I'm very exicted to hear epic45's stuff. My friend Eric/EL Heath (who features quite heavily in that clip) has been writing with them. I don't think he's been using his martenot with them though; that'd be bloody lovely if he was!

They've got a 7" out soonish, I think. One side is a cover of a Depeche Mode song in an epic45 style; the other a re-imagining of an epic45 song in a Depeche Mode style. You can hear the latter on the Make Mine Music podcast:

soundcloud.com/makeminemusic/sets/make-mine-music-podcast-1-1

Downloaded Seasons- thanks for the link Mumpo. Will listen in bed tonight, I think. Also enjoyed the Moon Wiring Club mixtape. Marvellous!

A blog for Mumpo.

I did a blog post cautiously critiquing hauntology t'other day, if anyone's interested.

I should have used this picture for comprehensive schools, rather than the one I did:



It's from the booklet to July Skies' The Weather Clock album, which I'm listening to now and which I can't recommend highly enough.

The shot you used is of the Smithson's school in Hunstanton isn't it? Perfectly suitable I reckon.

Ah, the "lachrymose paedophile's-eye view" shot. As taught in photography classes across the globe.

That's less lachrymal than glaucomal, I'd say.

Fatter Hipper wrote:
...



It's from the booklet to July Skies' The Weather Clock album, which I'm listening to now and which I can't recommend highly enough.
Just to observe that, yes, this is a superb album.

A different kind of Hauntology from 14 Tracks this week.

I'm not being terribly ordered in my contributions to this thread, but firstly just to pick up on FH's use of an image from one of the July Skies album booklets.

It's immediately obvious that Mr JS, Anthony Harding, puts a massive amount of work into the CD releases, not least being via his relationship with the graphic designer (all the July Skies artwork can be seen on the designer's website, here). But the way that The English Cold is presented really doesn't work for me. It's the florid typography, which puts me in mind of (and seems similarly inappropriate as) John Betjeman's gravestone:



Second, completely separate, point. Music and psychogeography. It's not what you'd call in-depth, but there's an interesting article touching on July Skies, Epic45, Belbury Poly and Ghost Box by Jude Rogers on The Guardian website, here.

I'm very interested in the idea of there being a relationship between the characteristics of particular locations on the one hand, and music and the creative process that underpins it on the other. Googling around the subject throws up other names that I'm not familar with, such as Bibio and Movietone, the latter having by all accounts recorded part of an album on a beach in Cornwall. Does this sort of thing strike a chord with anyone else?

Furtho wrote:
Second, completely separate, point. Music and psychogeography. It's not what you'd call in-depth, but there's an interesting article touching on July Skies, Epic45, Belbury Poly and Ghost Box by Jude Rogers on The Guardian website, here.

I'm very interested in the idea of there being a relationship between the characteristics of particular locations on the one hand, and music and the creative process that underpins it on the other. Googling around the subject throws up other names that I'm not familar with, such as Bibio and Movietone, the latter having by all accounts recorded part of an album on a beach in Cornwall. Does this sort of thing strike a chord with anyone else?

I'm not (yet) familiar with Bibio and Movietone, so I can't comment on their output.

However, for me the act of deliberately going somewhere to record (part of) an album is something that is separate from Hauntology. It's more an aspect of Ambient. For me (and yes, I am speaking personally here) I think the essence of Hauntology, on an individual level, is that it should be about a time or place that was an influence on you anyway - usually when growing up. It's the hazing of those memories through the imperfect lens of time, or being able to belatedly contextualise them that gives them their potency and atmosphere.

It's a bit like when you think of an aspect or a location from childhood and you almost 'get a taste in your mouth' to accompany it, so strong is the mental image. That's what Hauntology is about for me: a musical equivalent of the 'taste in your mouth'. It's involuntary. Staging it just isn't the same.

Furtho wrote:
there's an interesting article touching on July Skies, Epic45, Belbury Poly and Ghost Box by Jude Rogers on The Guardian website, here.


I know nothing about July Skies - I'm really out of touch at the moment, and was equally out of touch two years ago, when that article was written - but the song titles and quotes from the website on there make him/them sound like the most generic thing ever. Had the whole hauntology thing reached that point by 2008? The hauntological Soup Dragons?

he makes music that is inspired, according to his website, by "municipal parks at dusk", "concrete precincts" and "old ordnance survey maps"

Note to musicians: it's the job of music journalists to make you sound smarter and more imaginative than you really are. If you try to do their job for them, you will only make yourself sound as smart and imaginative as you really are... and no one wants that.

The Weather Clock has tracks called See Britain by Train and Branch Line Summers Fade

Christ almighty!

I bought a Novation BassStation this morning, and have set to work. Expect, in four days time, the latest hauntological masterpiece:

THE RICHMOND TEST
"1:50,000 SCALE COLOUR RASTER"
(Mummer Records)

1. Cradley Heath Transmitter Information Presentation Slide
2. Muddy-Orange Austin Maxi Parked Outside School
3. Maypole Flowchart / Nine For The Nine Bright Shiners
4. Borley Rectory Public Information Film
5. Over Sea, Under Stone
6. Summerisle New Town
7. Swimming Pool Crisp Vending Machine With Old Fashioned Typeface
8. Women Of Britain, Come Into The Factories
9. John Barleycorn On A Raleigh Grifter
10. Completely Flattened Cresta Can With The Colour Sunbleached Out Of It Lying On Hot Tarmac In Picnic Area Of Historic Battle Site

Hehee, brilliant stuff! It really didn't take long to get to that point, did it.

I've really liked some of Ghost Box's output, but I'm not sure there's much left for anyone else to do. For one thing: I'm 33 years old and I only just remember a couple of road safety adverts that must have been showing for ten years by the time I clocked them. The people making these records are presumably younger than me - they don't have that unmediated childhood experience of the source culture that I suspect lends some of the weirdness to the Ghost Box stuff. Which leaves them either as bold investigators of cultural history, like a version of The Band who'd retreated to a bungalow near Avebury, or like Spinal Tap doing 'Stone Henge'.

Well there's always TV Ark.

Actually, everyone should go here right now and check out the East Of England section, specifically the advert for Winchmore, to which Neil Kulkarni tipped me off the other day. The bit where he appears to gives you the phone number in patois is genuinely priceless.

OK, out of retirement.

I sometimes think I was an influence on all this stuff - certainly ten years ago I was one of the few people talking up Delia Derbyshire, the post-war public sphere, analogue synths, brutalist architecture combined with romantic ruralism (which itself is a peculiarly after-the-fact combination: nobody then was into both), and the rest - and when Ghost Box came through I talked it up very strongly as an antidote to a pop mainstream tainted by its ties to the neoliberal state, &c, &c.

But increasingly I don't want to think about it, I just want to listen to bassline and funky house. You can spend too much of your life fantasising on what didn't happen, what might have happened, and so on, and then you wake up the same age Pink Floyd were when they wrote "Time", and you realise your best years are slipping past and you've wasted them dreaming of something you can't even remember. Hauntology is, basically, a longing (albeit now increasingly second-hand and removed from the source) for a world where the state did much more, where everything was laid on and you had a definable job for life. Its specific point of departure is September 1978 when the election was delayed ("See Britain by Train" is presumably an allusion to a British Transport film from that year - something else I was into in the 90s, when nobody wanted to talk about it). And, you know, I dream of that sometimes as well. But that could as easily justify bits of Days of Future Passed (a title which, had it not been used for the starting point of the frilly, MOR bits of prog, would undoubtedly have been used by some hauntologist or other by now). And there comes the point where you realise that living on dreams is no way to build a future, and no more progressive than the old aristocrats who created their own little rooms where the world wars had never happened.

I still like Mordant Music because they're a lot harsher and weirder, and they reinvent the public for the present; they are still genuinely modernist. But hiding in a self-created lost world of second-hand cliches won't destroy city academies and the quasi-privatisation of the NHS, as its supporters presumably imagine it somehow might - indeed it will strengthen that wreckage of what remains of the public sector; the defenders of the public will simply appear to be deluded dreamers who can be safely ignored. Harsh, of course. But reality always is.

Well blimey. No offence, people, but I sure was enjoying this thread a lot more until you three little rays o' sunshine turned up.

Lucia Lanigan wrote:

I'm 33 years old and I only just remember a couple of road safety adverts that must have been showing for ten years by the time I clocked them. The people making these records are presumably younger than me - they don't have that unmediated childhood experience of the source culture that I suspect lends some of the weirdness to the Ghost Box stuff. Which leaves them either as bold investigators of cultural history, like a version of The Band who'd retreated to a bungalow near Avebury, or like Spinal Tap doing 'Stone Henge'.

This is the big confusion with hauntology: is it an era-specific thing, i.e. modernist architecture, pagan ghost stories, radiophonics and paternalist broadcasting, or simply a Proustian memory-led blur? The latter could apply to an awful lot more than is generally bracketed within the genre, and the former is occasionally allied to a sense of humour that, as Taylor crushingly points out, it's not really known for (Moon Wiring Club and, my own bias, Mordant).

If you subscribe to the idea that it's all about that '60s/'70s aesthetic, then age is of course key, but it's a little bit nonsensical when some start talking it up as being at the vanguard of electronica. There was a particular Times article from three years ago which tried to launch it as such, and at 29 I was by some distance the youngest practitioner. I wondered then how a 15 year-old might have related to such an antiquated set of reference points. It's basically for the over-35s.

That said, someone like Burial unquestionably does speak for youth, and though a title like 'In McDonalds' is not exactly a million miles away from those spoofed track names anyway, the thread of sound made as if unearthed by divination (a specifically UK-anchored revenance too) is probably worth holding out for yet.

Otherwise, what is considered to be at the core of hauntology had nowhere to go from the start really. I love the visual aesthetic and the related social history, but that's largely because I can (just about) recall it. It should be, just as modernism (in music) should have been, an ever-evolving thing. The problem is, the music most readily defined by the term has, in my opinion, been the least important facet of the genre.

Two brilliant posts by the way from Taylor and Robin.

I've got a feeling I know who you are, Harry.

It is a strange feeling to know I was a hauntologist, sort of, before the term was invented - if you look at my original website from a decade ago (not recommended) I was raving about Go-Kart Mozart's Instant Wigwam and Igloo Mixture (an album which, along with those Lawrence recorded with Denim, should have had a greater influence, both musically and in terms of its explicitly political defence of 60s/70s urban development) as heralding the emergence of "a new mythical homeland in British music" to counterbalance the whole Village Green Preservation Society thing which had just been revived via XTC's Apple Venus. And back then I was dissecting Martin Parr's Boring Postcards (a huge, rarely acknowledged influence on what was to follow), making a doomed effort to save the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, hyping Plone's sweet-toothed yearnings well beyond their true worth ... so my disillusionment (and I'm even younger than you, so for me this was always discovered memory syndrome) is maybe the frustration of a pioneer, a common tendency among people who picked up early on what became overdone memes.

But I also think a lot of this stuff was actually done better in the 90s, when you only had to be in your twenties to recall it, it was fresher in the memory and not yet wholly hived off and embalmed. Boards of Canada - who were as good as they were in the late 90s because the references were subtle and weren't endlessly rammed home, and were also less parochial and insular - actually recorded a track called "5.9.78", clearly hinting at a specific date when an autumn election seemed a certainty and a Labour win probable (the previous week, Auberon Waugh in the Spectator had declared capitalism dead in Britain). But that was when it was only as long ago as the actual election of 1992 is now, it didn't quite feel like ancient history past crying for. The Aphex Twin also covered a lot of these bases effectively, especially on the Richard D. James Album (not to mention Young Marble Giants' Testcard EP from your actual 1981). And I agree with you that what it is supposed to be has been deeply confused right from the start, that it ought to have carried on evolving and reinventing itself as an ever-present spirit, and that it has been distorted and prevented from doing so (as happened to the concept of "mod" and the whole Beatles legacy in the 90s - a more well-meaning distortion in this case, but a distortion nonetheless). Also, I think there's too much critical emphasis on "old British things" generally at the moment - this is very much the same as with the modernist/analogue/post-war state dilemma (itself problematic in pop because of course pop and rock in the 60s and 70s was all about privatisation of the mind, a legacy that could easily be fused with Thatcherism to become New Labour, and the generic late-period hauntology Taylor's dissecting here is little better than Britpop with its focus moved to a different aspect of the same era which hadn't been tainted by New Labour). I wanted more respect for obscure British films and the documentary movement in the 90s, but now I think the BFI and Sight & Sound are giving them too much space, almost justifying Anglo-Saxon supremacy through the back door (which surely isn't what they're there for).

I can't help thinking that Mordant Music are the Van der Graaf Generator of this whole territory (which can be compared to prog to the extent that it's very consciously aesthetically non-American - "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight" by Genesis covered a lot of these lyrical bases when they were still current) - more raw, more urban (or at least less rose-tinted rural fantasist), more aggressive when they need to be than the rest. The Ghost Box acts might be the Yes and Genesis, and the generic stuff that followed the Camel.

Hah, sorry Furtho. But to those of us still in the habit of reading whatever people write about music it's always going to be frustrating to find such a chasm between theory and practice. The music makers ("And I can play-ay. . . what can you play-ay . . . ?" Sorry - hauntological flashback) aren't really at fault, but this is one of the first musical movements (Music and Movement? I'm back in 1986, interpreting 'Space Oddity' in the sports hall . . . ) where you have to wade through more comment than there is content.

None of which is to slight Mordant Music, who are ace and true originals. If you're the Baron, harrycaul, please accept my sickening deference.

I think there are two strands to this stuff: nostalgia and exoticism.

Nostalgia, Saint Etienne did best on 'Avenue' and their early-90s albums (as no one in the paid press seems to have noticed). Boards of Canada? Perhaps a foot in each camp. The Books? They're a wonderful, actually talented American counterpart to hauntology (get Lost & Safe NOW).

Whereas the idea of relatively recent British history becoming exotic for the first time is potentially exciting, and politically terrifying. Most of the music, to date, I think, less so.

I love the Broadcast/Focus Group album to bits though.

Thing is, for me, it was always about exoticism, sort of - in the sense that I wasn't alive at any point in the 1970s. It can never be nostalgia for me, nor for any of those younger than me who've picked up on it. But unembellished exoticism for me is little more than a consumerist thing, and for me personally it had to do with discovering what had been politically worked towards over three decades, and thinking it was a preferable system than the one I'd grown up surrounded by, and also being repulsed by the way everyone around me seemed to think Poundbury was Natural, The Way Things Ought To Be ... it was all about thinking I was different, someone who stood apart from the mould of my generation and social tribe. This probably sounds horribly pompous, but for me being into this stuff was always a profoundly political act of protest (as was/is Back in Denim, for a start), and I think that's been lost in a sort of glorified anorak's game. Exoticism hints at "untouchably distant" (which is why it no longer applies to other places in the present tense as it once did), and I think it would be dangerous (because it would reinforce the sense of a permanent, irremovable neoliberal victory) if interest in the post-war settlement was purely on that level; trying to grab hold of what few traces remain, reinvent them, radicalise them is different and far better.

But, yes, Saint Etienne did a lot of this stuff far better (and more expressively, and as pop) than a great many people who've tried to do it more consciously. That's part of the reason why they meant a lot to my young self, though I only knew a fraction of the meaning then.

LL - Strange as it may seem, I was just a bit taken aback that anyone who didn't have a basically positive view of the subject would have wandered into the thread and bothered to comment. It never occurred to me that anyone other than evilC, Fatter Hipper or maybe Mumpo would have responded to my question.

So, anyway. A few points to follow on from the range of subsequent posts. I've never heard (of) anything on Mordant Music and so cannot comment on their output (although hold on, wait a second, isn't that what...? Ah, never mind). I've only heard a couple of things on Ghost Box and, even if the ideas themselves are certainly intriguing, in fact the music seemed to me rather tedious.

However, I certainly found harrycaul's post from the point of view of a practitioner very interesting. I agree with his point that this sort of thing is in the main likely to be made by and for the over-35s and, likewise, when it comes to July Skies specifically, I also "love the visual aesthetic and the related social history". In fact, I've started reading stuff like David Kynaston's books on the 40s and 50s more or less as a direct consequence of listening to July Skies. Personally I find that period much more interesting than the 60s and 70s, which having been born in 1966 I can actually remember and from which much of this material (although not July Skies) is supposed to draw.

That said, I don't agree with harrycaul's opinion that, "the music most readily defined by the term has, in my opinion, been the least important facet of the genre". Or rather, it's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing, but if the music is that unimportant when compared to the overall idea, then you're buggered before you start, basically. And this is what I really do like about July Skies - I mean of course I can see that it's easy enough to take the piss out of his approach, but to my mind although he's aiming bloody high with song titles like that, he does succeed in hitting the target he set himself.

This is due to the whole package of titles, artwork and music, which personally I find very affecting (well, I would - he likes Sarah stuff, which is one of my big things) in the context of having visited the kinds of places in the British countryside that he's concerned with. I don't know how old Anthony Harding is, but that fact that he can't have had a direct experience that would have informed a track like Countryside Of 1939 is irrelevant to me.

Surprised no-one has mentioned JL Carr on this thread yet.