[sonic]hauntology

the sound which constitutes something like the audio-correlate of hauntology itself: crackle. In veiling the past, crackle also makes the dimension of time audible. It is through this scratching of the scanner-lens that we can hear the time-wound, the chronological fracture, the expression of the sense, crucial to hauntology, that ‘time is out of joint’. Dyschronia.
– Mark Fisher

The phrase is coined by Derrida (not Delueze) in his Specters of Marx during which he reflects on the persistance of the concept of (utopian) revolution despite its apparent eradication from the scene of politics and history (the book is ‘work of mourning’ published in the early 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inauguration of the ‘end of history’). As such the concept of social and political revolution takes on a ghostly aspect – present and not present, eluding the categorical definition of western metaphysics, apparently erased yet still palpable in traces and echoes and uncanny visitations. Obviously, transplanting such a shadowy concept to the scene of (pop) music is no straightforward operation but as far as I can work out the concept is deployed towards a music that employs certain strategies of disinternment – a disinternment of styles, sounds, even techniques and modes of production now abandoned, forgotten or erased by history. The classic example, I think, is the music that is released on the Ghost Box label, which evokes a strain of electronic musical ‘futurism’ that was most notable in the 70s (but was also around before then) – the BBC Radiophonic Workshop sound of spooky analogue synthesizers etc. Listening to that music (and I must admit I haven’t heard much) is like encountering a revenant – a return in figurative form of a glimpse of a future that never was, a visionary dream that was envisioned once but which slipped out of collective memory. The concept of hauntology however tends to be more loosely deployed, and in particular to music that employs samples and especially dub reggae techniques that reanimate styles and sounds that hover, suggestively, around the edges of the day to day. Such techniques foreground the ‘re’ in recorded music and evoke the Janus-like status of music as recorded artifact, facing both backwards and forwards simultaneously, an inscripted trace that is neither presence nor absence but a spectral apparation that both referencesand eludes such binary oppositional catagories…

[posted by John Doe at dissensus.com : What exactly is hauntology to pop music?]

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HAUNTOLOGY NOW
Symposium – Mon 12th May 2008
Museum of Garden History, London (UK)

[info .pdf]

In the past two years, the concept of ‘hauntology’ has emerged as a name for the zeitgeist. The shades of the past become more vivid than anything turned up by the present. The spirit of the times is itself spectral. Faced with the apparent triumph of global Capital and the collapse of cultural innovation, artists and critics impatient with postmodern culture’s ‘nostalgia mode’ are forced back to a time before the End of History. They engage in mourning and melancholia for what has disappeared and what never came to be. Everyday life becomes ghostly… a saturated culture is unable to forget that things were not always like this. [...]

This May 12 event will be the first to deal with the relation between sound and hauntology, and will focus in particular on the role of space in generating hauntological effects. Why do certain places retain the traces of past sonic events? Why is so much hauntological music tied up with particular spaces? What has the disappearance of the concept of public space to do with hauntology?