Stop Press: Hauntology Not Dead!
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.
Then again, how can you call time on a genre so self-consciously untimely?
Besides, for a “dead” genre, hauntology appears to be enjoying quite an active afterlife.
Like (un)real-deal ghosts, the hauntologists stubbornly refuse to depart the scene.
So, for instance...
In the last few months James Leyland Kirby has put out three new and excellent recordings: as The Caretaker, the just-released An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, and, as Leyland Kirby, two volumes of the four-part series Intrigue & Stuff
Moon Wiring Club recently rush-released a Royal Wedding-themed album, Somewhere A Fox Is Getting Married. ( More info: http://www.blankworkshop.co.uk/index.htm )
A few months ago Mordant Music put out a new score composed for Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1960 film Un Chien Andalou, as part of the British Film Institute’s Blu-Ray/DVD box set. This followed hard on the heels of December 2010’s conceptual masterstroke MisinforMation, a BFI anthology of vintage public information films re-scored by MM. Recently there was also, via Mordant Music the record label, a cassette double-pack by Ekoplekz and the Variables II EP featuring Autre Ne Veut, Mordant Music, and Ekoplekz.
Demdike “We’re Not Hauntologists Oh No, Although We Are Named After a Witch and We Do Sample Library Music and Horror Soundtracks” Stare have also been busy bees this season. Earlier this year they released a deluxe triple-CD Tryptych that pulled together their vinyl releases from the last 18 months.
Ghost Box keep putting out cute little 7-inch singles that pair different but compatible artists: more about this Study Series, which is now up to number 06, here:
http://ghostbox.greedbag.com/dept/~study-series/
There’s been a flurry of vaguely haunty-aligned things from entities like Hacker Farm and Ship Canal and Woebot ...
Parts of Epic45’s enchanting new CD Weathering stray into ghostified zones, while Epic45’s offshoot project Charles Vaughan is named after a character from the classic 70s after-the-plague-wipes-out-99%-of-humanity TV series The Survivors... Vaughan, “when we first meet him, is compiling information about the remains of civilization”. That album is called Documenting the Decay and is out on Epic 45’s label Wayside & Woodland in a month or two (more info http://www.epic45.com/wordpress/?page_id=19 )
And let’s not forget Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services’s output such as Black Mill Tapes Vol.2–Do You Synthesize?" (more info http://pyecorneraudio.wordpress.com/ )
But the prize goes to Jon Brooks... In something like eight or nine months, there’s been three releases via his downloads-only label Café Kaput, all created by him solo whatever the mischievous cover-story might maintain:
Electronic Music in the Classroom (which I wrote about here, along with Moon Wiring Club:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/nov/23/moon-wiring-club
Music for Thomas Carnacki (Radiophonic Themes & Abstracts)
and
Music For Dieter Rams
The latter has the conceptual perfection of being based entirely around sounds derived from one source– "Every sound on this record, from the melodic sounds to the percussion, the atmospheric effects to the bass lines originates from the Braun AB-30 alarm clock” – but the first two contain the most impressive and spooky examples of musique concrete modern.
More information about those Café Kaput releases and how to procure them here:
http://cafekaput.blogspot.com/
If all that wasn’t enough, Brooks has a new album out this week on Ghost Box under his principal identity, The Advisory Circle. As the Crow Flies is the follow-up to 2008’s Other Channels, which was simply one of the most beautiful and.... well “haunting” would be le mot juste actually... albums of the last decade. I need to spend a bit more time with As The Crow Flies, but I think it is shaping to be every bit the worthy successor.
The concept underpinning the record is “an exploration of the passage of time and the traditional wheel of the year” and it comes with sleeve notes by Professor Ronald Hutton, Head of History at Bristol University “and author of the monumental work on the traditional British calendar, Stations of the Sun”.
But how rude of me - I’ve been operating under the assumption you know what hauntology is. Well, all – or quite a lot (it’s a densely congested—and contested–field that spills way beyond music) is explained in Retromania, which is OUT NOW. For an amuse bouche foretaste:
Early piece by me on Ghost Box
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/spirit_of_preservation/
(So early we’d none of us settled on the term “hauntology” yet, although that was actually my original title for this piece for Frieze – and when I say “we” I mean of course bloggers and journalists... the artists themselves have not rallied to the term... but at least they’ve not NOT-rallied to the term either)
Recent article by Andrew Gallix on Hauntology’s applications outside music
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jun/17/hauntology-critical
Joanne McNeil of Rhizome’s notes on Mark Fisher (a/k/a K-punk) 2011 lecture in New York on hauntology and non-time/non-place, a foretaste of Fisher’s book-to-come Ghosts of My Life.
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/may/18/hauntology/
^^^^^^^^^
Finally, a bonus beat: “Consensus to Delete” a/k/a the debate at Wikipedia about whether or not to erase the entry on ‘Hauntology (musical genre)’. In the end the shadowy cabal, led by one PhantomSteve wouldyafuckingbelieveit, 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-sinister discourse that could 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.
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hauntology (musical genre)
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