"This second volume in a series bringing together short stories of veteran science fiction author Gordon Eklund leads off with 'The Retro Man,' a visionary tale of a man reliving his life in reverse time."
A science fiction short story from 1977 - and quite an early appearance of the concept of "retro" in the Anglosphere. (In France, it's in use from the beginning of the decade, referring to a kind of nostalgic cinema).
For instance, I have not come across any "retro" references in Anglosphere music writing until the early 1980s.
The library at the academic institute where I work part-time recently had a massive chuck-out. Scanning the tomes strewn across the tables, I was struck by the high proportion of reference books - encyclopedias, dictionaries, guides, thesauruses, -ographies of various types. Quite a few seemed to be just lists bound between hard covers - an inventory of modernist sculptures made in the UK between 1945 and 1972 along with their current institutional location; a list of works by female visual artists; a cataloguing of examples of land art.
Reference books used to be one of the most reliable generators of revenue within publishing. The sheer number of libraries around the world provided a guaranteed base level of sales, and there were other institutions that might have a specialist interest in particular reference works. Back then, you could also probably count on some individuals buying them as well - people with professional or obsessional reasons. Then with general knowledge encyclopedias, there was the association of owning a set with self-advancement and edification.
But it was the profusion of specialized reference works that grabbed my eye as I browsed the bargain-price tables in the library. It seemed to me that it must have been such a thriving market that publishers of these kinds of books were incentivized to come up with new subjects and concepts for reference works, to the point of inventing needs and desires that didn't necessarily exist until the idea was put out there. How else to explain some of the titles that I saw - like the Dictionary of Literary Characters. Or like these -
There were various other kinds of reference works that weren't exactly encyclopedias or dictionaries. I was fascinated by these bound volumes of New York Times theater reviews from just one single year in the early 1970s - attracted by the illustrations printed directly onto the burlap-like cloth covers, instead of onto a dust jacket, but also intrigued by the idea that these compendia even existed.
But thinking about it, for a drama school or a university theatre department, having these in book form would be much more preferable in terms of ease of use than having to scroll through back issues of the New York Times on micro-film. Each edition of the Times is vast and on micro-film there would be legibility issues. Ergonomically, and in terms of eye strain, micro-film readers are a nightmare.
The stuff in this stacks-clearing sale was going dirt cheap and I was sorely tempted to rescue some of the orphaned tomes - but I was put off by the sheer weight of them (going to this place of work involves a lengthy commute by public transport) and also the knowledge that - after an initial flick-through - I would almost certainly pile them up in some corner and never look at them again, The house is already horribly cluttered - I must have around 400 unread books.
Still, there was something melancholy about these bereft books - I thought of all the effort, diligence, care that must have gone into their laborious construction. The sense of responsibility, based in the belief that what was being undertaken was of real value. And I'm sure they were valuable to users. Remember just how hard it was to find things out before the internet.
Of course, pathos suffuses the objects in any second-hand store - books, records, magazines, whatever. You think of the creative excitement behind each object - the labour not just of the authors but of everyone involved in making a project reach fruition and get out into the world: editors, designers, marketing etc. The anticipation of impact. DJ Shadow's comment comes to mind - about the record store basement as "a big pile of broken dreams".
But with music, there is still the possibility of a life in the culture - radio play or streams or YouTube views... crate-diggers unearthing things and sampling, bringing it back into circulation if often anonymously. The analogue husk of the music is not necessarily the end of the story. Fiction and non-fiction can get reissued or rediscovered by new readers. But reference books - here, it's the very function that has been voided. The internet has usurped the role of the bound ink-and-paper repository of information.
Before the internet took over, back in the 1990s, one of my main ways of procrastinating - putting off the work that needed to be done - was to pull a reference book off the shelves and flick through it. usually something to do with music. Often it was the Rolling Stone Albums Guide, which had somehow come into my possession - it's not something I would have bought. I'd skim through it and my eye would come to rest on an entry for the Allman Bros, or Bloodrock. Or I'd reread and be freshly bemused by the loathing directed at Sparks, or snort once again at the measly 3 out of 5 stars afforded My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything.
Thinking back to much earlier in my life, certain reference works were revelatory. Take The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - a thick, full-color book teeming with illustrations and reproduced covers of paperbacks and s.f. magazines, but also crammed with well-written, informative essays on various sub-genres and scenario typologies, and mini-thinkpieces by some of the great writers in the field (there's a terrific one by J.G. Ballard on the cataclysm novel).
The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was a present I asked for for my 14th birthday, or maybe it was Christmas 1977 - I'm not sure. Another present request was a pictorial dictionary - the one below. See, I fancied being able to recognise and name things like, say, all the different parts of a shoe, and to know all the different kinds of shoe as well... basically have at my command the names of appliances and tools and vehicles and garments and plants and creatures and ... every kind of object and substance in the world.
However although I never got rid of it - and recently was reunited with the book after years of it languishing in storage - I have never once found myself using The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary. So I still couldn't identify the different bits of a shoe or name many types of footwear. I guess there's still time...
Among my late father's effects were a number of reference books, including Who's Who and Debrett's Peerage. But they were all too yellowed and crumbly to welcome into a home. I particularly regretted that his copy of Brewer's Phrase and Fable was not in salvageable shape. But of course, if I ever did need to know the origins of an idiom like Hobson's Choice, or "sent to Coventry", there's always the internet.
Still, perhaps there remains some demand out there for these kinds of work in solid form, use that is still made of them.
Indeed recently I was hired to do some consultation on a music encyclopedia (it just occurred to me I have no idea if it is ever going to exist in paper-and-ink form or is just going to be available online, through subscription). I also contributed a few entries.
Back in the 1990s, I did some things for Encyclopedia Britannica. The entries can be found online, credited to Simon C.W. Reynolds - but they have been updated by unknown hands, so after a certain chronological point in each entry, the style - and the opinions - are no longer mine. (Of course, they were probably not meant to have discernible personal style or a non-objective perspective in the first place). I don't know if any of these entries ever made it into the book form of the Britannica. Obviously I quite fancied the idea of being in this gigantic set that door-to-door salesmen used to flog to families who saw knowledge as aspirational, a form of status.
Then there's the Spin Alternative Record Guide, where being opinionated was valued, although there was also an emphasis on encyclopedic comprehensiveness (every last release by an artist had to be at least listed at the top of the entry and graded - but ideally mentioned in the entry itself, even if only passingly). There was also an element of faux-objectivity maintained for the grades awarded each recording (we as contributors were instructed to be restrained with our 10 out of 10s... but the editor was noticeably generous with his own favorites).
People of a certain age have testified what a lifeline the Spin Alternative Record Guide was in those days just before the Internet took off - especially if you lived somewhere remote. For there were no easily accessible sources of information or guidance when it came to left-field music. But beyond that the Guide was something to read for the pleasure of reading. The contributors were the best in the American business at that time - and they were expected to be stylish and individual rather than restrained and quasi-objective.
And there are other reference works that count as literature, guide books where the compiler's personality suffuses every sentence. Most famously: David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film. A flickable feast of perceptions and descriptions to savor, sat right alongside gluey globs of facts (every last film a director made, an actor starred in).
I also love Have You Seen...? - DT's twist on the 1000 You Must See/ Hear / Read Before You Die format. I'm always blown away by the way DT deftly threads together background stuff about the making of pictures (money, the process of a script coming into being, disagreements over casting, conflict on the set) with aesthetic responses, zooms into details of scenes or performances, where a movie sits in the arc of a director's work, meta-thoughts about the nature of cinema. Here, reference and reverence, usefulness and ecstasy, coexist.
As long as I live I won't forget this line from his Blow Up entry.
"As long as I live I won't forget the breeze in the trees in that park"
Winging its way through the post, a little Christmas present to self.
postscript
Just remembered I recently got sent this attractive-looking and impressively detailed listening guide to genres of British popular music in the second half of the 20th Century -
Home-grown Sounds, Far-out Visions, conceived and written by Richard Costa with design by Leo Cooper. If you are stumped for a stocking filler (in the case of this large format book, stocking distender) for a music nerd, this is an ideal candidate.
There's this trope that music critics sometimes use, where they talk about a particular artist, or a particular record, "inventing the future" - or "inventing our future". There's a variant of it where the critic asserts that this particular artist or record invents a much later artist (or record).
I associate this trope with a particular blogger prone to this construction, this kind of assertion - and who particularly loved doing it in situations of maximum incongruity and over-reach (such-and-such a Bucks Fizz B-side "invents" Autechre - that kind of thing).
Here's an example of me using the trope in a 1995 column on Krautrock.
I don't imagine I was the first to use "invents" in this way in the world of music criticism. That said, I haven't come across earlier examples.
I'm wondering if I picked it up from reading Harold Bloom. It's a construction he uses often as part of his whole Anxiety of Influence view of literature as family romance: a net of filial links that bind poet to ancestor-poet, and from which the later poet struggles to break loose (adding parricide to the filial filigree) . So he often write about how a certain precursor poet "invents" a later poet.
But Bloom also loved to say, repeatedly, that Shakespeare invents us - meaning Western consciousness, modernity, our conception of the psyche and human motivation etc. (More pointedly still, he asserts that Shakespeare "invents" Freud - massively preempts him - talk about family romance).
"Inventing the future" also has a life, as you'd imagine, in the world of writing about science and technology, futurology.
Back to my Krautrock column - another notable thing about it is the piss that the Melody Maker reviews editor is taking out of me for my relentless vanguardism.
Christmas is coming and that can only mean one thing - new stocking stuffers from Moon Wiring Club!
These comprise excellent new album Sepia Cat City, a new issue of Catmask, a calendar, a T-shirt, an array of badges, and a selection of seasonal greeting cards.
Sepia Cat City is the final instalment of MWC's Cat Location trilogy (see The Most Unusual Cat in the Village + The Only Cat Left in Town). It's one of Ian Hodgson's excursions into the entropic, possibly my favorite of his modes (although I do love the classic reverb-bassline, dankly dancey mode too). If anything, this is more delirious-sounding than some of his boggy seepage of recent years. Minded me of nothing else at all really, except just maybe some of the more disintegrated moments on 23 Skidoo's Seven Songs. Particularly enjoyed the skidding scumbles of the aptly named "Scatterbrain 9" and the whiplash churns of "Boarded Up House Musicke".
Ian Hodgson holds forth about inspirations and orientations:
"For quite a few years I’d vaguely wanted to do something with Punk aesthetics.... A lot of the Punk visuals I recalled were (despite the fluorescent hair) monochromatic, undoubtably this was absorbed via exposure to the photocopied zine scene. So from an early age Punk seemed a bit ancient and gelled in my mind with similarly monochromatic Victorian sepia daguerreotypes... As long as I can remember I’ve had Sepia Punk as an unfocused aesthetic floating around my noggin. In my favourite series of Sapphire & Steel (Assignment 4), the opening episode, which is set circa 1980, has a group of children playing in the back yard of a shared house ~ they’ve all been taken out of a Victorian photograph and have sepia toned skin & clothes. There’s something about the studio setting + ‘off’ videotape telly colour of it all that makes it really appealing. From this I’ve always liked the specific idea of a Sepia Ghost Gang...
"Over the past couple of years, I’ve also been watching quite a lot of grimy New York films. There’s something about the 'decaying city as movie backdrop' that I find really appealing, and it really fits with the current state of the UK ~ collapsing deregulated infrastructure. I’d say the less-obvious ones that stuck in my mind were Smithereens, Cruising, Wolfen (bit daft + so good) and Desperately Seeking Susan.... In pretty much every film there’s some kind of gang activity going on, and most of them are wearing leather jackets. I also really like the mixture of musical styles... often a default excellent funky post-Shaft score would be underpinning everything.
"This fed into my long-term Punk rumination ~ how can you make a Punk album if you don’t really like punk rock music? If you set out to make an ‘authentic’ Punk record it would be totally boring even if you succeeded... The solution I came to was that you could make a Punk album inspired by what may have influenced the musicians of the time, rather than the specific music that was actually made.
"I also read Cathi Unsworth’s excellent Season of the Witch Goth book... one snippet that really stuck in my mind was that Magazine wanted John Barry to produce their second album.... It really got me thinking ~ 'what if you took a load of the more arty Punk inspirations (John Barry, Avengers, Vivienne Westwood, 2000AD comic, Herzog, even something contemporaneous like Cindy Sherman) and made something with an attempt to emulate that mindset?'.
"... I started gluing everything together with Sepia Punk in mind. I’m strongly in favour of recycling audio, so along with a large variety of newly conjured bits n bobs, I went through the MWC archive ov tat and pulled out stuff that I thought might fit with the style. What I found was that certain fragments that had already been used on specific MWC releases could be nicely repurposed ~ especially once combined / glued together / looped into oblivion with a freshly composed segment. So it was as if the defining characteristics (or the potential) of the overriding Sepia Punk idea had latently existed within the original material...
"The Cat Location LP format - 4x10min tracks - suited this composition mix, and from a narrative perspective the idea that you move from a cozy but unsettling village, to a deserted echoing town to eventually ending up joining a stylish ghost gang in a corroded city was exactly right.
"The artwork allowed the fashionable Punk / alternative characters to manifest naturally, but one thing I always wanted was not to have a uniform style of city architecture ~ most cities are a mishmash of styles so it was important to include that crumbling Victorian warehouse vibe rather than just ‘can’t-we-have-something-else-please default Hauntology setting’ 70s concrete.
"The first track "Ghosts of the Underground Market" - I’ve always been fascinated by Underground Markets, specifically this one which used to have a few alternative / weird shops before the '92 IRA bomb allowed mass homogenisation / insidious gentrification to creep in. If you walk over the concreted street site now, I reckon on a rainy Sunday morning you can still hear the dusty ghosts of the market shops, sedimented inside rusty escalators and echoing with the patchouli oil-scented sounds of grotty ’78 records + bootleg post-punk cassette tapes."
"The third track 'Boarded Up House Musike' is a combination of two interests ~ in those 70s NYC films there would often be a grot disco scene and I wanted a representation of a dodgy svengali / hippy cult leader style figure that always features in squat / commune dwelling telly."
"After I’d sent the LP off for manufacture, I deliberately didn’t listen to it for about 4 months... The main thing that it reminded me of was 20 Jazz Funk Greats ~ which sort of makes sense going by the inspirations. I’m happy with that because it would have been completely impossible for me to make a record that sounded (a bit) like Throbbing Gristle intentionally."
Ah, so I wasn't a million miles off course with my 23 Skidoo thought.
As for Catmask No. 2 - this ultra-vividly designed publication lurks somewhere undecidable between a pop annual, a hard-spined comic book in the Tintin tradition, and Radio Times (albeit with dramatically upscaled paper stock and color reproduction).
Must say I do really like the new 'punkified' twist on the Moon Wiring Girl, as seen on the postcard below.
With the vinyl LP, there is a fold out poster that features a bunch of alterna-girls and sepia punkettes - it reminded me just a teensy bit of the Gee Vaucher fold-out for Crass ("Bloody Revolutions" I think) with Margaret Thatcher all anarchopunxified.
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Apart from that... it's pretty quiet in the parish.
But hey let loose your credit card, as there's a notable reissue - The Focus Group's classic mini-LP Hey Let Loose Your Love, originally released in 2005, is out again on 10-inch vinyl, compact disc, and the various digital formats and avenues.
Part of that originating starburst of hauntology landmarks - alongside Dead Air, The Willows, An Audience of Art Deco Eyes, Other Channels, The Death of Rave- Hey Let Loose is one of my Top 5 albums of the 2000s. Something I've never stopped playing, in fact.
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But yes here in the parish, there's a hibernating feeling
In a neighbouring village, though, stirrings of note - a Bristol-aligned, if not always Bristol-located sound that is sparse but sensual... bewitching twists on time-and-place rooted traits.... soulful, sombre, spacey, desolated, dubbily reduced and not-all-there.
Via the label Do You Have Peace?, an album by Jabu, Boiling Wells, and a compilation, Always + Forever.
‘Always + Forever’ is the first compilation to be released on Do You Have Peace?, the Bristol-based label run by Jabu. Collecting thirteen unreleased tracks from artists both new and familiar to the label, the album weaves an unorthodox collaborative web.... Originally conceived as a project to link together the dream-pop oriented leanings of a disparate group of artists, as the project grew it became more amorphous and developed its own narrative, held by a strange, half-awake quality throughout. The pop leanings are still there, although often buried under clouds of reverb, and they take their place among less heavy-lidded bedroom confessionals, DIY chamber pieces, and teary-eyed instrumental passages. The majority of the vocal-led tracks occur on the first half of the album, leaving the second section to drift into more sedative, hypnagogic terrain. Where further voices do reappear, they feel more like half-remembered fragments of dream-speech. As the words eventually leave us completely, the album closes out through three chamber pieces, transposing classical instrumentation from the lofty heights of concert halls to more intimate and familiar settings: a box room in a flat, a bedroom, a memory of lying awake staring at the ceiling and trying to go to sleep again.
An essential addition to Do You Have Peace?'s catalogue, the record serves as another example of the label’s continual reframing / recontextualising of their music and influences. Like Jabu’s gradual shift from their post-dubstep / hip-hop roots to a more ethereal dream-pop sound, or the continual shift and sprawl of their NTS show with Andy Payback (one of the very best shows on the platform), it foregrounds an impeccable taste and a masterful grasp of context and connectivity. Wonderfully zoned-out and immersive, it’s a meticulously programmed, fully cohesive compilation that leads the listener on a journey ever deeper into the night.
Featuring Equiknoxx's Time Cow, HTRK's Jonnine, and Jabu's Guest (appearing both solo and in collaborative mode with Birthmark), there are solo outings from Tarquin Manek (aka Silzedrek / Static Cleaner Lost Reward) and his sometime collaborator YL Hooi. Young Echo's Vessel contributes both solo and in tandem with Rakhi Singh (Manchester Collective), Zaumne appears with relative newcomer Hermeneia. Teresa Winter's 'Juniper' offers a sweet bridge to the tracks it's bookended by, and a counterpoint to the two consecutive offerings from the mysterious Laughter of Saints.
'Always & Forever' is set for release on December 8th on digital formats and a limited vinyl edition of 300 copies. Featuring cover artwork from Skkinz, the record is pressed on black vinyl with full download coupon.
Demos/sketches/interludes from the hinterland between records. Drum machines and single take vocal sketches tied together with downtime synth experiments and recordings of local disappearing areas.’
True as it is, Jabu’s strapline is a somewhat understated take on what also proved to be a transformative experience for them. The follow-up record to their 2020 sophomore LP ‘Sweet Company’ (and the ensuing ‘Versions’), ‘Boiling Wells’ sees tracks stitched together in one long, seamless flow and weaves a smudged, group-mind spell. Originally released earlier this year without fanfare as a ltd. cassette and digital release, it now receives the proper release attention it deserves, issued in a neatly packaged vinyl edition of 300 copies. Dreamlike, woozy, raw and in dub, the album documents a blossoming process, and encapsulates a fragment in time - holed up in the country, soaking up the atmosphere in collective isolation, creatively embracing the limitations of a small recording set-up, and finding a new way to work as a band...
Jabu’s debut album proper, ‘Sleep Heavy’, arrived in 2017 courtesy of Blackest Ever Black. A sublime, focused meditation on grief and loss written largely by Amos and Al, it marked the debut of Jasmine Butt (aka Guest), adding a further layer of vocal texture to their palette. ‘Sweet Company’, their first album written as a trio (released via their own Do You Have Peace? label), drifted into lighter, more ethereal introspection....
. A celebration of the endless tapestry of interrelated musical connections, it runs parallel to Jabu’s own reinterpretation of their influences. For ‘Boiling Wells’, Amos remembers a diet of “A.R. Kane, Cocteau Twins, DJ Screw, Southern/Memphis rap mixtapes, early 90’s jungle, Karen Dalton, Sybille Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Svitlana Nianio, a lot of soul, Armand Hammer & Alchemist, Grouper, Bobby Caldwell. Jazz was a constant, Japanese, Polish, Latin, American…”. And from those diverse strands, something new and singular has formed, to line up alongside them.
Some slightly earlier stuff - like a lover's rock Maria Minerva
Affiliated once, or maybe still, with the Young Echo cru
Neatly, sweetly, described by a Bandcamp commentator:
It's like if Tricky ran a orphanage and had all of the foster kids from many different backgrounds learn how to make trip hop tunes...but with their own experiences with Punk, reggae, Hip hop, etc...i love this collective.
Well, of course, now I think about it, Tricky was one of the first artists to get the word "hauntology" affixed to him, right...
Did really like this first Young Echo album
Inna GRM stylee
(didyaseewhatIdunthere)
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Stirrings even further afield - in our twin town in Germany, Gespensterland
"The sound they make blends the contemporary and the traditional, stitching-together archaic instrumentation and modern electronic production techniques, all wrapped up in the influence of folk songs and nursery rhymes, fantasy, and myth. Its makers—who release their surreal and dreamlike music under names like Brannten Schnüre, Kirschstein, and Freundliche Kreisel—sing in their native German about strange and eerie things: hauntings and silences and absences. This sense of mystery is further cultivated by the fact that the people who make this music prefer not to speak publicly about it, refusing conventional press interviews. Perhaps they fear that added context will weaken the unusual energies that move through their music. Ghosts, after all, can’t thrive under the cold light of scrutiny....
"This is meticulous, occasionally mischievous music, dotted with distinctly German cultural reference points. Schoppik’s self-titled debut solo album under the name Läuten der Seele, released in 2002, took samples of Heimatfilme—a post-war genre of German cinema consisting of sentimental morality tales—and gently twisted them into something distinctly unheimlich. There are scattered references to the supernatural and occult. Writing of the experimental sound manipulations he performs as Baldruin, Schebler invokes the psychokinetic activity of the poltergeist, a German term that translates as “noisy spirit.”
Teutonic rendering of "Scarborough Fair" there - cross-contamination of volkisch traditions.
Mr. Pattison notes that the Gespensterland compilation cover is a "blurry image" that appears to capture "a scene from some pagan festival: a flower-wreathed Green Man transplanted onto the streets of suburban West Germany."
Gespensterland, if you are wondering, translates as Ghostland.
All this reminded me of the German on the roster of Ghost Box - ToiToiToi, whose Vaganten I particularly enjoyed, making me think of "Der Plan if they'd formed in 16th Century Swabia"
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Finally some ancient maunderings 'n' mitherings on the subject of H-ology, between myself and Richard Lockley-Hobson. During the course of which I observe that:
I think every country or nationality... has its own Hauntology. Potentially anyway. This sort of cultural or para-cultural substrate of common experience that you don’t really notice until it’s gone.
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update 12/15
From our twin town in France - a late addition, via a tip off from Dave Howell:
PRENDS LE TEMPS D'ECOUTER - Musique d'expression libre dans les classes Freinet / Tape Music, Sound Experiments and free folk songs from Freinet Classes - 1962/1982
Before listening I wondered if this was real or whether it was one of those fictitious 'avant music made by schoolkids' releases like D.D. Denham's Electronic Music In the Classroom
After listening... well, I'm still not sure
An earlier release by the same label, Lancepierre, also seems like a prime slice of French hauntology, or at least the kind of thing that would inspire a French hauntology: a reissue titled Outremusique pour enfants 1974-1985
Just look at the set-up for the rerelease-rationale:
"In the land of Presidents Giscard and Mitterand, thermal clothing and elbow pads, Sautet films and Sunday roasts, the carpeting of a nursery is strewn with a handful of 7-inches. There, exotic birds and courteous elephants guarding a castle built with cakes form a Front for the Liberation of the Imaginary: colourful, systematically framed illustrations standing out against the cream background of gatefold sleeves… doorways to a maze of sounds at the crossroads between the neatest form of chanson and the most prospective jazz.
"Founded in the course of the 1970s by Philippe Gavardin, the small collection named Chevance is above all the story of buddies who were out and about between the twilight of the Trente Glorieuses and the disenchantment that followed the socialists’ rise to power, gravitating around this mentor known for his kindness and curiosity. Originally a linguist, Gavardin was one of these open-minded intellectuals, with one foot in the Contrescarpe cabarets and the other in step with the avant-garde, combining his apparently classical tastes with a keen interest in the novelties of his time. It is notably with Jean-Louis Méchali—a drummer from the free jazz scene who became Gavardin’s team-mate and arranged a good deal of the releases—that he forged the identity of this series of recordings for the younger generations: musically janus-faced, definitely literary, impregnated with a surrealism that echoed the decade’s psychedelic and libertarian experiments. The label developed a real editorial policy disregarding commercial constraints. Each record took a clear direction: modern fables, bestiaries, musical tales, cookbooks… Words were the backbone and every release was both carefully designed and perfectly manufacture..."
A piece by Louis Pattison for Bandcamp about a German scene-not-scene that strangely doesn't mention the word "hauntology" even though the parallel fairly screams out, not least because the Bureau B compilation that is the focus of the piece - Gespensterland - translates as "Ghostland".
"The sound they make blends the contemporary and the traditional, stitching-together archaic instrumentation and modern electronic production techniques, all wrapped up in the influence of folk songs and nursery rhymes, fantasy, and myth. Its makers—who release their surreal and dreamlike music under names like Brannten Schnüre, Kirschstein, and Freundliche Kreisel—sing in their native German about strange and eerie things: hauntings and silences and absences. This sense of mystery is further cultivated by the fact that the people who make this music prefer not to speak publicly about it, refusing conventional press interviews. Perhaps they fear that added context will weaken the unusual energies that move through their music. Ghosts, after all, can’t thrive under the cold light of scrutiny.
Gespensterland's "distinctive cover.... the blurry image seems to capture a scene from some pagan festival: a flower-wreathed Green Man transplanted onto the streets of suburban West Germany."
"This is meticulous, occasionally mischievous music, dotted with distinctly German cultural reference points. Schoppik’s self-titled debut solo album under the name Läuten der Seele, released in 2002, took samples of Heimatfilme—a post-war genre of German cinema consisting of sentimental morality tales—and gently twisted them into something distinctly unheimlich. There are scattered references to the supernatural and occult. Writing of the experimental sound manipulations he performs as Baldruin, Schebler invokes the psychokinetic activity of the poltergeist, a German term that translates as “noisy spirit.”
Teutonic rendering of "Scarborough Fair" there - cross-contamination of volkisch traditions.
All this reminded me of the German actually already on the roster of Ghost Box - ToiToiToi, whose Vaganten I particularly enjoyed, making me think of "Der Plan if they'd formed in 16th Century Swabia"
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