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 "Science and Folklore," 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
|
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" echoes the broadcast term which brings chills to any on-air producer. Showing their taste for wordplay, for Mordant Music "Dead Air" also means a dead transmission never to be revived again but exorcised through Ian Hicks (alias "Baron Mordant") and Gary Mills's ("Admiral Greyscale") ever expanding choices of media, which for "Dead Air" include music, clever package design and graphics.
"There were a lot more live broadcasts back then," says Mills, "so the immediacy of the presentation and transmission is key — nowadays we're all very much aware that if something is not presented as a recording, then the likelihood of its recording and repeating after the point of transmission is very strong."
Ariel Pink is one of a few undisputed American representatives of hauntology. His vehicle, Haunted Graffiti, is more often than not 28-year-old Pink, a guitar, an 8-track recorder, some inexpensive audio effects and his beat-boxing mouth.
Pink decries the wasted momentum of a golden era of pop he dates from 1967-1982. Half out of technological necessity and half out of bloodymindedness, Pink's four albums to date, culled from hundreds of tapes he's recorded since the late '90s when he was an archly skeptical art student, present a corroded alternative pop history to the one archived in countless K-Tel compilations and Circus magazines of the period.
The sub-industry of rock esoterica — CD reissues, magazines like Mojo and Uncut, publishing enterprises like the 33 1/3 series, which goes into near-pathological detail on the making of records by a wide miscellany of artists including Led Zeppelin, Belle and Sebastian, the Replacements and DJ Shadow — has brought a new hyper-awareness to pop history for the novice who might have purchased their first copy of GarageBand. The effects of this are apparent by looking at the release schedule for any independent label's upcoming quarter, which feature many studied updates of past bands and, sometimes, entire periods.
To take one example, part of the appeal for a more straightforward retro artist like Devendra Banhart centers on his ability to appear to have come from another time. It's as if his music and persona were a fastidiously constructed period piece by Merchant and Ivory, but fed on a diet of granola, acid and some less illuminating passages from Tom Wolfe's earlier books. An interview with Pitchfork reads like the script to a scene from an imaginary David Crosby biopic, but one written without securing rights to the subject's name, music and former novelty:
"Pitchfork: The first track on Cripple Crow has the opening line 'You gotta pay back every penny you owe.' It's such a simple, direct way of talking about karma, and I wondered if that's what you were getting at there.
Banhart: Definitely, man, but I've always noticed talking about lyrics is like talking about a duality. It's like a Gemini time every time I talk about one line. Because each line, of course, means different things to different people, millions of interpretations. With me, I always see two sides. I just see things split into two."
What Ariel Pink and other hauntologists do is markedly different. They're not updating the past, nor are they recapturing a spirit. Like Mordant Music with "Dead Air," Pink is re-imagining something he concedes can never be retrieved because it existed only in myth. But ask him about his association with hauntology and Pink is reticent.
"It's not so flattering," says Pink, "being only one of several purveyors of the so-called hauntology movement, a term which came to be, in this context at least, a good while after I had come into public awareness."
Pink's view, with some variation, is shared by each musician I asked about the term. Gary Mills draws an especially stark line between Mordant Music and hauntology.
"What's really important to remember above all else," says Mills, "is that this all refers to one record we've made, not a manifesto of our entire projected output."
Paul Dickow, who runs the label Community Library with David Chandler (alias, DJ Brokenwidow), and makes his own genre-evading records as Strategy, takes a broad view of the use for such classifying terms in music.
"On one hand," Dickow says, "they're really interesting and convenient. I like them above all because they provide rules, which are fun and important to break and that is how cultural information is critiqued and hopefully spread. On the other hand, I dislike genres for the simple reason that, since most people adhere tightly to rules instead of breaking them, they simply provide [the] guidelines for artistic conformity."
Chicago-based hauntologist Rolan Vega's recent Community Library release Documentary struck listeners in the UK as clearly identifiable with other hauntological records. It contains the familiar predilection for glazed-over or spectral sonics and an enthusiasm for the past. But what makes Vega and his associates exceptional enough to require their own buzzword is the cautiousness of this enthusiasm. They pursue the past with a rigor and selectivity which amounts to more than mere influence. Whatever their flirtations with nostalgia, it hasn't seduced them.
Nostalgia is an idea with a short, though dynamic, history. From Svetlana Boym's poignant book The Future of Nostalgia we learn that it was coined by a Swiss doctor in the late 17th Century. For the first hundred years of its life, it remained a specialist's term diagnosing a condition commonly found in soldiers sent away from their home cantons to defend the Old Swiss Confederacy. Boym writes:
"Nostalgia was said to produce 'erroneous representations' that caused the afflicted to lose touch with the present. Longing for their native land became their single-minded obsession. The patients acquired 'a lifeless and haggard countenance,' and 'indifference towards everything,' confusing past and present, real and imaginary events."
Gradually, as the medical term fell (or rose, depending on your view) to popular usage it became associated with sentiment rather than symptoms. The big break was when nostalgia ceased to mean a return to a place and started meaning a return to a time. The word lost its pejorative edge; it began to pop up in advertising copy around the time the atom bomb and self-cleaning ovens made it clear there was no going back to ... well, a time before those things. By the 1960s, nostalgia hardly meant more than that. In such instances, it was used to commodify exactly what those tormented Swiss soldiers were in want of: coziness, the familiar and the knowable.
Following Simon Reynolds' first trend-spotting, Mark Fisher has explored in depth the significance of hauntology as it applies to music. Fisher, a cultural critic and blogger, argues that the artists' use of nostalgia is in line with the post-modern critique that is hauntology's origin.
"What haunts in hauntology," Fisher says, "is in many cases the abandoned program of modernism."
Fisher cites Frederic Jameson, the Marxist political theorist and literary critic, to illustrate his point.
"Nostalgia for Jameson," Fisher says, "is not at all a psychological state so much as a cultural dependence upon past structures."
What is the step beyond this dependence — where today is eternally slavish to yesterday? Jameson's answer: "Nostalgia for modernism." Or, more precisely, nostalgia for the sense of progress which modernism took for granted.
"Well, we live in a culture dominated by nostalgia," says Fisher. And nostalgia for modernism differs from postmodern nostalgia by calling attention to the weaknesses of the present; not just our present but the idea of "the present." Or, as Fisher puts it, "there is no 'Now' any more."
Pop music is almost the perfect stage for viewing this philosophical drama.
"For example," Fisher explains, "Franz Ferdinand are presented to us as new, even though they are quite clearly a pastiche-collage of styles developed over twenty-five years ago. By contrast, the artists I'm calling hauntological do not conceal their relationship to past cultural forms and eras. But they express a craving, not only for a moment that has gone, but, more importantly, for a future that never came to pass, but which seemed to be promised."
What Fisher suggests by pointing out this rigorous redux is that the short, dynamic history of nostalgia and how we relate to it is approaching yet another shift in emphasis. The nostalgic yearning, which around a hundred and fifty years ago moved its focus from a place to a time, is now, with hauntology, moving from a time to our collective imagination and the parameters history has set around it.
If you're looking to test the legitimacy of a new music genre, the categorical split between "practical" and "theoretical" is a good way to start. Rhythm and blues, for example, is a casual but apt name for a type of music: it's practical, therefore very legitimate. Heavy Metal began more theoretically. It started life as a loosely descriptive term in the late '60's for the heroin-tinged boogie of post-Summer of Love psychedelia (think: "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," fringed suede, Dennis Hopper's mustache in Easy Rider). By the early '70s, its nebulousness had solidified into a genre with most of the instantly identifiable features in place: volume, black leather, machismo, guitar virtuosity, occultist imagery. Combining at least three of these elements implied the rest, and the label Heavy Metal by association. The theory concretized into a practice and Heavy Metal received its credentials as a pop music genre.
Hauntology remains stubbornly theoretical. It may end up like post-rock, the substantively DOA sub-genre of the '90's and another Reynolds formulation. Though he is "astonished by the persistence of the term" as a clearing house for what in the '70's would have been called "prog" or progressive rock, Reynolds admits that the path post-rock has taken since his decade-old report compels him less than the music he initially covered.
There's an outside chance hauntology might turn out like Punk or Emo. These labels, though identifiable with specific types of music, many continue to adopt as a cluster of values from which they assemble a Weltanschauung and lifestyle. One doesn't have to play music in order to be "punk" or "emo." But as Frank Zappa once said, dismissing punk, "No pop fad ever succeeded that you couldn't dress up to." A hauntological "look" has yet to appear.
In discussing hauntology's cultural reach, Mark Fisher offers a more useful suggestion.
"I've written before about hauntology as our zeitgeist," says Fisher, "playing on the idea of the spirit of the times being ghostly. What fascinates me is that hauntology is instantiated in musics — and not only musics — that are very different to one another, and which don't appear to be influenced by each other at all."
But how did an esoteric witticism cross over from one vigorous debate to another?
"It wasn't meant to suggest some doctrinal alignment with Derrida's quite abstruse ideas," says Reynolds, referring to the French deconstructionist. ''My wife, who was working as a books editor, got sent a copy of Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's 'Specters of Marx.' I think I had been very vaguely aware of the word hauntology but was never that up on Derrida, especially not his later work. But the term lurked in my head."
Hauntology entered the world as Derrida's pun on "Ontology" — the study, or contemplation, of being. The first time we see it in print is in the last chapter of Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, (1993). And with this neologism, the thesis of Francis Fukuyama's own book (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992) which, in summary, is a long victory lap for liberal democracy, met one of its many rebuttals.
Where's the opposition now? While Fukuyama's The End of History walked straight into common usage among the international relations chattering class, Derrida's Specters has taken a more unusual course. Almost 15 years after its introduction, hauntology leads a double life. By dreary day, the term helps produce a book or so a year from a university press (such a statistic speaks against any notion of its ubiquity). Come sundown, hauntology indulges in its pop life.
Yet Ian Penman, a British critic and Reynolds's contemporary, is skeptical of the way hauntology has developed from its humble origins as a bookish turn of phrase to a burgeoning pop genre. On his blog, The Pill Box, Penman took aim at those who were treating the term too literally — missing the basic premise underlying hauntology's initial usage which, he emphasizes, is "not about 'haunting' music made by bands with the word 'Ghost' in the title."
"If you just reduce it to a synonym for 'haunting' music then you're already way off course. And if you start to say — here is Music X, which reminds me of Childhood Y, and so is about a straight feedback system of nostalgia — well, I would say you ... have missed the point. It would be more apropos to find a piece of music from THEN that seemed to be haunted by NOW, maybe. [Music] that utterly messed with our usual notions of time and reception."
There may be a marriage between Reynold's and Penmen's conceptions of sonic hauntology on London blogger Owen Hatherley's compulsory site 'sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy.' Last year, Hatherley wrote about the blues records of Robert Johnson, noting "there's surely no music more utterly dominated by its recording technology " than the 41 recordings that survive from his only two sessions. This observation rests not only on the buzz and crackle which dominate the primitive recordings but also with the controversy following their transfer to CD. To many ears, these hallmarks of authenticity sound blaphemously sped up as if it were a Timbaland remix.
It's true Reynolds never claimed a strict link between Derrida's historiographical pun and what he casually gleaned from it. For better or worse, from psychedelia to the New Romantics and beyond, pop tends to confuse what it brings into its fold. In pop, images and noises make the statements. Words only qualify them.
Sonically, hauntology is much easier to pin down. The analog/digital divide which characterizes most music in the last two decades — the false struggle between authenticity and its other, in an entirely inauthentic medium (audio recordings) — merges in much hauntology. The way the artists bridge the gap is often what provides the spook to a sound which ranges widely but usually off the rock mainland and on a desert island with no discs but, in Ghost Box's case, plenty of Jan Tschichold-designed Penguin Paperbacks.
But an equally important trait of sonic haunology is what Fisher expains as "the surface noise, the hiss, that prevents us from experiencing what we are hearing as present." In hauntology, like dub, Fisher says, "We hear the absences."
If the tension between presence and absence is the point of departure for sonic hauntology, then perhaps no artist proceeds more daringly than Colleen.
Colleen (AKA Cecile Schott), quickly gained a reputation for fragile yet tense atmospherics with the release of her debut album "Everyone Alive Wants Answers" in 2003. That record was marked by her use of samples taken from out-of-print Baroque and Romantic records she borrowed from a library in Paris. In the three releases since, Schott has moved away from a reliance on samples towards an all-acoustic approach. She often uses archaic instruments whose sonorities are the basis of her sound, creating an impression of music out of time and time that is out of phase.
"You could argue that the sounds of the harpsichord and the viola da gamba are dated," Schott says. "However, I do believe that once put in the context of another music, they can give an ancient color, but that in itself does not make the instrument dated."
The viola da gamba is a forbear of the cello. When bowed, it makes an impressively gentler sound with a broader resonance than members of the violin family. This year Schott released "Les Ondes Silencieuses," a record which uses it prominently. By taking the instrument out of the ceramic hands of 17th Century virtuoso Marin Marais and placing it at the heart of her minimalist records, Schott, like the hauntologists, asks us to listen, not quite without prejudice, but without the presumptions supplied to us by cliched divides: digital/analog, nostalgia/modernism, classical/pop. She is struck by how strong this last taboo is within music criticism.
"Because I used baroque instruments on my last album," Schott says, "it seems to have been considered by some reviewers as an attempt to enter the classical world. Therefore some have applied technical criteria of interpretation which, while relevant in some ways, are often off the mark since I'm not a classical composer and since my 'compositions' are tightly linked to my non-classical way of playing."
The archival instinct which seems a common hauntological denominator gets a sensual reworking on Schott's records. Whereas "found sounds" make up much of Ghost Box's sonic template, "Les Ondes Silencieuses" is striking for its use of the "lost sounds" of archaic instruments.
"I too was convinced that I could never play those instruments," Schott says, "since I was already too old to play them 'properly.' I had to enter adulthood to realise that I didn't have to stick to those conservative patterns and that there was no reason for me to be denied at least the joy of learning to play such instruments."
The remark may recall the images of a teenaged Schott and Reynolds confronted by their own reaction to a sound, strange enough at first listen to seem a barrier, but in the end just its opposite. In the undivided moment of those first contacts, there was no music journalism on hand, no advertisements on TV and no hackneyed film interpretations of what was, is, or will be to console the adolescents.
A major part of the thrill in sonic hauntology is the sense of discovering sound and music outside its accepted context. In an article written for The Wire, Reynolds likened this aspect of hauntology to the appearance of hip-hop in the early 1980s.
"I vividly recall the disorientation induced by the first hip-hop records based entirely around sampling, productions by Marley Marl and Herby Azor — the sensual but uncanny friction caused by 'different auras, different vibes, different studio atmospheres, different eras' being placed in ghostly adjacence."
What Schott's and Reynolds's first contacts share, besides the fact they foretell how both would make their living as adults, is they were disorienting. Schott's expectations of how a record could access her were shaken, perhaps even her own emotional reach lengthened. Reynolds's moral universe was thrown into thrilling question. Such thwarting of conventional wisdom, expectation and the firmly-established narratives which signal the break with childhood is key to exploiting one's nostalgia. Or, at least, understanding this unlikely buzzword, hauntology.
E-mail Andrew Stout at andrewstout at gmail dot com.
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