Hauntology Parish Newsletter April-May 2018: A Year in the Country book; Ghost Box new releases; Emotion Wave / Lo-Five; mediadropping; Starblood

The big news in the parish is the publication this week of A Year in The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields by Stephen Prince of A Year In The Country the blog and the label.

Sub-subtitled "Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology", it's an excellent compendium of Prince's musings and meditations on all things wyrdly bucolic, uncanny, and elegiac, spanning a spectral spectrum from Richard Mabey to Zardoz, Virginia Astley to Sapphire & Steel. 

                                          


With the possible exception of Mark F's Ghosts of My Life, it's the first tome fully dedicated to all things hauntological (as opposed to various volumes about "folk horror" or 70s kids teevee)

You can buy it here, and here - and if you must (although then again, it's effectively funding righteous scourge The Washington Post, so why not?) here (UK) and here (US)

                                          


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In other parish goings-on, I have already mentioned the delightful debut album for Ghost Box from Portugal's Beautify Junkyards -  The Invisible World of... 











Fairly imminently there will be another fine album by The Advisory Circle - Ways of Seeing, out late May. 

Through his own imprint Cafe Kaput, Circle chief Jon Brooks also recently put out this album 


Neil Grant of Lo-Five - whose album When It's Time To Let Go for Patterned Air Recordings  pleasured me last year  - has set up a  collective of Liverpool-based experimental electronic musicians under the rubric Emotion Wave.  Here's Neil's project rationale .

Emotional Wave has some musical output  already under its collective belt and I believe there is a non-audio entity (printed matter) in the pipeline. And in a week or so Neil releases the Lo-Five miscellany Propagate - remixes, compilation tracks and one-off specials.


Neil also alerts me to his having put out a little while back some "super lo fi house tracks"  under the title My House Is Your House Volume One. Like Propagate,  it's a tide-you-over / palate cleanser type release before the follow-up to When It's Time To Let Go.


Love the graphic echo of Human League's "Being Boiled" single sleeve there.

(Neil informs me that this was actually unintended - he just got the figures from a Letraset pack! A nice eerie echo nonetheless)

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A rather tardy mention of an intriguing my-back-pages project Meadow House by Daniel Wilson of Radionics Radio renown. It's really on the very edge of this parish, in so far as it's not particularly haunty, but the back story to Daniel's self-invented Dada-prankster practice of media-dropping - "theact of recording special homemade music and dropping it for random people tofind" -  is pretty interesting.  





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The hypnagogia/memoradelia-tinged project Starblood has launched a series based around the concept of late-night TV sign-off themes.



Here's another of their tracks coming more from a dreampop / idyllitronic precinct than this particular parish but nice 'n' woozy nonetheless. 



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Parish elders Boards of Canada were recently venerated here and here. 


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hauntgaze

Momus, "thinking about Scarfolk", along with a bunch of other things and themes, including archival culture and fictitious books

I persist in seeing Scarfolk as the Ride to Ghost Box's My Bloody Valentine

Which must make this chap, Chris Sharp, who records as Concretism, something like the Slowdive or even Chapterhouse of hauntgaze...

from his blurb:

Welcome to my grey world of sinister public information films, dusty archival sounds, Cold War Britain and weeping analogue synths. Not necessarily in that order.

All music, stings and sounds created entirely from scratch, using vintage analogue synths, varispeed tape bouncing, reversing, field recording and self-sampling. I do not use pre-made samples, sounds or loops.

among his output:

 Lost Transmissions: Broadcasts that could have been

 The Science Programme (BBC, early/mid '70s?)
   
    400kV Thames Crossing (from BBC 'The Nation Tonight' package, c. 1970)
   
    Fog (COI public information film, 1982)
    
    History for Schools (BBC, 1978)
    
    A Tour of the Factory
    
    'The Switch' (M&E clip) (ITV 'Drama for Tonight', 1973)
      
    The Mediaeval World (BBC, 1975 - *never made*)
   
    'The Star Children' opening theme (BBC, 1980)
     

among his endorsements:

'Brilliant! Concretism is the perfect accompaniment to ‪Scarfolk‬'  -Richard Littler, Mayor of Scarfolk.

'This guy out-Ghost Boxes Ghost Box. Hauntological heaven.' - -Mike Innes, They Go Boom!!

'Bloody fantastic! On a par with the Ghost Box output at the very least, full of great ideas behind the tracks. I don't know whether to cry, smile, be afraid, or just take note.' -Betacord


Actually enjoyable well-executed stuff, listening to it.... it's just that there's an element of, well, redundancy there.

Still, I suppose at the least it is gratifying that he quite happily tags his output as "Hauntology" c.f churlishness of certain other operators

spectral cinema

At Residual Noise, James Riley argues for A Field In England as a hauntological film

That makes two, then - with Berberian Sound Studio as the other. Not quite a movement, and one integer short of a trend according to the old journalistic rule. But significant.

The H-connection is clear because of Julian House's involvement in Berberian (doing the credit sequence to the film within the film, Il Vortice Equestre) and his making of an alternative trailer for A Field:

Riley points out where both Ben Wheatley's film and Julian's trailer overlap with a neo-psychedelic aesthetic but also how they differ and veer away into something darker and more unsettled:

"Here we have a similarly high contrast palette indicative of stereotypical psychedelic imagery. The trailer is shot through with the kind of mescalinized intensity described by Aldous Huxley in Heaven and Hell (1956). However, House adds a number of additional details. Unlike the smooth, HD black and white that embellishes the film, what’s emphasised in the trailer is the grain of decaying film-stock. House emphasises the degraded materiality of celluloid which seems to enhance the paranormality of the of the events in the filed as depicted in the film. The impression is created of spectral emanations momentarily captured on film with distorting results"

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Haven't yet seen A Field In England, really keen to. Recently, finally watched Berberian, having had the DVD sit around for ages, and thought it brilliant.

hauntologist chats up proto-hauntologist / Foxxy gentlemen / ghost writings / the umtimeliche

Jim Jupp of Ghost Box recently chatted with Mike Sandison of Boards of Canada for this French monthly magazine Magic, Revue Pop Moderne. The nature of Time came up as a topic, with Jupp reiterating GB's interest in what they've variously called "Eternalism" or "The All at Once".





GHOST BOX: As a group of artists we are often asked about nostalgia and memory, but for us BoC’s notion of “the past inside the present” has been a more important motivator than straightforward re-enactment of music from our childhood. To my mind, BoC’s music suggests a world where time has no existence at all and contemporary sounds and references seem no more or less important than ones from the past or future. It certainly gives your records lasting and timeless appeal far beyond simple nostalgia, but is this something you recognize in your work yourselves and how far is it part of a deliberate process?

BOARDS OF CANADA: Absolutely yes, I think you put it really well there, as it’s never been our aim to just accurately ape something from the past. I don’t think there would be much point in doing that. We’re trying to take something stylistically recognizable from the past as a starting point and then to envisage where that style would have gone if it had been allowed to develop further, if you imagine a parallel reality where music went down a different route. So I suppose you do hear anachronistic and contemporary things sitting side by side in our music.

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Anachronistic and contemporary side by side....  well, how's about this new Ghost Box EP Empty Avenues, a collaboration between John Foxx and the Belbury Circle (Jim Jupp + Jon Brooks) 

(Ruddy good, it is too -- especially the tunes "Almost There" and "Suit". Proper pop songs)

This invocation perfectly timed (in a time out of joint way) for the approaching publication of Mark 'Foxxy Gentleman' Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures on Zer0 Books. An extract from which collection, titled "The Slow Cancellation of the Future", can be checked out here at The Quietus.

Hauntology Parish Newsletter #2

1/ Children of Alice

For a moment there I thought  this was the first Focus Group influenced outfit to emerge, but then discovered that it's actually a trio formed by Broadcast's Roj & James Cargill + Julian House!

"Harbinger of Spring", which for some reason I can't embed here, is 18 minutes long and downloadable for 3 quid on its own, but also apparently can be got as one half of a cassette release titled Devon Folklore Tapes Vol. 5 - Ornithology.  Put out by whomsoever's behind Folklore Tapes. How you actually go about buying one of these tapes "housed in bespoke books", I've yet to be able to ascertain.

on which subjects (Focus Group + striking fetishisable packaging), an addendum to the previous newsletter:

Ah, this is how you're supposed to actually look at the new Focus Group album!



It's a great record

2/ Interpretations on F.C. Judd

As discussed at Quietus by some of the participants  - Holly Herndon, Ekoplekz, Perc, etc -  this is very good, isn't it?  I like that Public Information have called used the term "interpretations" as opposed to remixes...  perhaps that seemingly trivial semantic shift somehow propelled the project out of the swamp of enshitenment that the remix-tribute album almost invariably tumbles into?

Further thoughts on F.C. Judd from Nick Ekoplekz over at Idiot's Guide to Dreaming.


3/ continued eruption of Ekoplekz related activity:

* Ensemble Skalectrik LP Trainwrekz on Mego


* Mordant Music/eMMplekz split mini-LP on opaque vinyl with  A4 insert daubed by Zeke Clough  -  A) Mordant Music - Nothing in Here of Any Value (9:50) /  AA) eMMplekz - No Show (Live, Whitechapel 06-10-2012) (21:20)


* split 12 inch in the FatCat series,  pairing Ensemble Skalectrik and The Durian Brothers (of

Salon des Amateurs in Dusseldorf, Germany)

4/ Data70 - Space Loops: The Complete Sessions

All three volumes of Data70's 21st Century library music on one 50 track CD.

 

Hauntologists taking the piss, or hauntologists having the piss taken out of them?

"Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. "Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay." For more information please reread."

Jolly well done, either way:
 

                                                   
 

 (via Our God Is Speed)


Ah, an interview with the creator Richard Littler indicates that in fact Scarfolk is in the sincerely-humorous spirit of imaginary towns like Ghost Box's Belbury or Moon Wiring Club's Clinksell, with  pedagogical/paternalistic imagery in the same vein as The Advisory Circle, D.D. Denham's electronic music for schools, etc

Still, as one commenter notes in the box at the bottom of that Creative Review interview, it's a wee bit disconcerting that neither Littler nor the interviewer acknowledges the precursors: "I  do very much enjoy Scarfolk, but I am surprised the questioning didn't ask how it related to earlier explorers of the same ideas (Look Around You, Ghost Box, Mordant Music's Disinformation remix of Public Information films for the BFI)...".  It is presented as if all this just occurred to Littler out of the blue.

But perhaps that's just a sign of our recursive / anterograde amnesia / Groundhog Day culture, that something that's already been around once or twice, can keep coming back again?

There is something appropriately undead about hauntology and its sister genre hypnagogic.

The dialectical march of music really ought to have superceded them by now (eight years on in the case of hauntology, even if we don't count precursors like Position Normal or Boards of Canada or Mount Vernon;  five or six years on in the case of hypnagogia). And yet they keep on coming: there's a new, excellent Focus Group album out next month;  vaporwave was hypnagogic 2.0;  Prince Rama's ghost modernism = hauntology merged with hypnagogic merged with stargaze...

The dialectic is precisely what has broken down in music, replaced by hyperstasis, or should that be hipsterstasis... 

Anyway, for now, feast your eyes....