Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Christmas Edition: Moon Wiring Club; Dismal 1970s - Stonecirclesampler + Travis Elborough; Sophie Sleigh-Johnson's Code Damp; William Burns's Ghost of An Idea; Mart Avi + Ajukaja

Very quiet in the parish at the moment. The rotten weather isn't helping. 

On the way home after walking the dog over the fields, coming back along Icknield Way, I did spy a bit of commotion: some new arrivals in the village! An American family moving into Hazeldene, that big house on the corner of Penfold Lane. A grey-haired fellow huffing and puffing great plumes of breath into the cold air  as he lugging into the house what appeared to be an endless succession of boxes crammed with vinyl records, "Don't see many of those these days," I commented cheerily - receiving, for my pains, just a scowl.  I shall return at a less-trying time, with a copy of this newsletter and some mince pies. 

But talking of vinyl records, parish stalwart Ian Hodgson has a new Moon Wiring Club long-player. 

Yes, that's right - the LP has an equine concept. 

There's also a new artwork approach - dropping the usual MWC style for watercolour painting. 

Says Ian, "I wanted to steer away from those rinsed-into-the-ground Folk Horror tropes, so gave the whole album a (very) loose Undead Dressage feeling (lots of movement)" 

Sound-wise, this is reflected in a switch from the marshy, ambient quease vibe to a brisker, starker sound that coats the beats in ample spooky space. "Funky" is not a word that generally springs to mind when you think of Moon Wiring Club - unless in its other meaning of fusty and unventilated. But listening to the crisply syncopated beats of Horses In Our Blood, I kept thinking of The Meters. 

On the Hodgson mood board for this project: The Residents's "Jambalaya", the sound design and production design of spaghetti westerns (in particular the Klaus Kinski Gothic Western And God Said to Cain  and Matalo! ) and acid westerns (like The Hired Hand).  

And there was I thinking the inspiration came from the unfortunate incident at last year's gymkhana. 

There's a whole backstory to the record. 

Another fine offering from MWC - buy it here. 

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Talking of horses....  at the Horse Hospital in London this Sunday afternoon, there will be an event called Dismal 1970s, involving parishioners Stonecirclesampler and Travis Elborough, along with telly scholar Sophie Sleigh-Johnson  and neo-pulp writer Tim Wells. It is described as "an afternoon of festive-ish words, moving pictures and performances dedicated to the decade of Smash instant potato, public information films and Evans the Arrow". More details about times and tickets here.

Stonecirclesampler  - also known as Luke J Murray, the figure behind The Iceman Junglist Kru and various other haunty entities working in mutations of nuum and drill and wotnot -  has produced a "special limited edition Dismal 1970s cassette...  a super short run only available to attendees" orderable with tickets and to be collected at the event.  

Dismal 1970s participant Sophie Sleigh-Johnson has a new book out via Repeater.

Now it was only recently, wasn't it, that I remarked upon the under-acknowledged intersection between hauntology and British comedy. 

Here's a whole book inspecting that area: "a sometimes comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on."

Here's a warm endorsement from David Tibet of Current 93 renown: "LUCIFER ON THE BUSES! Code: Damp is one of the strangest books I have read. As well as one of the most evocative, lateral, sidereal... an unspellable jewel."

More endorsements and the opportunity to purchase here

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Another addition to the racks at the local library (note the new reduced opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and plus Saturday 10 am to noon). Of course you may prefer to support the author by picking up a copy at Book Nook or order directly from Headpress. 

Release irrationale: 

William Burns's Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia examines the use and effect of nostalgia in the Horror and Hauntological realms. It asks why these genres hold such a fascination in popular culture, often inspiring devoted fanbases. From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? How has nostalgia become linked to other concepts (psychogeography, residual haunting) to influence Hauntological music such as Boards of Canada or The Caretaker? What can the ‘urban wyrd’ or faux horror footage tell us about our idealized past? And how will these cultures of nostalgia shape the future?

Combining the author’s analysis with first-hand accounts of fans and creators, Ghost of an Idea offers a critical analysis of our cultural quest to recognize, resurrect, and lay to rest the ghosts of past and present, also summoning up those spectres that may haunt the future.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Seductive Liar, or Are We What We Used to Be?

Chapter 1: Today is Tomorrow’s Yesterday: The Philosophy of Nostalgia

Chapter 2: The Yearning to Return: Folk Horror and Nostalgia

Chapter 3: The Illusionary Precipice: Found Footage and Nostalgia

Chapter 4: The Longing of the Permanently Lost: Franchise Nostalgia

Chapter 5: An Ethereal Composition of Disjointed Memories: Nostalgia as Catalyst for the New

Chapter 6: The Vice of the Aged: Do They Still Got It or Living Off Past Glories?

Chapter 7: The Enemy of Truth: Is Nostalgia Counter-Revolutionary?

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And finally, Estonian exchange student Mart Avi has a new release out, a collaboration with his countryman Ajukaja, bearing the rather sombre title Death of Music.

You can hear it and buy it here.

It's really excellent. To me it has the feel of  a classic "new pop" album -  in the lineage of Lexicon of Love / Sulk / Penthouse and Pavement  - but a new pop album if it had been somehow made after the 1990s. Perhaps in 2001 - the way it folds in rhythmic ideas from hardcore continuum genres and other dance styles of the 1990s - reminds me a bit of Truesteppers, in moments at least. But the songfulness  and the soulfulness - along with the wayward perceptions and intellectual edge - come more from a Scott Walker or Billy Mackenzie sort of place. 

It's a double album too -  a meaty listen that doesn't flag on the quality front.

Release irrationale: 

Certain albums hit like howling bullets at pivotal moments, tearing open the face of music to reveal hidden sonic muscles and fusing them back into something both strangely familiar and yet entirely unrecognisable. We believe this is one of those records.”

The double album Death of Music delivers 16 crooked vocal pops, some ruthless, others unexpectedly disarming. In some songs, Ajukaja & Mart Avi function like a two-headed saurus swinging its spiky tail to shady pop-house smackers. In others, Ajukaja's serene organ licks descend into subterranean caverns, allowing Avi to float to the surface on their wavelengths and turn his voice into billions of extinct moths, enslaved by the moonlight’s pull. There are songs that face destruction and those that seek to prevent it.

One kykeon rap goes, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you don't die!”. Ajukaja & Mart Avi have embraced this notion to create new music that allows them to thrive in the algorithmic wasteland. 13 years in the making, these 66 minutes are packed with lifetimes of truths you didn’t know you needed to know. They are Ajukaja & Mart Avi – two against death.

Forever Not-Now

 

C.f. what Michaelangelo Matos called - in the dance music context - permaretro

Back from the Dead Boys

 A reanimated Dead Boys, with Cheetah Chrome on vocals  - the record company decides the vocals need something else, so they use AI to "dust" it with some quintessence of Stiv Bators. 

I remember Cleopatra from the '90s when packages would regularly arrive through the post, generally occasioning disappointment or disbelief. (Okay they did put out some good Krautrock - Manuel Gottsching stuff). But mostly they established a micro-market as a non-retirement home for twilight -career industrial and Goth acts . So this is a logical development. For the diehard fans who can't get enough, for whom death of the principals is not an obstruction or obstacle for appetite.

punk is dad

This made me chuckle 

This made me frown 

Still enough of a believer to consider it defilement to have a version of "Sex Pistols" tread the boards without Johnny Rotten....  

Other bands that go the prosthetic singer route, I'm not so bothered.

Well, there's one and half others on the same Glasgow punkstalgia lineup that are doing that - The Stranglers, sans Hugh Cornwell, with a younger-than-the-others singer (younger-than-the-others - what am I saying? Only Jean-Jacques Burnel remains from the original line-up, what with Jet Black and Dave Greenfield now dead).  

And then Buzzcocks are the 'half' -  insofar as Diggle (I assume) is singing the Shelley-sung songs as well as the smaller number of numbers he originally sang. 

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Talking of "punk is dad", I had a "rave is dad" experience the other night - went to see Orbital in LA. They were playing the first two albums - with an intermission in between! - and so, if you think about it ,that would necessarily largely draw a crowd who remembered those records from the early '90s - thirty years ago. So we are talking fiftysomethings for the most part.

Wasn't quite Cruel World levels of haggard, but yes a lot of baldness, bellies, and time-creased faces on show.  You sensed a lot of memory-rushes were being triggered in the assembled, but that was not quite enough to galvanize manic dancing in the old style.  

Some of the bar staff and the sound guy behind the mixing desk seemed on the grizzled, elderly side too. Perhaps veteran promoters and rave-scene people?

Surely now in their early sixties themselves, the brothers Hartnoll were great. Well, some of the material on those albums was a tad middling, but the killer tunes - fantastic. Triffic lights 'n' lasers 'n' projections too - that's something that has advanced in leaps and bounds since back-in-the-day. They got a very warm reception and they seemed to be quite touched by it. 

This must be the fourth - or possibly fifth - time I've seen Orbital live, but the last time would have been way back in the mid-90s.  

The very first time - when they were then almost alone in being able to play techno live - was the late 1991 rave conversion experience I describe in the intro to Energy Flash. Well, the whole night really was that - as opposed to any specific deejay or group that played - and above it, it was the audience's dancing 'n' demeanor as much as the music 'n' lights that blew my eyes. But Orbital certainly were a crucial component of this baptismal immersion in a new culture. 

Then the following year, I traipsed down to Sevenoaks for an interview and they gave me my very first glimpse of the Silver Box - I don't think they let me twiddle the knobs myself but they showed how the 303 makes those wibbly-wibbly acid sounds.  

Phil and Paul then - and now.

Come to think of it, it was probably this very cubbyhole in which they showed me the 303 in '92.

Also come to think of it - Orbital were punk-is-dad before they were rave-is-dad. If I recall right they had been into anarcho-punk and Crass and stuff like that before getting swept up in acid house.

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Punk-gets-parental is not really news - I can remember when we were still in NYC and Kieran was little (so early 2000s), some of his pre-school friends's mums had a hobby band, all-female, playing punk rock. And then a few years later, at my brother's kids's elementary school in Silverlake, at a school fair or fund-raiser, there was this band of dads entertaining the assembled with punk cover versions. 

And of course there's that thing of parents buying tiny T-shirts with the Pistols or Ramones or Clash logo on for their kiddies to wear.  (We did that, I confess - before it was completely played out, honest!)

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(A) punk is (grand)dad...

Just watched Blitz (ooh but it's clunky) and there was the surprise of Paul Weller playing the little evacuee boy's grandfather - silvery hair swept back in the 1940s style, face lined with ridges. He looks distinguished, though, as an old gent.

haunty ha-ha, haunty peculiar

 

Sometime ago, Vic Reeves posted this on Twitter - if I remember right, it's artwork for a tour poster that was never used.  

Immediately I flashed on Martin Parr's Boring Postcards book.

And then I thought of the graphic that Julian House cooked up for my big Wire piece on Hauntology. 

And then the album art of second-wave hauntologists Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan 

And this got me thinking about the proximity of hauntology and comedy - more precisely, a certain strain of British comedy... 

Now, on account of some of the write-ups the H-zone gets - the droves of dissertations even now being written on this area - it's easy to come away with a sense of H-ology as this rather sombre and gloomy thing. Especially if you go with the Fisher-ian take with its focus on Burial / The Caretaker* and things adjacent like Disintegration Loops and The Sinking of the Titanic and all that.  Lost futures, decaying memory, cultural entropy et cetera. 

But, as anyone who really knows the area knows - and who has a wider sense of what it is - hauntology is actually riddled and addled with whimsy and macabre humour. When you listen to and look at the graphic presentation of what I consider to be the canonic core - Ghost Box, Mordant Music / eMMplekz, Moon Wiring Club, Position Normal -  comedy runs through the whole thing. 

And I'm not just talking the album art and the song titles and the samples - rather often the music itself has an antic air. 

(Same goes for the sources too actually: whatever else it is, The Wicker Man is also a comedy). 

(Think also of the "sinister camp" flavor of The Prisoner.... Kafkaesque yet absurdly English.... deliciously over-thesped)

(Or the Dr. Phibes movies)

So partly it's to do with the source material... and partly the proximity to pastiche and parody in a lot of the work...  and then there's the element of retro-satire in something like Scarfolk, or the early records by The Advisory Circle. 

I made this point in the sleevenote for the Ghost Box tenth-birthday compilation In A Moment:

One of the things some people don’t seem to get about Ghost Box - and perhaps they’re thrown off by the name - is that this isn’t meant to be some hair-raising, soul-harrowing trip into necromantic darkness.   It's much gentler than that, a twisting or tinting of the everyday. Softly spooky, sweetly creepy, Ghost Box enfolds the listener in a cosy unease. It’s umheimlich you can live with, live inside. No, we are not dealing with Gothshit or pierced-dick second-wave industrial shlock here.  Yes, humour is involved: in the artwork, the song titles, the fabric of the sound itself, with its queer mix of solemn and jaunty.  A humour of a particular poker-face kind that reminds me of old dear comrades from long-ago campaigns of mischief and obfuscation. That’s a personal resonance, but it illustrates a wider public fact: the existence of an Anglo-Surrealist continuum that crops up repeatedly across the generations, based each time around slightly different constellations of esoteric erudition and arcane research. 

So anyway, all this got me thinking about it from the other side - what about actual comedy on the telly that has haunty undercurrents? Britcoms that are fellow travelers with Ghost Box et al. 

 

Way back when, there was Victor Lewis-Smith’s Buygones for Club X on Channel 4 - these were standalone mini-programmes (later a newspaper column) focused on obsolete gadgets and quaint appliances, once-popular toys, fads, and foodstuffs, dead media and forgotten TV personalities, etc etc... Things like the Spirograph, candy cigarettes, the Stylophone, Frank Bough ... An early example of retro-futurism. 

 

Then there was Vic Reeves' Big Night Out. 

Now I must admit, when I saw the first episodes I disliked it intensely (see the negative review at the end). But about six shows in, I realised my grave error - the moldy-old all-too-English stagnant odour that I initially found suffocating was actually the source of its musty genius (The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer indeed). I don't know if it is quite hauntology but it nourished itself on similar decaying culture-matter.

Then, by the early 2000s, we have Look Around You, series 1 and series 2 -  quasi-pedagogic retro-TV that could not be more congruent with the Hauntology Project.  There's even an episode about ghosts!

"in today's modern world"

What else? 

Blue Jam, in moments (there was an album on Warp wrapping blackest-ever-black humorous sketches in creepy ambient IDM)

More recently, some of the episodes of Inside No. 9 are straight out of the H-zone. There's one, "Mr King", that is very much ripping off The Wicker Man. 

The Mighty Boosh had retro-fantasia aspects that connects to that side of hauntology that imagines musical counterfactuals and alternative history trajectories for pop.  

I also think of Detectorists as on the outskirts of hauntology…  not quite bucolic horror but a sense of the past inside the present...  

Whoever did these fake Penguin / Pelican / Puffin paperback covers for the show is picking up on the same thing I am... 

Not having lived in the UK for the last 30 years or so,  I have missed much. So I decided to ask a few people who might have a better sense.

Neil Quigley of KilkennyElectroacoustic Research Laboratory grew up in Ireland but has been exposed to much of this stuff. He told me that Reeves & Mortimer were actually a formative influence on what he does, especially their later stuff (which I had never heard of) like The Weekenders and Catterick, describing them as "tonal companions to Scarfolk and more like art school projects than the prime time TV stuff they did" 

Neil also pointed me towards Garth Marenghi's Dark Place - another one I'd never heard of.

He also mentioned Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom as a non-Brit counterpart

And This Morning with Richard Not Judy  (again, never heard of it)

I also quizzed Bob Fischer of The Haunted Generation / Mulgrave Audio

He pointed to a series called Mammoth and said "there was enough in there to make me wonder if he was a Ghost Box fan". 

Any more for any more?

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And here's my Vic Reeves pan - I think it hones in on an essence that is proto-hauntology and in that sense the review provides a hauntology critique long before any one in the 2000s mounted their critiques of it - the need for some force of newness to blast open the windows, let the stuffy air out

Meat paste did, in fact, figure in a later episode of VR'BNO

* Not that The Caretaker is devoid of humour - even when confronting the most terrifying prolapse of consciousness, there's flashes of dark wit. But also the pre-Caretaker identity of James Kirby - V/VM was all about puerile laffs and icono-vandalistic glee. The butchering of middle-of-the-road entertainment as perpetrated via the CD-R series Offal reminds me of the kind of malarkey we got up to as kids - defacing Ladybird books and other innocent childhood books, adding obscene addenda to the pictures, inserting foul utterances and actions in the text. Or at a slightly cleverer level, parodying things like Stars Wars or the Famous Five.