitors includePortishead[9] andI Monster.[15] Reynolds also invokedsample-based groupPosition Normal as presaging the genre.[16]
Music genreshypnagogic pop andchillwave – sometimes deployed interchangeably with each other[17] – descended from hauntology.[18] The former is described as an "American cousin" to hauntology.[19]
Hauntological music is identified with British culture,[19] and was described as an attempt to evoke "a nostalgia for a future that never came to pass, with a vision of a strange, alternate Britain, constituted from the reordered refuse of thepostwar period" byThe Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality.[5] Simon Reynolds described it as an attempt to construct a "lostutopianism" rooted in visions of a benevolent post-welfare state.[3] A sense of loss and bereavement is central to the phenomenon, according to theologian Johan Eddebo.[20]Simon Reynolds in 2011, remarked:
There are those who say that hauntology's moment has passed... that a good five or six years after the genre-not-genre coalesced, its set of reference points and sonic tropes has been worn threadbare. [...] how can you call time on a genre soself-consciously untimely? "Consensus to Delete" a/k/a the debate atWikipedia about whether or not to erase the entry on 'Hauntology (musical genre)'. In the end the shadowy cabal... decreed that Hauntology was too ontologically tenuous an entity to qualify for status as proper knowledge. It's the kind of Moebius pretzel of preposterous-yet-faintly-sinisterdiscourse thatcould have inspired an entire monograph by Michel "Power/Knowledge"Foucault or Jacques "Archive Fever" Derrida. But look, look, how carefully and scrupulously they preserve ("do not modify") the record of their own deliberations.[21]
Liam Sprod of3:AM Magazine stated that "[h]auntology as aesthetics is firmly rooted in the idea ofnostalgia as a disruption of time," adding that "[i]nstead of mere repetition, this distance provides a sense of loss and mourning, [...] and revitalizes the potential for a utopianism for the present age".[22] Mark Fisher characterised the hauntology movement as "a sign that 'white' culture can no longer escape the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of theAfrodiasporic experience", calling it contemporaryelectronic music's "confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future".[23] Fisher stated that
[W]hen cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, [...] one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyondpostmodernity's terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.[24]
Hauntological music is stated by academic Sean Albeiz to suggest "anuncanny mixture of shared but faded cultural memories with sinister undercurrents".[1] Hauntology (along with the hypnagogic movement) was likened to "sonic fictions or intentional forgeries, creating half-baked memories of things that never were—approximating the imprecise nature of memory itself".[25]
Without using either term, Penman's 1995 essay showed that Afrofuturism and hauntology are two sides of the same double-faced phenomenon.