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I’m writing this in late 2009, which is usually list-writing time. On my message board, in fact, people are listing their favourite albums of the decade, which I find terrifying – I am having enough trouble just coming up with my most-loved records of the year. But looking back over the decade I am, in fact, seeing an emerging pattern in my listening – that which music writer Simon Reynolds will now only refer to as “the H word”. Hauntology.
The word comes from Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx, and it speaks to the notion that the present is haunted by the past, and that we cannot help but constantly orient ourselves to it. Reynolds applied the word to new musics defined by their relationship to, or reiteration or détournement of, musics that evoke the past. It is, perhaps, a peculiarly apt thing for music to do in the early 21st century: deal with the unfinished business of the previous century.
It also falls within what the wonderful Moon Wiring Club are pleased to call “confusing English electronic music”, whose most famous early proponent today might be the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and its most deified member, Delia Derbyshire. You’ve all heard her work. The original Doctor Who theme was written by Ron Grainer, but Derbyshire’s interpretation was so radical that he tried to get her co-credited as composer. The BBC, however, preferred to keep membership of the Workshop anonymous. This is an idea that’s followed through today in hauntological units like Moon Wiring Club, who go to lengths to remain anonymous, presenting a list of entirely and obviously fictional members in their materials.
Later in her career, Derbyshire created pieces for music libraries, and library music is another touchstone of the movement. Many of the acts on Ghost Box, an exclusively hauntological label, use or evoke library music to summon the spirit of the 70s: not so much the flares and claret tank-tops, but rather the disturbing (and usually electronically scored) children’s TV dramas of the time. For those of you who managed to avoid being born in this hideous time, go to YouTube and find the deeply creepy opening titles of The Tomorrow People, or look at The Changes, a kids’ drama where everyone in the country goes completely mental and destroys every item of technology they can lay their mad hands on. Even the public information films of the time tended to be sinister and otherworldly. Records like the superb From an Ancient Star by Belbury Poly on Ghost Box create an entire world from these sources, music surrounding the idea of a story, the howling presence of cosmic horror in some small country town in spitting distance of a stone circle. Those TV series, and these records, go after the same jolt of verisimilitude that Jon Pertwee approved of when Cybermen wandered round London in an old episode of Doctor Who. Or, perhaps, the ghost of it.
Of course, different generations are haunted by different things. Burial’s “Raver” is all about unfinished business with the 20th century; the ghost of a rave, heard across the centuries by a man who never went to a field off the M25, freaky-dancing as his spinal fluid is evaporated by a dodgy E. He sits in his room and hears the spectre of it, an evanescent graveyard dance 20 miles away that he will never get to reach and join. Like much of his work, punctuated by the pops and crackles of vinyl poltergeists, it’s melancholy, rueful music.
Not as baleful, mind you, as the music of Philip Jeck, who combines ancient turntables and antique records into a full-on summoning. I heard him perform live a few years ago and the experience was immense in its strangeness, a musical version of Raudive’s Electronic Voice Phenomenon. The sound has the absolute sense of being drawn from The Other Side. No one in this audio-weave is alive any more; the room fills with ghosts.
I have the new CD by Leyland Kirby (aka hauntological pioneer The Caretaker) on my desk, and perhaps its title lays a stone slab atop the hauntological enterprise of the first decade of the 21st century. It’s called Sadly, the Future is No Longer What It Was.
Previous columns from Warren Ellis:'Look out for Hollywood spelunking things into the Moon' 'How an old guy saved online music journalism' 'I want to vapourise you with a death ray from space' 'Thunderbirds will grow a generation of mad engineers' 'The future isn't big any more. The future is small' 'We could all have swine flu by the time you read this' 'The Kindle is a mewling, crippled, pining thing...' 'I plan to invest in anti-carnivorous robot security'
MicrobiographyWarren Ellis is a prolific comic-book writer for Marvel and DC, as well as a novelist and socio-cultural commentator, based in Southend-on-Sea. You can read his blog at warrenellis.com and follow him at Twitter.com/warrenellis
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
