Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!
This BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance.
Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score.
And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.
As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West).
There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962.
The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.
I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.
There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness.
One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.
"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.
"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "
Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"
"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.
Substack called Anglophone Xenotrope and person who goes as Thunder At Twilight riffs on the "conjunction of futuristic technology and retro" thing I mentioned in the last post. (Strictly speaking retrotalk2022 as the post - titled "The End of Culture" - is from the very end of last year).
"Retreads, reboots and remakes were ascendant in the first decade of this new century but the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the return of the Star Wars franchise—combined with the digital de-aging technology, pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic—added considerable fuel to the nostalgia fire.
"When Disney bought Lucasfilm and ILM, they were not just buying Star Wars; the work that Lucas had done in bringing dead actors back to the silver screen in the form of digital composites was arguably even more significant. To that end, the corporate giant has made integrating these creations into existing brands a core part of their corporate strategy.
Examples include:
"Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, featuring actors wearing digital masks of the deceased Peter Cushing and the (then living) young Carrie Fisher"
and Marvel's use of
"the technology to provide a curious kind of continuity, allowing much older actors to play younger incarnations of their characters in earlier eras."
and most recently (at the time of writing):
"the trailer for the new Indiana Jones film featuring a very respectable depiction of a much younger Harrison Ford."
Twilight at Thunder speculates:
"Seeing cutting edge digital rendering technology used as a means of rehashing and remaking the past leads one to reflect on possibly the ultimate manifestation of the mash-up: AI systems such as GPT and Stable Diffusion. Soon we might be able to look forward to machine created films, featuring digital recreations of characters from existing franchises.
".... AI models cannot create, even if their outputs are novel. By definition, these systems are synthesising based on statistical inferences."
My teenage s.f. fiend self would have been well chuffed and seriously impressed if I could have peered into the Phuture and seen my own childspawn writing forOmni
(albeit a revival of that publication launched by Adidas)
(and that said, I'm not sure I ever bought or read a copy of Omni but I certainly ogled the covers)
The original Omni seems to come from a point in late 20th Century when the idea of the future / outer space - or at least the graphic language attached to it - is edging into tackiness.... NASA becoming naffer by the year
the imagery and attendant hopes 'n' dreams appealing still to the unjaded and earnest, but sophisticated taste slipping deeper into the retro
New joint project from DJ Food and Howlround, under the deliciously sibilant and resonant alias The Superceded Sounds of… The New Obsolescents... released shortly on the equally sibilant imprint Castles In Space.
What is immediately striking is the silver metallic artwork with which the releases are gorgeously clad... triggering erogenized memory-rushes for those of a "lost future" fetishising disposition.
As Food, a.k.a. Strictly Kevexplains, he has been fantasizing about making a record with this kind of cover since stumbling across the Prospective series while touring Europe in the '90s:
“The patterns etched in the covers are achieved by minute differences in the angles of the foil coating which then reflects the light and appears to animate when moved... Tracking down the company who made the original Philips covers in France led to a dead end as they had long ceased to exist so I gave up hope. Unknown to me a British company had managed to replicate the process under the name Dufex in the UK. Sadly they’d also wound up business in 2019 but via a chance encounter on a separate project I managed to find the final stocks of card from the business at a lighting company. Once The New Obsolescents’ album was in the bag we started to think about artwork and I knew that this collision of tape loops and turntablism was the perfect record to sleeve in foil as a homage to the Philips series.... Procuring 300 sheets in five different designs, I gave them to Jonas Ranson at paperHAUS who carefully but expertly screen printed each panel with the cover design. Each sheet was then cut to a 12”x12” size and painstakingly glued to each sleeve, pressed while drying and sleeved in PVC outers, making sure not to scratch the foil which is extremely delicate. As a nod to the site of the original performance recordings at the Museum of London, with moon rock bean bags and a space travel theme, we decided on a silver and black hybrid moon surface effect for the vinyl. The whole process of making the sleeves probably took longer than the whole album but I couldn’t be happier with the results, it was worth it.”
There are five variants of the foil board sleeves known respectively as “Spiral’, “Starburst’, “Cross’, “Swirls’ and “Hyperspace”
For a text for the exhibition Futur Anterieur, I wrote about the Prospective 21e Siecle covers and how the look inspired similar covers for the French science fiction publisher Ailleurs et Demain (which translates as Elsewhere and Tomorrow)
"In 1969, the publisher Robert Laffont launched the literary equivalent of Prospective 21e Siècle: the imprint Ailleurs et Demain, dedicated to science fiction and under the direction of Gérard Klein. Over the coming years Ailleurs et Demain would publish translations of works by giants of the genre such as Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Frank Herbert, and Arthur C. Clarke along with novels by French s.f. writers like Jacques Sternberg, Michel Jeury, and Klein himself. Klein was an admirer of the Prospective series and decided to package A & D fiction using the same process, called Héliophore and originally developed in the 1930s by Louis Defay to transform aluminum paper for printing. Some of the Ailleurs Et Demain designs closely resemble specific Prospective 21e Siecle sleeves, while others are new but clearly inspired by the series. (With both the albums and the novels, nobody seems to know the identity of the designers, who were in-house and uncredited). The design style, which eventually extended beyond silver to gold and copper book covers, was maintained for over 20 years, before being abandoned."
This album began life four years ago when the trio of Strictly Kev, Robin The Fog and Chris Weaver were tasked by Jonny Trunk with providing an all-night immersive soundtrack for the mammoth ‘Museum Of Last Parties’ extravaganza in the Museum of London’s Torch Room. Setting up their vintage reel to reel tape machines, turntables and various FX units in the very shadow of the torch that became the icon of the 2012 Olympics, the trio set about creating a soundtrack worthy of champions.Strange new worlds conjured from obsolete media, a vision of the future constructed live using nothing but vintage analogue technology and a sense of adventure.With a constant stream of revellers stopping by to lounge on moon-shaped cushions and enjoy this interstellar soundtrack being woven right before their ears, the trio amassed almost four hours of improvised oddities that night. It wasn’t until the spring of 2020 when they suddenly each found themselves at home with all plans cancelled and a LOT of spare time that the tapes were resurrected and the album started to take shape.
(Hat tip Bruce Levenstein and Andrew Parker)
^^^^^^^^^
While checking out the release, I also had a butchers at the recent discography of Castles In Space - mostly clocking the visuals, not so much the audio. I was struck by how they are sticking with the hauntology (the uncanny persistence of H being a recurrent thought-wrinkle here). This was the most striking son-of-Ghost-Box release.
“Interim Report, March 1997” by Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is Gordon Chapman Fox’s hymn and homage to the brutalist beauty of Cheshire’s designated new towns of Warrington and Runcorn.
Chapman-Fox grew up in Lancashire, and having been a frequent user of the famous Preston Bus Station in his youth, he was struck by the enormous chasm between the sixties architects utopian vision for what new towns should be and the sticky-floored, piss-streaked reality. He explains: “The more I looked into it, the appeal of these visionary architects grew. It felt like perhaps the most visionary building projects of all post war Britain were some of the estates built in Warrington and Runcorn new towns, these twin towns on either side of the Mersey. The estates of Runcorn were space-age futurist with external plumbing, rounded windows and raised walkways. But as housing, they were a failure. Runcorn was the last great UK modernist, futurist building project built with a community in mind. “Interim Report, March 1979” looks at this interim, this gap between vision and reality.”
At the time of recording the album, he says, “It seemed like there were a lot of ersatz-soundtracks to lost John Carpenter films, or obscure giallo “classics”. I preferred to find inspiration from the surreality of the mundane, hence the creation of Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. 1979 seemed the perfect point to be located in time, sitting on the razor’s edge between the post-war consensus and the dawn of Thatcherism. As the concept took hold, I tried to format the music according to the capabilities of a small, provincial recording studio in 1979. I limited the number of instruments available, the number of tracks available and so on. This really helped to shape the album and anchor the concept. As a teenager, I was into rock and looking for ever more extreme sounds - AC/DC gave way to Metallica gave way to Carcass. But by the 90s I heard Warp artists and that was me hooked. What they were doing could be far more brutal than anything by four sweaty long-haired guys with guitars. But it could also be funky, beautiful, ethereal, melodic and so much more.”
It’s that ethereality and true sense of time and place that Chapman-Fox has captured so well here. “1979 marked a change in the political and wider culture of British society. The Warrington- Runcorn development marks the swan song of post-war urban planning in the UK – soon the ethos of building better communities would be replaced by Thatcherite “no such thing as society” and “Greed is good” mentality. And look where that got us…“
Well, you can't much more hauntological than that can you? Cut-off point 1979, end of post-war consensus... and the sonic palette is very Pye Audio Corner.
The "H for life" vibe is discernible in some of the other Castle In Spaces releases's artwork too:
