Hauntology (music)

The term hauntology was introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx as a term for the post-Marxist understanding of what is perceived as the tendency of Karl Marx's ideas to "haunt Western society from beyond the grave". ==Characteristics==

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", Hauntological music draws on varied postwar cultural sources Other British influences include obscure musique concrète composers and Joe Meek's album I Hear a New World, 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. ==History==

1990s–2000s In music journalism, Derrida's ideas were invoked by critic Ian Penman for his 1995 essay on the production style of Tricky's album Maxinquaye, though Penman did not use the phrase "hauntology." In the mid-2000s, the word began to be more widely appropriated by writers and theorists such as Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, who referred to the work of Philip Jeck, William Basinski, Burial, The Caretaker, and artists associated with the UK label Ghost Box as hauntology. In a 2006 article for The Wire, Reynolds identified Ghost Box's the Focus Group, Belbury Poly, the Advisory Circle as prominent in the trend, along with Broadcast, The Caretaker, and Mordant Music. Other progenitors include Portishead Reynolds also invoked sample-based group Position Normal as presaging the genre. Music genres hypnagogic pop and chillwave – sometimes deployed interchangeably with each other – descended from hauntology. The former is described as an "American cousin" to hauntology. According to the Michigan Daily, the music microgenre vaporwave is considered hauntological due to its use of nostalgia. ==Critical analysis==

Hauntological music is identified with British culture, A sense of loss and bereavement is central to the phenomenon, according to theologian Johan Eddebo. Simon Reynolds in 2011, remarked: Liam Sprod of 3:AM Magazine stated that "[h]auntology as aesthetics is firmly rooted in the idea of nostalgia as a disruption of time," adding that "[i]nstead of mere repetition, this distance provides a sense of loss and mourning, [...] and revitalizes the potential for a utopianism for the present age". Mark Fisher characterised the hauntology movement as "a sign that 'white' culture can no longer escape the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience", calling it contemporary electronic music's "confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future". Fisher stated that [W]hen cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, [...] one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity's terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past. Hauntological music is stated by academic Sean Albiez to suggest "an uncanny mixture of shared but faded cultural memories with sinister undercurrents". ==See also==