Hauntological Happenings at The Wire’s New Salon

As you may be aware after our incessant yammering about it, we do a new salon event. But we’re not the only ones – also recognising the need for a heretofore undernourished nexus of thought and sociable boozing, the world’s greatest music magazine, The Wire, has started its own salon series at Cafe Oto in Dalston, London.

It launched last week with ‘Revenant Forms: the Meaning of Hauntology’. Hauntology is a term coined by Derrida but reinterpreted for experimental music by critic Simon Reynolds, to describe music which evokes a forgotten yet emotionally redolent past era. It’s ripe for discussion, particularly given the increasingly complex nostalgia of some of the underground’s “hypnagogic” new school, and exploring the ideas were Mark Fisher (aka k-punk), Adam Harper (aka Rouge’s Foam), and the Wire’s hauntologist-in-chief Joseph Stannard, with the whole thing led by the magazine’s editor, Tony Herrington.

The complexity of this music was established early on – rather than being blandly backwards-turning, it actually pines for a “lost future”, as Fisher put it. This is music that has nostalgia for past anticipation, and its power comes from the disconnect between the earlier imagined future and the realities of today. Examples include releases on the Ghost Box label, including ones from The Focus Group and Belbury Poly – their blend of vintage synths, echoing and plastic forms, and creepy sampling, creates a rich, evocative and tangibly English music. Perhaps the thing most ardently longed for in this music is the comfy paternalism of the 1970s, with its public information films, Open University, and well-meaning housing projects – this music dredges up this past by playing back this ephemera within its tracks, and in its ghostly new incarnation, can be seen to comment on the relative failure of such ideals. This, for me, is socialist music, animating a spectre of a previous political ideal for an age of individualism.

Fisher perceptively noted how hauntological dubstep producer Burial is – with his murky, sub-aquatic sound, Burial seems to long for a pre-Criminal Justice Bill time of unfettered raving that seeps back from the past into his productions. Fisher also made the elegant point that hauntological music has “the medium of listening to music written into it; we’re listening to listening”. In other words, as listeners, we’re listening to nostalgia, rather than being nostalgic. Fisher put this complex position next to Franz Ferdinand, who he saw as blandly reanimating past forms without anything new. Here, as sometimes happens in the Wire magazine, everything got a bit joyless – Franz Ferdinand may not be reinventing the wheel, but they make great songs that everyone likes dancing to. It’s a weakness in ’serious’ music criticism, this resistance to acknowledge melody as being just as transformatively powerful as rhythm or mood. There can be gloriousness in pastiche, it just needs a good tune.

Similarly, Harper was in love with Ariel Pink’s lo-fi rendering of shiny pop – but how might he react to Pink’s newfound gloss? Not well, I’d imagine. While artists like Oneohtrix Point Never wholeheartedly find the beauty and brilliance in cheesy 80s music (as in his ecstatic looping of Chris de Burgh below), there was a sense that these critics couldn’t quite bring themselves to agree, and still regard this music with an irony that they profess to hate in others. Herrington saw that things were veering off topic and steered back, but unfortunately a tone of very weak hipster-bashing continued to reappear throughout. This, and the constant recourse to I’ve-been-to-university language (“problematise”, “obfuscate”, “discourse” et al), were the weak points in what was otherwise a really enjoyable brain workout.

There were a couple of points of discussion that should be explored further. Stannard pointed out the “malevolence” of some of this music, and this was backed up by the films of Ghost Box founder Julian House which were screened afterwards – creepy snatches of schoolchildren and countryside, alongside geometric shapes, buried under scratches, foliage and opaque forms. But as Ian Hodgson, aka Moon Wiring Club (another hauntologist) said to me afterwards: why isn’t anyone pointing out the fun? There’s a lot of humour in this music, with its odd juxtapositions, overly sincere and schlocky dread, and laughable contemporary fashions. It’s the simultaneous blend of the light and shade that makes this music so compelling, and to reduce it to mere spookiness is to greatly underestimate it. Moon Wiring Club’s performance, with choice moments including chopped-and-screwed Mike Reid vocal samples accompanied by video of low-budget 70s costume drama, evoked hauntology in all its scary/hilarious glory.

Ultimately, there is the sense that no matter how complex the nostalgia, it is still nostalgia, and I can’t help but think we’re lacking a truly innovative strain of new music, one that takes the very fabric of our society – overloaded with digital information and self-empowerment – and renders it in a completely fresh way, just as, say, PiL did in the late 70s. But hauntology is nevertheless one of the most sophisticated and compelling strains of modern music, and this event series promises to be one of the most exciting places to discuss sophisticated and compelling music. Its next event features dubstep producer Kode 9 talking about his new book, an analysis of how sound used in warfare – we’ll see you there.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Events | April 8, 2010 9:48AM |