Hauntology - scrying with sound

Hauntology is a philosophical and cultural concept describing the persistent return of elements from the past—particularly failed, "lost futures"—to haunt the contemporary present. Introduced by Jacques Derrida in 1993, it signifies a "nostalgia for lost futures" or a "time out of joint," where culture recycles old aesthetics instead of producing a truly new future.

Abstract, random and improvised sound collages

In music, hauntology is predominantly associated with a British electronic music trend but it can apply to any art concerned with the aesthetics of the past. The trend is often tied to notions of retrofuturism, whereby artists evoke the past by utilising the "spectral sounds of old music technology". The trend involves the sampling of older sound sources to evoke deep cultural memory. Critic Simon Reynolds stated in a 2006 article that "this strand of 'ghostified' music doesn't quite constitute a genre, a scene, or even a network. [...] more of a flavour or atmosphere than a style with boundaries", although in a 2017 article he summarized it as a "largely British genre of eerie electronics fixated on ideas of decaying memory and lost futures". A 2009 blog post by academic Adam Harper stated that "[h]auntology is not a genre of art or music, but an aesthetic effect, a way of reading and appreciating art".

Hauntological music draws on varied postwar cultural sources from the 1940s through the 1960s which lie outside the usual canon of popular music, including library music, film and television soundtracks, educational music, and the sonic experimentation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as electronic and folk music sources. Other British influences include obscure musique concrète composers and Joe Meek's album I Hear a New World, as well as psychedelia and public information films. Also important is the appropriation of visual iconography from this earlier period, including graphic design elements of school textbooks, public information posters, and television idents.

Artists typically use vintage recording devices such as cassettes and synthesisers from the 1960s and 1980s. Production often foregrounds the grain of the recording, including vinyl noise and tape hiss derived from the degraded musical or spoken word samples commonly used. Sampling is used to "evoke 'dead presences'" which are transformed into "eerie sonic markers". Artists often mix antique synthesiser tones, acoustic instruments, and digital techniques, as well as found sounds, abstract noise, and industrial drones.

Position Normal are one such English musical duo, formed in London in 1986, consisting of Chris Bailiff and John Cushway. Their music is sample-based, incorporating existing music and found sound from unusual vintage sources (purchased second hand or previously owned by Bailiff's father) into collage-like tracks.

Hauntology is a term that offers freedom for creative interpretation, and while typically used to reference temporal disturbances and the ever-increasing interaction between the present and the past, I will use it to refer to a broader but intertwined dichotomy: Real experience vs. unreal experience. While perhaps abstract-sounding at first, it is not hard to think of examples of experiences you’ve had where the power of the moment comes from what didn’t happen as opposed to what did. Picture yourself passing through a crowded nightclub. You lock eyes with someone who passes by with a slight smile, but neither of you turn back, the flash of potential fading as soon as it begins to burn. Stories you’ve heard that you only know through imagination; dreams that slip away as you wake but leave emotional traces that you can’t shake throughout the day; missed opportunities and regrets that hound you even when their sources are long gone ― these unrealities are just as impactful on our internal experience as the realities we experience, and hauntology is an attempt to capture the ineffable emotion that comes at the border of the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music)

https://www.michigandaily.com/arts/hauntology-exploring-liminal-space/

https://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2012/05/?m=1

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nAokzlubz5lzNIQEUoKGhkxGvjSoT7LwA&si=cePT5u9saxPuiVBn

#Hauntology