“The ‘futuristic’ in music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be different; it has become an established style. Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now as antique as Glenn Miller’s big band jazz…”

Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures

Currently, the most prolific area of hauntological art is the field of music. Ironically, hauntological music seems to be the vaguest in terms of how exactly these forms of art relate to Derrida’s original conceptions. It seems as if many hauntological musical artists integrate the themes of hauntology into the conception and explanation of their approaches to music, and so some of their music itself seems only to have a tenuous link to the philosophical framework, transforming and extending the tenets first explored in Derrida’s lecture and essay. Musician Elvis Costello (supposedly) once remarked that writing about music is like “dancing about architecture”, as written descriptions and analyses of music are missing a vital aspect of the experiences of hearing and feeling the medium of music, and so perhaps the absence of definitive textual connections between a philosophical theory and an aural phenomenon are to be expected. Most hauntological music contains no lyrics at all, as sound, album art, and liner notes provide the ghostly connections to hauntology. Hauntological music, then, cannot be reduced to its lyrical content or message; it’s more of a sensibility, a feeling, a mood, and an approach to not only creating music but listening to and experiencing music as well.

Hauntological music is often suffused with an existential sadness and longing nostalgia, a painful yearning to preserve memories, feelings, fleeting images, half-heard sounds, even types of recordings and recording technologies that have disappeared or perhaps never truly existed. This music’s ethos seeks to invoke the emotional world between anticipation and disappointment. In this manner, hauntological music expresses Schopenhauer’s own view of the futile quest for contentment and joy through time, nostalgia, and future expectations:

“Happiness lies always in the future or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain and the past irrecoverable.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, The Essential Schopenhauer: Key Selections From The World As Will And Representation and Other Writings (New York: Harper, 2010).

Often hauntological music calls attention to how fragile and ethereal recording anything really is; the inevitable breakdown and decay of all recordings and recording materials and recorders themselves; the imperfect nature of recording and playback is pushed to the forefront of much hauntological music as pops, crackles, skips, static, distortion, surface noise, and tape degradation are not muted or erased but rather enhanced to make the listener feel the loss and slipping away within that moment of listening. Like memory, hauntological music starts to break down, warp, and dissipate even at the moment of its creation.

Hauntological musicians utilise their recording media and technology much as human mediums were conductors and conduits for spiritualist contact, plucking voices and sounds from the ether. Hauntological music exhibits an uncanny (in a Freudian sense) nostalgia for the forgotten, the discarded, opportunities lost or squandered that will never come back again, the abandoned and neglected. Childhood and adolescence are popular subjects for hauntological music as time, memory, and wistfulness conjure up could have beens, should have beens, and never weres.

This kind of longing for unrequited teenage love or the safety and unconditional happiness of childhood has its predecessors in pre-hauntological musical works such as The Beach Boys’ “Caroline, No” (indeed the whole Pet Sounds album), The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever”, The Kinks’ The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, and even in less acclaimed pop songs like The Dream Academy’s “Life In A Northern Town”, and REM’s “Nightswimming”. While past sentiments and reflective memories can be lauded in songs, there is also the potential trap of a nostalgic miasma that discourages and paralyses personal growth as reflected in tracks such as Japan’s plaintive electro-minimalist “Ghosts”: “Just when I thought I could not be stopped/When my chance came to be king/The ghosts of my life/Blew wilder than the wind.”

Critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher loosely define hauntological music as music reflecting temporal disruption, retrofuturism, Cold War paranoia, and nostalgic childhood memories, often using anachronistic or obsolete instruments and recording media, drawing upon esoteric cultural references, library music, soundtracks, field recordings, analogue electronic music, psychedelia, musique concrete, and media sound sources like public service messages and educational film narratives. The aesthetic is one of futurism, utopianism, and ultramodern progressivism meeting the failed, the forgotten, the discarded, the decommissioned, and the abandoned. Hauntological music foregrounds the eerie, the odd, the out of sync, the disjointed, the unsettling, reclaiming cultural ‘debris’, neglected history, and deteriorating memory. At once, functional, official, institutional, and scientific, and yet doomed, broken, failed, occult, and supernatural, hauntological music is intentionally anachronistic, especially in its invocation of promised futures through the triumph of technology and scientific technocracy, a yearning for a future that was imagined, guaranteed, and idealised in post World War II England and World’s Fair USA.

British hauntological music artists have created an alternate utopia, a time and place where all the promise, hope, and optimism of the 50s, 60s, and 70s have come to fruition in a celebration of a perfect world of stylish leisure, technological marvels, and personal freedom. This retrofuturism was integrated into popular music with early Roxy Music’s mix of 1940s Hollywood glamour and the wild hedonism of freak-out postmodern synthesized sound, as well as with Kraftwerk’s romanticised 1920s Weimar/Teutonic/Bauhaus aura recreated by precisely syncopated Futura robots, but can ostensibly be traced back to Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist jazz, stage appearance, and philosophy. Psychedelia’s first hauntological casualty Syd Barrett, the Edwardian psychonaut, had one foot on an interstellar spacecraft and the other on a penny farthing bicycle, haunting his own acid-addled mind, becoming rock’s premier living ghost.

Time is not the only obsession of hauntological music as place, setting, and environment are all crucially invoked through sound compositions. Like the Situationist psychogeographers, hauntological music seeks to recreate the emotional, ethereal, and psychological aspects of space and place. Hauntological geography, much like psychogeography, is not concerned with the mapped, the measured, the official, the surveilled, or the known. Hauntological music conveys the feelings of stepping into the hidden, the obscure, the unknown, the transitory, areas that cannot be mapped objectively, the just out of reach either temporally or geographically. Landscapes are more than just boundaries and borders; they are haunted by all the events that have seeped into the ground.

Precedents for this kind of sonic mapping can be found in former Roxy Music provocateur/Renaissance man Brian Eno’s “On Land” (1982), a subjective sound recreation of the brooding Suffolk coastline in eastern England, half remembered from Eno’s childhood trips there. Sound invokes remembrance when it becomes a virtual place, even if the listener has never been there physically, only in the mind. Just as the music genre exotica conjured up spaces and places that were half real and half desired, hauntological music too indulges both nostalgic reminiscence and projected imagination, as the lines between these psychological and emotional states blur into a third space beyond the perceived and imagined. Personal and collective memories along with long promised but never realised dreams are the ghosts that are both conjured and exorcised through hauntological music, transforming the hopes, fears, pain, trepidations, and fascination for what was, what might have been, and what never can be again into sound.

This is an extract from the introduction to Ghost Of An Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, And The Spectre Of Nostalgia by William Burns, published by Headpress.

Read Spenser Tomson’s review of Ghost Of An Idea in The Wire 491/492. Wire subscribers can also read the review online via the digital library.