Hinterlands of Memory

 

Here's an interesting book - a specifically Canadian perspective on hauntology, exploring the nexus of  nationality, landscape and memory in the 1970s. 

As you can imagine the National Film Board and Glenn Gould's radiodoc The Idea of North come up,  but most of what's discussed by Andrew Burke in Hinterland Remixed: Media, Memory, and the Canadian 1970s is new to me. 

Including this extraordinary experimental film by Michael Snow, La Région Centrale. 

Release rationale: 

Like the flute melody from Hinterland Who's Who, the 1970s haunt Canadian cultural memory. Though the decade often feels lost to history, Hinterland Remixed focuses on boldly innovative works as well as popular film, television, and music to show that Canada never fully left the 1970s behind.

Andrew Burke reveals how contemporary artists and filmmakers have revisited the era's cinematic and televisual residues to uncover what has been lost over the years. Investigating how the traces of an analogue past circulate in a digital age, Burke digs through the remnants of 1970s Canadiana and examines key audiovisual works from this overlooked decade, uncovering the period's aspirations, desires, fears, and anxieties. He then looks to contemporary projects that remix, remediate, and reanimate the period. Exploring an idiosyncratic selection of works - from Michael Snow's experimental landscape film La Région Centrale, to SCTV's satirical skewering of network television, to L'Atelier national du Manitoba's video lament for the Winnipeg Jets - this book asks key questions about nation, nostalgia, media, and memory.

A timely intervention, Hinterland Remixed demands we recognize the ways in which the unrealized cultural ambitions and unresolved anxieties of a previous decade continue to resonate in our current lives. 

Buy it here

Here's Andrew Burke discussing Hinterland Who's Who, the NFB film series about wildlife that inspired the title of his book.

"The first series was in 1963 — the Silent Spring, Rachel Carson era. The glimmerings of a modern environmental movement are relatively simultaneous to the development of the Hinterlands ... By the time you get to the 1970s, the decade is fraught with environmental anxieties and even deep fears of ecological catastrophe. There's a strange way in which the Hinterland shorts are in deep dialogue with those fears and anxieties that people had about pollution, the degradation of the environment, the loss of natural habitat and even the extinction of species. That comes out at least a little bit in the melancholic, elegiac tone that the Hinterland shorts have.... 

"Harnessing the power of television as a kind of educational medium for the nation... completely mesmerizing in their slow, deliberateness of the delivery of information about these animals... they were a bit unusual and unsettling, even though they had a positive political message behind them...  There was still a kind of menace behind them, an anxiety that we might not be able to do this. It might already be too late.... So it had this combination of educational programming with a hint of the atmosphere of '70s sci-fi."

Wow, I would have loved this series when I was 9, 10...  for a while there, my ambition was to be a naturalist and I was obsessed with Canada. It seemed like the ultimate expanse of unspoiled Nature, densely forested and full of cool critters (teeming in particular with my favorite mammal, the marten).  At the peak of my interest in wildlife, I bought a thick textbook-style guide to Canadian mammals, with lots of incredibly detailed hand-drawn illustrations. I found it at Dillons, the academic book store in London. But this was a step too far. I didn't derive much use or pleasure from this bulky tome (I can still picture the dour green covers). It was designed for serious zoologists, which - I realised suddenly - I wasn't ever going to be. Plus it had zero practical use, given that I was thousands of miles from the forests of British Columbia and not likely to be spotting flying squirrels  or fishers any time soon.

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.

 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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.

Geeta Dayal at Slate on Tomorrow's Harvest:

"If there’s an ongoing theme in Boards of Canada’s music over the years, it’s a celebration of the beauty of imperfection, of slow deterioration. The concept of capturing a bygone moment and holding it in your hand as it slowly dissolves is central to Boards’ aesthetic... True to form, the melancholy closing track... “Semena Mertvykh” (in Russian, the title apparently translates to “seeds of the dead”), was “performed into a dissected VHS deck with the motor running super slowly, so you can hear all the pockmarks, the dropouts in the tape,” according to a recent New York Times interview. (Eoin also noted with pride that the track was recorded in mono.)...  “Everything we use is decrepit,” Sandison said in a recent interview with the Guardian)....

"...  Boards of Canada always sounds like Boards of Canada.... As unrelentingly dark as most of Tomorrow’s Harvest is, there are moments where it’s hard not to smile. In “Palace Posy,” the mood steadily grows warmer, culminating in a cut-up vocal sample that sounds like it could have been ripped out of 1998’s Music Has A Right To Children. Boards of Canada—they’re just so … themselves."

Of course, a not-as-nice way of saying this is "self-parody"....