Revisiting Hauntology, or the sound of lost futures

In short

Podcast Episode Summary: Revisiting Hauntology, or the Sound of Lost Futures

Podcast Title: The Culture Journalist Episode Title: Revisiting Hauntology, or the Sound of Lost Futures Hosts: Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick [Listen Here](https://theculturejournalist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

---

Overview In this episode, the hosts explore the concept of hauntology, a term coined by critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher to describe an emerging genre in UK music that reflects a nostalgia for lost futures and a longing for the past. They dive deep into the cultural implications of hauntology and its continued relevance in contemporary music and society.

---

Key Concepts

Hauntology Defined

Origin of the Term: The term "hauntology" is a play on the philosophical concept of ontology, introduced by Jacques Derrida to describe a present haunted by futures that never materialized.
Musical Characteristics: The genre is characterized by:
Archival recordings from post-war England.
Vinyl crackles and eerie atmospherics.
Artists include Burial, The Caretaker, and the catalog of the Ghost Box label.

Historical Context

Cultural Roots: The hauntology movement reflects a nostalgia for Britain’s pre-Thatcherite social democracy, influenced by cultural artifacts like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Brutalist architecture.
Musical Lineage: There are connections to earlier movements, including:
90s influences like Boards of Canada and Broadcast.
American movements such as J Dilla-era hip-hop and freak folk.

Hauntology vs. Nostalgia

Distinction from Nostalgia: Hauntology is seen as a more profound engagement with the past that resonates with cultural memory, unlike shallow nostalgia that simply seeks to recycle past aesthetics for current trends.
Cultural Echoes: The episode discusses the haunting effects of past cultural moments, including rave culture and political ideologies like Marxism.

---

Discussion Highlights

Interview with Simon Reynolds

Reynolds, a veteran music critic, shares insights into the inception and significance of hauntology:
The term was coined around 2005 amidst a burgeoning interest in archival and “ghostly” music.
He emphasizes the relationship between digital technology and a fetishization of obsolete media.

Cultural Reflections and Legacy

The Persistence of Hauntology: The hosts and Reynolds discuss how hauntology has influenced various artistic realms, from music to film, and its ongoing relevance in the digital age.
Contemporary Examples: References to artists and movements that embody or react against hauntological aesthetics:
A.G. Cook and Geese are mentioned as current examples engaging with these themes.

Future Possibilities

Cultural Agency: Despite a grim outlook on the future, the discussion concludes with a sense of optimism regarding individuals and movements that can reshape cultural narratives.
The Role of History: The importance of historical context in shaping current cultural landscapes is raised, with a call for younger generations to engage with and learn from historical cultural movements.

---

Key Takeaways

Hauntology as a Cultural Lens: The concept serves as a lens through which to explore how music and art can reflect on and reanimate the past in meaningful ways.
Interplay Between Past and Present: The episode emphasizes the need for a deeper engagement with cultural history as a means to inspire future creativity and critical thought.
Ongoing Relevance: The discussion indicates that hauntology continues to resonate in today's cultural landscape, offering insights into our collective memory and societal aspirations.

---

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:15Hello and welcome to Cujo, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. It's Andrea Dominick here, along with my co-host Emily Friedlander. Hey. So in 2005, the music and culture critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher started using the term hauntology, a riff on ontology, to describe a new current in music they were picking up on in the UK, characterized by archival recordings from post-war Britain, vinyl crackles, and elegiac haunted atmospherics. This included, for example, artists like Burial, The Caretaker, and basically the entire catalog of a mysterious label called Ghost Box. Simon and Mark borrowed the term from Jacques Derrida, who originally used it to describe the idea of a present that's haunted by ghosts of futures that never came to be.

1:07In Derrida's case, it was the specter of Marxism. Mark Fisher, RIP, did a lot of great work unpacking what hauntology meant from a political perspective. rooting the movement in a longing for Britain's social democratic pasts in the years before Margaret Thatcher, and an affection for deeply British cultural touchstones like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Brutalist Architecture, and films with pagan themes like The Wicker Man. Simon, meanwhile, went deep in documenting how the phenomenon bore out in terms of recent music history, not just in Britain, where 90s anthology predecessors like Boards of Canada and Broadcast helped lay the foundation for the genre's backwards-looking sound, but also across the pond in the U.S., both in J.

1:52Dilla-era hip-hop and in underground musical movements like Freakfolk or New Weird America, hypnagogic pop, and even the butt-of-every-music joke at the time, Chilwave. Artists like One-O-Tricks Point Never, James Ferraro, Ariel Pink, and William Buzinski, and even Joanna Newsom and MVNDE. For music fans who grew up reading Simon and Mark, Hauntology was extremely influential. And after talking about Hauntology in a recent Cujo reading group, we got the idea to bring on the source himself, Simon, to reflect on what the genre has to teach us about mobilizing the culture of the past in a way that feels meaningful and even forward-looking.

2:35Plus, when we reached out to him, he pointed out that this year marks the 20-year anniversary of hauntology itself. You guys know Simon. He's the veteran music critic and historian behind books like Generation Ecstasy, Rip It Up and Start Again about the history of post-punk, Retro-mania, pop culture's addiction to its own past, and most recently, Futuro-mania, Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today. If you haven't heard our 2024 interview with Simon about that one, be sure to give it a listen. All of which is to say, Simon has made something of a specialty out of examining music's relationship with the passage of time, culture, and technology.

3:16Simon joins us to discuss the historical and cultural factors that give rise to archival-obsessed movements like hauntology, as well as the fetishization of outmoded technologies that can happen when our lives become increasingly enmeshed with the digital. We also get into the differences between hauntology and nostalgia or retro, as well as the pasts or past futures that continue to haunt us today, including rave culture and, yes, Marxism. He also gives us a sneak peek at his new book, Still in a Dream, Shoegaze, Slackers, and the Reinvention of Rock 1984-1994, which is dropping in 2026. and because there are a lot of different music references in this episode and it's so sound specific we've also made an accompanying playlist for your enhanced listening pleasure it's great for following the episode along in real time as well as just doing a general deeper dive into ontology and all of its influences past and present you can go ahead and find that on our sub stack as well as in the episode description we've got them for youtube and for apple music And just a hats up, on Sunday, January 11, we'll be hosting our second reading group meetup.

4:28We'll be reading one of my favorite essays of all time, The Californian Ideology by Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook, as well as a recent piece in The Baffler called The Texan Ideology by Stanford professor and media historian Fred Turner of counterculture to cyberculture fame. We're inviting all of our paid subscribers to sign up and we'll send you the details. Or you can send us a tip via our Substack and email us at theculturejournalist.substack.com requesting an invitation. We'll be back with Simon right after the break.

5:18The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners. If this pod had something meaningful to your life and you want to access everything we put out, please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber over at our Substack. Paid subscribers receive access to our Discord community, the Cujoplex, full access to bonus episodes, and more goodies. You can get it all for just$5 a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Hey guys, we're back with Simon Reynolds. Simon, welcome back to Cujo. So good to have you on again.

5:55Yeah, nice to be chatting again. So in Retro Mania, you reference hauntology as a term that you and Mark Fisher had started quote banding about in 2005. And you use it to describe a very particular current in British music at the time. As you pointed out on an earlier email chain with us, that was now 20 years ago. Yeah. Which, of course, is the peg for this conversation. So tell us, where did the term hauntology come from? And what did it mean to you in terms of music specifically? The term just seemed to be floating around a little bit. I mean, I'd come across it because it was this term in philosophy.

6:28Jacques Derrida had done this book, Spectres of Marx, which I hadn't read. I'd read a follow-up book called Ghostly Demarcations, which was like a bunch of mostly Marxists kind of very annoyed with Derrida and Derrida's hilariously petulant response to her wounded response. So I had a vague idea of what Hortoji meant in the philosophical world. But to me, it was just a word that's kind of lying around that you could repurpose and apply to these groups. I think Mark Fisher used it in a more rigorous, philosophically grounded way than I ever did. But yeah, there were a bunch of groups that sort of seemed to come around or become visible at any rate.

7:06Around about 2005, 2006, there was a label called Ghost Box, which puts the ghostly thing right in the center of the identity. and then there was an article more music there was moon wine club a little bit later this but also separately a sort of separate scene as an offshoot of dubstep there was burial doing kind of ghostly spectral stuff and then in america you had william basinski doing i think it was 2005 was certainly near to then the disintegration loops you know very much based on the idea of the decay of memory so you had a bunch of artists who were like playing with ideas of i'd say like the idea of memories as ghosts you know like you know they're like your own memories are like ghosts internal to you but also like these sort of cultural memories that sort of loiter on the cultural scene and can be reactivated and specifically with these groups they're often mostly playing with ideas of lost future a sort of earlier more optimistic time when technology seemed to be bleeding to this bright progressive efficient future you know um Stereo mono Light bulbs

8:21Early synthesizer music like the BBC Radio Phonic Workshop There was a cluster of things but there were other things that were jumbled in there that were quite unrelated to that It was a weird collage of things so there was this sort of interesting actual ghost stories tales of the rural uncanny so it could be a film like The Wicker Man it could be authors of the macabre fiction like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Macken and H.P. Lovecraft, these sort of cosmic horror slash pastoral horror, often with a sort of sense of specifically England as this culture that has a pagan past not that far ago, you know, and there were witch hunts and there were, you know, there might be a community where they were still practicing rituals and sacrifices, you know.

9:06And a lot of the folklore and quite recent, still lingering folklore of the UK is rooted in pagan stuff, you know, stuff to do with fertility and nature and stuff. It's still, the traces of this stuff still exist. And England, Britain is just saturated with history. Like, you know, wherever you go, there is like layers upon layers of history and old buildings and stuff. So it's sort of stuff that is very much like there.

9:40But there was also a whole other thing to do with television as well. I mean, so many different things that people were obsessed with, the kind of weird, spooky television that a lot of us grew up with if we grew up in the 70s and 80s, like, you know, really quite disturbing kids' shows. There was a show called The Changes, which suddenly some kind of fever breaks out across a population of Luddite, you know, anti-technology, and they smash all the machines. And it presents, you know, this is going to kids, like, five in the afternoon after they come home from school. it presents this really kind of disturbing near future where people have, you know, everything has collapsed, society has collapsed, and had spooky music.

10:16So that, you know, really quite disturbing, inappropriate for children programs were part of what we, this generation of ontology musicians and fans, we grew up on this sort of stuff, and we had the weird kind of, like we kind of almost been traumatized by it in a weird way, but in a good way, in a way that we kind of liked. But it's very much like cultural ghosts being brought out again. Seances, cultural seances. Yeah. Do you think there's always been an element of, you know, hauntological vibes or sounds or elements in popular music? Or at what point did you sort of realize this is actually its own emergent genre?

10:58Well, the first time I noticed anything sort of like this was with Borders of Calendar when I sort of really got into their music as to write to children. And they were like using these deliberately old-fashioned synths. They were using like sort of analog-era synths at the time when everything was very, very hyper-digital and chopped up breakbeats. And they were going the other way, and they were like sampling sort of things from old television programs, children's voices, things from nature programs and educational programs from the 70s. and the whole feel of it was very much like it had this profound effect on me when i i would actually seem to activate memories uncontrollably like images of my childhood would pop into my head as i listened to it possibly the association of these sort of synth tones that they were using with the kind of children's programs and educational programs i would have seen then but it was uncanny and and and that they seemed to be interested in the uncanny and the ghostly and that was sort of sweetly spooky, I suppose.

11:58Like it's poignant, but it was also eerie at the same time. And then there was a few others, a group called Position Normal Broadcast, I suppose, were in this area as well. I would later collaborate with the focus group, one of Ghostbox's main artists. So there seemed to be something coalescing around the end of the 90s. And I think there's always been retro and revivism had this undercurrent innately, because you're reactivating the past and the present. So one example would be The Group of Madness, so you wouldn't think of in terms of ghosts or spooky things. But their first single is a homage to Prince Buster, the sort of Jamaican pioneer of ska music, which they are reviving 15 years later or whatever.

12:44And they say something like, a ghost dance is preparing. And that's a reference to a song he did called Ghost Dance.

12:54A ghost dance is preparing You've got to help us with your feet In the song they're singing about Orange Street, which was the big street in Kingston, Jamaica, where all the record business was. And it's sort of this longing of, like, we wish we could go back in time to the birth of Scar. But in this song, it's called The Prince. It's a homage to Prince Buster. They're kind of bringing it back into the present. So it's not as eerie or spooky as what the people like Ghostbox were doing in the 2000s. But it has a little bit of that vibe of time travel. Or you could have a song like Ghostdown, actually, by The Specials, also another Skoll group.

13:33That's more about the ghostification of the present than under Margaret Thatcher.

13:48Industries are declining, shops are shutting and being boarded up, clubs are closing because no one has any money. It's a bustling town becoming a ghost town. But the music's very kind of spooky and it's using like, I don't know, soundtracks and library music, which is another sort of easy listening. These are the same influences that a lot of the ghost box and the hauntologists were really drawing on.

14:22So there are pre-figures of it. I think whenever there's some sort of sampling, a lot of hip-hop, because it uses sampling, there's something innately spooky and archival about it you know in a certain sense you've got like little fragments of past music brought alive in the present and looped so it's kind of it's working from memory but it's slightly uncanny in a weird way yeah can you can you talk a little bit more about like what are the specific qualities that make something hauntological as opposed to just like referential to the past or maybe even just sort of like romantically nostalgic Well, there's two things that the artists would tend to be doing.

15:01One would be, they would be using sampling a lot of the time. So this artist, Bellby Polly, sampled a recording of a folk singer that was made in around the turn of the century, the 20th century, using cylinder, using cylinder, you know, like a very early form of recording before shellac and long before vinyl. People go and collect these folk songs from the last people alive in a village that remembered an old song. So it's a very old, faded recording of something that in itself is ancestral. And he took this voice, this singer, and he kind of essentially, I've forgotten the name of the singer, but he took this folk song, British folk song, and he kind of rewrote it.

15:53so a new melody was made out of fragments of this man's voice uh i was like i mean it sounds really beautiful and eerie but also something really kind of weird and disturbing about it because you're like you're making a dead man sing a new song you know if you think about it conceptually. It's kind of sort of proto-AI in some ways, but so, yeah, sampling, a lot of use of, you know, if they're not using sampling, they'll be using analog synths, these sort of synths that have a, now have a sort of elegiac futurism exuding from them. What else do they do? Oh, well, a lot of things, you know, Popboards of Canada pioneered this, is sort of tones and sounds.

16:36A lot of it's about memory, but A lot of it's also about the recording mediums in which memory is captured and how they are fragile themselves. So our own memories are fragile and they're becoming distorted and, you know, unreliable. But also, you know, photographs fade, superate films of children in the back garden get all mottled and scratched, vinyl gets scratched, tape kind of, you know, as it starts to kind of the tones bend and waver. So a lot of these artists are very attracted to these sort of sounds of a recording medium becoming fallible and fading or disintegrating, as in the disintegrating loops by Brzezinski, where it's actually that process is captured.

17:23A recording of a moment in time starts to crumble before your ears. Yeah, I was going to ask, do you think it was no coincidence that artists become interested in these media, these formats, right around kind of the dawn of the digital turn? And do you think it was a response to that? Or do you think it was a response to some larger things going on in society? Like, I know that hauntology is very tied to, you say this in your work, Mark Fisher says this in his work, to a sort of longing for an earlier era in UK, his political history. Yeah. I mean, I tend to think it is largely to do with digital technology.

18:10I mean, it's paradoxical because hauntology is one of the first scenes really that almost entirely exists on the internet. you know these are not bands that play live you know there are clubs i mean there have subsequently there have been events that be like special events where these groups have dj'd and sometimes done kind of live performance but really it wasn't a scene born in the traditional ways that music scenes are which is either like bands playing or djs playing together it was like born on the internet but it's very much like obsessed with the world before the internet you know the world of analog medium mediums like records and tapes um and super eight films and old television broadcasts you know um so yeah i think it's very much symptomatic of that sort of there's something about digital culture i mean digital culture does decay and things get lost but certainly at that point it seemed like digital culture was imperishable and also very very exact and clean as a recording technology now i'm sure there are people who fetishize the clunky early message boards of the 90s or really shit sounding mp3s but like you know it seemed like one of the defining things about digital controls it'll never die and it'll never fade and so that sort of then weirdly for some people with a acute sensibility it sort of made them fetishize or be interested in you know the analog media with its flaws and its scratches and its hiss and and uh and its ability to erode with time which is interesting because when something doesn't die and doesn't fade it's kind of by definition almost inherently a ghost right it's just it just loses i don't know but it doesn't sound ghostly i think yeah there's something there's a sort of feeling with digital culture that um certainly no i'm just i'm just the irony of like what we sound ghostly is almost because it's like the mortality of it i guess but there's a different kind of haunted aspect to the like um perennial existence of something digital the kind of coldness of that that quality ghosts if you think about them how they're represented they're always represented as sort of blurry not sharp they don't look just like a regular person they're sort of in some way it's bleeding into insubstantial and one of the reasons derida was interested in the ghost was that it was a kind of scandalous philosophically scandalous entity in the sense that it's neither being nor non-being and it's neither fully present nor fully in the past it's like it's crossed between those categories in some way that undermines our entirety of western thoughts or something i don't know for those of our listeners who don't understand or don't aren't like super familiar with especially like derida's understanding of the term wasn't it about like the specter of marxism yeah it was he wrote it kind of around the the fall of the soviet union i don't know if it was exactly then but it wasn't about like how marxism didn't work or he wrote it i think specifically in response to this book the end of history by fukuyama francis fukuyama yeah so this was a very you know widely read and discussed book that said you know uh communism has fallen and we will now have an endless reign of of liberal democracy.

21:27And so Derrida wrote this book that was like, so actually, no, the specter of Marx stalks the earth because exploitation and oppression, et cetera, are, if anything, even worse today. More people are dying and starving or whatever in total than when Marx was run. I'm not sure that's totally true, but it was very much like, you liberals think Marx has been exercised actually he's here stalking our culture and he's more relevant than ever which actually I think has become true if you look at just the number of socialist people being elected across America and young people being interested in these ideas it's a very odd book I only read it after talking about ontology for many years happily banding the world around it's spectacularly useless for a music there's like nothing about music there's nothing really you can apply to internet or digital culture really it's um you know the first chapter is all about hamlet's father's ghost then there's a later chapter where about marx having a debate with a philosopher called i tried to read it was very dense i couldn't tell if that was because of the translation i read books in a very perverse not perverse but like kind of odd way which is i'm constantly trying to non-fiction books i'm constantly trying to extract something i can use in my work and i found nothing in it at all And there's a very impassioned middle chapter where he is talking about, in quite a very non-Derrida sort of way, about straightforwardly denouncing capitalism and the awfulness of the world.

23:03And it's very sort of heartfelt. And yeah, it's an odd book. But he did give us this word, ontology, which we could misuse. And I got the sense that, or what can be sort of transposed a bit is this idea of like a future that never came to pass or being haunted by a future that never came to pass, which I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that meant from a British perspective specifically. specifically? It's what it is. It's kind of a deceptive memory. It's like a sort of false memory, actually, because memory, cultural memory and archives allow you to focus on all the good bits in the past.

23:41For the hauntologists, they're talking about things like there was this enormous expansion of higher education in the post-war era. There were these things called polytechnics. There was this thing called the Open University, where you could get a degree by mail order, basically, and just watch programs on television and send your exams in by the mail and you get a degree. My brother actually just got one just like that. It still exists, the Oak University. But there was this democratic expansion of education. Kind of people who never had higher education now had access to it. There's things like the Newtown movement where, oh yeah, brutalist architecture.

24:15That's another thing that's part of this, where you're like, you think about the noble intentions and the initially very impressive and futuristic look of all these buildings that were built and how it's going to improve. urban planners thought this would make ordinary people's lives better. In fact, they made it worse and buildings started to decay and get mould and they were socially atomising and it was a utopia that got wrong. But through memory you can just look at the cool pictures of these brutalist buildings and you can extract these progressive exciting utopian things from the past and you forget about how they're embedded in unbelievable racism, sexism, homophobia just like i think you know if you go back and watch say a comedy program in the uk from the 70s it's shocking what was allowed in terms of what was considered funny and um so it's sort of like you know it's like any nostalgia or revival you sort of take the cool bits the cool clothes or the cool music and and certain other cool things or excitingly progressive and utopian seeming things and you forget about all the bad stuff at that time one of the utopian things wasn't it also just the bbc oh yeah yeah as it existed at the time and like the radio bbc radiophonic workshop and all this like cool art that got produced because of like state funding yeah that is genuine yeah that was genuinely sort of amazing uh you know if you think about like like there's this thing i mean it's the equivalent of pbs and nbr npr in states but it's so much more powerful it's like i mean it's just such a huge part of everyone's life of bbc especially in those days when there wasn't much commercial television or radio uh at all um radio 4 is sort of like the the most august and uh educational of the radio channels still exists It's still amazing.

26:11You know, imagine they did the thing with Deidre Darvish and this guy called Barry Bermal, which is called Inventions for Radio, where they, you know, they weave together voices of people who've been interviewed about dreams and death and his own afterlife, and then this spooky electronics. And it's this amazing sort of piece of sound art. Death is going from shadow into reality. Leading this earthly life. I'm going on to the next plane, Dave Pedic. Going to hire life. Leaving the physical body behind. And this went out on the radio to the whole nation, potentially, of an evening, you know, in 1965, or whatever it was, I can't remember.

26:49But, you know, this was the sort of stuff that the state would fund. It was based on this, the original charter by this guy called Lord Reith was like, you know, shall expand the horizons of the common man or woman and, you know, elevate and edify. And so as a result of that, They did all this weird electronic music and strange radio plays, and it spread, in some ways, this sort of weird children's TV image, which was pretty challenging stuff. And now BBC is much less, it still has some cool things on it, but it's much more entertainment-oriented and market-driven, I suppose. Yeah, or adapted to the market, yeah.

27:33Yeah. Were there aspects of hauntology that you and Mark Fisher were interested in for different reasons or even that you differed on? I mean, I think Mark had a much more expansive political idea of it to do with, you know, tied into neoliberalism and just the idea that the future was dead or something. But somehow, hauntology was reactivating these memories of like, you know, when it's an era in the UK history when ideas of planning and the state intervening and doing things or the state-run broadcaster producing all this sort of challenging material. These were very much like dominant ideas and also like genuinely utopian and trying to build a world, you know, where of possibilities and, you know, for people and opportunity.

28:26And, you know, he would talk about how that personally expanded the kind of things he saw on television, Dennis Potter plays or whatever. Weird children shows like Sapphire and Steel, this exposed him to ideas. He came from a working class background and, you know, he would sort of say this led me to who I am now, you know. For me, I was quite happy to let it, because think of it mainly as a music genre and aesthetic and a particular sensibility. I tended to think like, I didn't really necessarily go in for this sort of capitalism is to blame kind of thing. I felt more like it was related to digital technology and how, in a weird way, it's sort of enabled by the amazing archiving that, you know, that digital technology and the internet allows for.

29:11I think, you know, you all totally came to distance, I think, before YouTube. But YouTube, in many ways, is like a great instrument of this sensibility. It's the repository of a lot of this weird old stuff. The archive that the internet puts at our fingertips, yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, paradoxically, it's also reacting against digital culture and it's fetishizing the analog and all this sort of old, forgotten stuff. Things you can only find in used bookstores and old record shorts and stuff like that. This is interesting. This kind of brings me to the next question, which was obviously Hauntology, as you originally wrote about it and Mark Fisher did, is connected to this very specific group of artists that are out of the UK.

29:56But in Retromania, you talk about how there's sort of something similar going on across the pond in American music. Like, obviously, a very different history, very different set of reference points that one would be nostalgic for. But there was an adjacent movement going on that also fixated around the kind of older, outmoded technologies at the same time a little bit or similar approaches to that. Can you talk a little bit about what was going on in America? Yeah. This writer, David Kean, wrote this piece on what he called Hypnagogic Pop for the Y. It's a really interesting piece. And it was like pulling together a lot of these figures like Jane Ferraro.

30:36I think Ariel Pink was mentioned there. There was Spencer Clarke. One of Tricks. This group Rangers. There were so many of these groups. There were Emeralds. I mean, it was like the open the door to a whole realm of music that I personally had not noticed. One of Tricks, point never, you know. These things were popping up. and I instantly thought, oh, this is the American cousin to hauntology. The reference points are a little bit later in time, like it's more the 80s, but there's a lot of things in common, like sort of interesting old analog synths. There's interesting background music, like it wasn't so much library music and soundtracks, which were the big obsessions of UK people.

31:15It was more like new age music, but it was still like backgroundy music that sort of was often very new in its time but now had a certain kind of patina of yellow jack about it associations of with one's childhood and i don't just and oh yeah interesting sort of hazy lo-fi aesthetics of uh tapis and you know partly because a lot of it was made in a very primitive bedroom way and then released on cassettes you know so it was already not you know pristine sound but there was a sort of fetishization of that blurriness and that haze. It didn't quite have the same, quite the same interest in spookiness and horror.

31:54But the one thing they both have in common is sort of humor, which I haven't mentioned, is that, you know, there's a kind of whimsy to a lot of the sort of ghost box and the UK stuff. And it's quite funny. And there are even parallels in TV comedy that was being made in the 2000s, like this show, Look Around You, The Mighty Boosh. And similarly, a lot of the hypnagogic pop or Chilwavers came to be known, it's kind of funny. Or it's sort of like, there's sort of a lot of irony in it and there's sort of these playful references to cliches like palm trees and beaches or, I don't know. It's not as somber and sober a thing as if you bring Derrida into a conversation, you think we're talking about something very forbidding, maybe.

32:41It's actually often really kind of amusing music, I've found. To me, at least, a lot of it, I'm tickled by it. It's not like laugh at land, but like that, especially with the artwork. The chillwave artwork is funny and clever and playing jokes with retro graphics. The ghost boxy UK stuff is, again, very interesting record packaging and playful juxtapositions of old stuff. It's not all like we've lost the future and we're a lost generation. It's not all that. it's quite entertaining a little bit definitely and you also make the point in the retro mania chapter that like maybe the hauntological impulse is just like something that could happen to artists it's about what artists are like remembering from their childhoods in general like it's not yeah and that like for in the u.s for artists that came of age in like the 80s or the 90s like the hondological impulse was remembering just the extremities of commercial culture as opposed to like state-sponsored media stuff yeah i know i mean another sort of place you get the same sort of vibe he's certain kinds of hip-hop artists like jay diner some of his stuff he's definitely doing the same thing you know there's one where he i forget it's called light works i think the track and it's like you know it's sampling a corporation it's bendix or something like that you know they're advertising some new electrical domestic product and i think their slogan is something like bendix the tomorrow people this is bendix the tomorrow people the name of the game is light works

Read the full transcript

34:32so it's sort of like a lost future thing but it's like being america it's much more bound up with corporations and and uh commercial culture than say the uk where there's this very big state sector including the broadcasting bbc thing but it's the same sort of thing you know and and a diller and similar sort of artists like mad they were like very much using samples as ghosts that carry these sort of cultural associations. It's very much collaged out of fragments of the past, each of which is soaked in sort of memories of often like sort of black cultural life in the 70s, but sometimes just other, you know, like one of my favourite tracks is largely based around a 10cc song, which is, you know, some random salvage that he found in a record store that, you know, he sort of repurposed the great drum track that they'd come up with.

35:23so yeah i do actually think of the the hauntologists but particularly the ones particularly ones who use sampling very very heavily they i just think of it as like this sort of weird british form of hip-hop that's so british doesn't really resemble hip-hop that much yeah and then one more thing to touch on just in the american side of it we also mentioned another movement one that david keenan had written or like the the freak folk movement or like he wrote about the new weird america movement that that was like another maybe slightly i guess it was less about medium but yeah can you talk a little bit about that it was like longing for america's past but a different kind of past yeah and in fact although it's there like playing you know instruments acoustic instruments or sometimes electric instruments and it seems much more less ethereal in a way.

36:17I think it clicked for me when I realised I read something that this Byron Coney said, well, these people are all record collectors. Freak folk is very different from, say, the folk tradition in, you know, the folk scene in, say, the UK, which is just this ongoing thing. It's almost like a dynastic thing where you have the children of Martin Carthy are actually still practising or carrying on the family tradition in a weird way. And it's like an ongoing music movement. This is like a bunch of hipsters who got interested in the weirder corners of folk music american and british and made a kind of weird simulacrum of it but in actual fact in some ways what they are doing is only what john far he did you know his stuff was very much like based on him being an obsessive record collector you know he he came up with all these weird guitar tunings but a lot of it is invoking the imagery of the titles of his records and the imagery on the covers he's invoking some lost America of the 1920s and 30s, the early days of blues and so forth.

37:20So country blues. So that sort of uncanniness, the uncanniness of collecting old mountain ballads and so forth has always been an undercurrent within folk. Bob Dylan was really into that side of it. And what's his name? Harry Smith, right? The Anthology of Folk Music, this very important collection of old, very early records he found, the sort of earliest shellac recordings of things you know that was as much a sort of esoteric archaeology as it was folk as a living culture yeah i was working in record stores at the time like i was like very young and working my first jobs in record stores and i remember like the early 2000s and it was like very the coolest thing was to be into like very very obscure old psych records and like america like lost america pipe recordings yeah like i think with like you know say i was talking about the british traditional music scene you know and how it goes on generation after generation fairport convention had this big thing called croppergy festival every year and you see bedraggled original fans of this music and then younger kids who got into it and i feel like it's like a scene where like you probably learn to play from other players or you go and watch chord shakes they're making on their hands because i feel like with freak folk it's much more like playing a record over and over again working out how to play it yourself it's not like an organic, ongoing culture.

38:39And that's not a critique, particularly because so much of our culture is like this. It's much more like a strategic movement within the cartography of taste, if you know what I mean. I suppose hipsterism is what I'm trying to avoid saying, but yeah, nothing wrong with it. I think it still exists. People say it's over, but I think it still exists just in different forms. What, freak folk? No, hipsterism. Oh, hipsterism, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, yeah.

39:06If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas.

39:42You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. I really want to get into sort of the difference between ontology and like nostalgia culture or you know like retro tm especially as we're kind of experiencing those latter tendencies right now especially you know with a hyper acceleration of like micro trends that are kind of like scavenging doing cultural scavenging of past aesthetics especially as I think our relationship with the past when i say our i mean just like sort of culture broad popular culture's relationship with the past seems to be more about looking at the past and nostalgia as like a set of resources rather than as like culture that has already been fully formed you know what i'm saying yeah i mean in some ways the distinction is to be like i like this bit of nostalgia and this other bit of nostalgia i disapproval it's like i've used this formulation but before i say like it's it's like the distinction between good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.

40:52There's good retro, which would be, you know, immagric pop and ontology and whatever else. And then the stuff you don't like or you think is shallow in some way is the bad cholesterol, the bad retro. But it's just, it's an arbitrary distinction. In some ways, I think the distinction is actually the forms I like, like ontology, so that is genuine nostalgia. Like it really is nostalgia. There really is this sort of ache of longing and a fascination for what one lost sort of time and kind of wishing you'd go back or at least really wanting to know what the fabric of culture was at that time and then there's there is a more sort of shallow extractive way which is just like oh here's a beat we can use or a stylistic mannerism we can reactivate just because it'll differentiate us in the current music market and give us a little you know we bring back this and that'll you know could get a hit off the back of that because it's a sound that people haven't heard for a while.

41:43I always think of that one line from LCD Sound Systems, Losing My Edge, where he says, you know, Losing My Edge to the art school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s. What a line, you know? Yeah. But I mean, that can produce fun things as well. You know, it's not like it's necessarily a bad thing. Like, I don't know, what was the records that, was it Olivia Rodgreens who did a song that used that Elvis Costello riffs from Pump It Up or something like that. And it was great because, you know, and it wasn't really meant to be nostalgic for New Wave. I don't think it just was a really cool riff.

42:18Reactivate and get some excitement energy in the present from it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, really. It's just, it's a different thing from Hontology, which sort of, to me, sets off reverberations in you. It gives you this sort of weird, more interesting set of feelings, I suppose, in a way. Like you're sort of poignant, but it's also this idea. It's not just about being like, this is cool or trendy, remember this? I think the other kind of, it's also a bit more like the way fashion works, which is like, you know, this season a mod look comes back, or this season we have like a Laurel Canyon kind of vibe, clothing, and then it's onto something else.

42:55Again, that's totally fine. I don't sort of object to that at all. But I think like nostalgia is really, you know, things that are genuinely nostalgic, I think it's really interesting because we all have a nostalgia. And even if you're like sort of a young futurist and you're like, nostalgia is evil, given enough time, you will be hit by nostalgia. And nostalgia is coming for you. There's no escaping it. And when you get to my age, you have like multiple nostalgias. Like I have about five or six different sites of nostalgias in my own life that I can go back to and think, oh, that's so amazing.

43:29And because you're only thinking about the music or certain aspects of that time, you forget all the other things, how miserable you were personally, how shit things seemed politically. You can just return to how exciting Jungle was in the early 90s or post-punk or whatever. There's so many cool moments you can falsify in your own mind or just, not even falsify, you just kind of hone in on the fun bit and forget about all the shit stuff going on. Yeah. We were just talking about hauntology versus kind of culturally commodified nostalgia let's look at different genres like what about the difference between hauntology and say like mashups or yeah go ahead yeah mashup you know with a lot of these things there's a sort of um it's hard to say when one practice goes into a less interesting there are hauntology records that are quite close to mashups like the jay dillard track that i mentioned is kind of pretty much like a mashup like it's it's very largely composed of this tennessee sea song and a few other bits and pieces and he sort of liberated the 10cc song which is called the worst band in the world from all the shit bits of it and just only extracted the most exciting bits of this song and uh then thrown in a few motorbike effects and some other sort of samples but it is essentially you know a mashup but it's incredibly exciting and it feels more interesting than some of the classic mashups where there's like right there's like sampling or like references to like Miss Neolettes on top of the Stooges you know and that's well let's say like the Avalanches I love the Avalanches but a lot of their stuff is you know like a slightly more complex for the mashup and when they DJ'd a lot of the things they DJ was really mashups you know it was the same as I forget the name of Soul Wax and it was the really famous girl talk right oh yeah girl talk the Avalanches were kind of doing what girl talk did but in a little bit more sophisticated to less sort of pavlovian high fructose way than what girl talk was doing are people still doing mashups today is it still a thing or uh i feel like they're gonna make a comeback in the same way that like ugly belts from 2005 are making a comeback you know what we what we referred to on the show is the boho amnesia belt um i have a friend who does really awesome yuri beats he's a friend of the pod he's on uh he does macho pod with my partner drew but he does an amazing he does amazing mashups that are very very soulful and i think larger than some of his parts he does this amazing one for the theme song of that podcast which is father john misty and drake and it's beautiful but i don't think they're not like this like sort of like pop lightning in a bottle that i think they felt and girl talk and all those others first emerged but i would say it's like you know i think sampling in hip-hop that felt so innovative even if it was referential was like you really were like eking out like a new space and sonic futurism with the way that some of these were assembled like i think taking going all the way back to like just taking like elements from craft work and like merging that with like rock like let's talk you know like herbie hancock for example but my friends are super hauntological though you can do like a hauntological sounding map or like a textural right like those i don't i don't think of like that kind of sampling in hip-hop is hauntological i think but what i think about girl talk like that just felt like i mean i was like so into that stuff when it came out but i feel like the joy and excitement from it was that it was just kind of like dumb novelty music and it was like thrill of the track was like oh shit and now he's like weaving in that one you know and like oh those two things you wouldn't expect those to work together and like it kind of makes you giggle like there was another uh optimo i think the late oh rip died so recently they yeah a similar thing It was like, here's a really great house track, and then suddenly Iggy Pop appears over the top of it.

47:22And you're like, when it was done cleverly, you sort of reinvented music history, and you saw sort of weird lines of connection between things. The energy in this house track was, in its own way, as Dionysian as Iggy Pop or even, and it sort of fit. But yeah, I felt like a match-up thing. I wasn't really that involved in it. I enjoyed the avalachas and Optumos sets. but it always reminded me of a club I used to go to in East Village where they just played classic rock. It was full of hipsters, but they just play Nielsen's Jump Into the Fire or that song that's on Goodfellas, the most exciting season in Goodfellas, or they play the James Gang or ACDC.

48:03I felt like it was the exhaustion of the hipster. We just want to be pleasure, be dumb riffs. I felt like that mash-ups were kind of like the same thing. like let's still have the best bits the most instantly enjoyable bits of pop history and just you know intravenous injection of rocking good rocking fun and in that sense you know perfectly it's understandable that would be like the thing people would play when they wanted to party made sense no that actually makes so much sense it was like we just had this like super self-serious moment of like the return of like you know the whole strokes phenomenon and and it's the opposite of our music and like the pret you know twee and like sort of like neutral milk hotel like very touchy feely like and you don't you know when you go out you don't necessarily want a dj playing deep cuts you know yeah obscure detroit b-sides you want you want to get drunken but the new the new party get drunk music was assembled from past musics instead of like forging a new yeah founder path forward which is interesting to culturally locate at that moment yeah yeah right Right.

49:08So when we look back on this musical movement of Hauntology now, 20 years later, what do you see as its legacy? Like, do you see any ways in which it feels like it's continued to influence culture or even is influencing culture now? I don't know. It was always a fairly specialized area. You know, it got quite a lot of talk about it. And I suppose in some ways its high point was when Broadcast collaborated with the Focus Group, one of the main artists on Ghostbox. and the wire magazine made it was like the number one record you know of the year which uh surprised me actually i guess one oh tricks point never you know has gone on to have like a very interesting career and it does soundtracks for films and has brought that some of these ideas quite near the mainstream collaboration with the weekend who's like one of the oh yeah yeah of course yeah that was totally like a very haunty fingerprints of one oh tricks point never album it's now a settled genre and there are people still doing really nice and interesting records with it usually the original people you know like we're wearing club and every so often a sort of newish artist will come along and and do something that i think oh that's even if they're not directly influenced it certainly feels ontological like the record that debbie did the long count where it's like like an exercise in almost literally sonic archaeology you know using ai to try and create this music from the Mayan civilization from like a thousand years ago, which we don't know what it sounded like, but we just have these, you know, strange looking pipe instruments that, you know, it's unclear how they were fingered and what sort of sounds they produced.

50:41So David made this record, sort of genuinely spooky sort of record using AI to sort of simulate or imagine what the sounds might have been like and a sort of tribute or evocation of Mayan civilization, which was very complicated and had its own unique cosmology. you know that feels autological to me but I'm probably I'm told reliably that the movie Marty Supreme has autological undercurrent tier and there have been other sort of filmmakers there's this guy Peter Strickland has done films like Barbarian Sounds System and In Fabric that are just totally haunty in their aesthetics so I feel like it's got this sort of cultural half-life but yeah it's not a storm the barricades of the mainstream really Burial's still going strong Yeah, that's true.

51:28Yeah, Beryl is someone who has been pretty influential and has become almost a genre and has carried on making interesting records. I almost feel like something like A.G. Cook's kind of sound was like a direct reaction. It was like going the other way from Hauntology. Like it was like a response. And then now A.G. Cook was one of the architects of like Charlie XCX's really big album. Right. But I think like someone like James, I always talk about James Ferraro, but someone like James Ferraro, I'm sure that A.G. Cook heard Farside Virtual. And I think that there's kind of, you can draw a little bit of progression that.

52:08Yeah. It's like that chill one. That would be a fun thing to draw out or like map out progression of ontology across music. Yeah. People were really into these like outmoded technologies. Then there was like a cheeky embrace of the digital in reaction to that in like the early 2010s. and then we're still living a little bit downstream of that but then i also see some luddite tendencies creeping back in or like analog like geese is the biggest band right now yeah yeah yeah vapor wave wave is very much like what came out of the chill wave moment i think or some of those people but it's very much like yeah the opposite like suddenly it's sort of completely ultra bright i think it was like a soundscape that has no shadows in it it's very much like Yeah, exactly.

52:52The hauntological is banished from it in a weird way. But as you say, in a weird way, the reaction against it is a kind of weird continuity in itself. Or there's a relationship there, you know. Yeah, someone like Salem, I think, are pretty hauntological. Oh, yeah, yeah. They're still like, Zoomers love Salem. Like, they're a cult. I had this student who was so obsessed that, like, he was in several different classes of mine. And in each one of them, every assignment he did was about Salem. That's amazing. I wish I said, look, the point of this class is to expand your horizons. And, you know, you're not supposed to come into it and just be still obsessed with your pre-existing obsession.

53:29You know, I'm supposed to be giving you new obsessions. Can you do something on another artist? That's amazing. It's funny, actually, at this showcase festival that I was at, it's Simon, it's a little bit like sort of like South by Lake for Quebec, but it's also international. But like, there's actually like a number of bands who sort of, you know, were on the spectrum of either like sort of like hardcore punk to slowcore that also were incorporating like haunted messages and like recordings, either stuff taken like sort of from older mainstream media or from, I don't know, some of them sounded like people's old voicemails.

54:04And we're sort of weaving those in and out of their sets. And I didn't really like make the hauntology connection to that until now. But it was something I noticed while I was attending. and I was like weird sort of yeah haunted voice samples like suffusing the guitar music of the youth now oh yeah for sure so obviously uh we sort of touched upon this a bit but we live in a culture right now that is super nostalgia obsessed not just in terms of micro genres I think but in terms of like I like to call it the nostalgia industrial complex where like every major tour that everyone seems to be talking about right now is like a band that was big in like the 90s or something that like Oasis was one of the biggest tours I think of UK and Irish history ever but also was like one of the biggest tours of the year here bands like the Deftones are seemingly more popular than they've ever been and are like beloved by Gen Z but I'm curious if you think there are like pasts or past futures that have continued to haunt us or that are haunting us right now?

55:08I don't know, really. I mean, I think the legend and lore of early rave culture is something that seems quite persistent. And probably people like Beryl have kind of helped to perpetuate that to some extent. But there does seem to be sort of an abiding interest in this sort of acid house, early jungle, these sort of the first raves, the illegal raves with outfaces like Spiral Tribe. There seems to be, I mean, I suppose there's sort of an academic interest because it's sort of a fun thing for people to do PhDs about and assignment song. There's a romance of things that are happening for the first time.

55:41Anything that's like, you know, was once an emergent thing, there's something about that moment when it breaks through for the first time. It's more interesting than it's continuation. You know, now there's probably as many or maybe more people clubbing than ever, but somehow the early days of that culture are more interesting or the early days of disco, you know, early days of Detroit techno. There's a sort of abiding romance, partly because the stories have been so told and the people who are involved love to retell these sort of self-mythologies and so forth. You mentioned, this is outside of music, it feels like we're culturally haunted by like socialism and Marxism again, for sure.

56:18Zoran Mamdani is one of the like biggest like cultural figures out there right now. And like one of the biggest movies was One Battle After Another this year, which was sort of about that, like about the specter of utopia that like passes from generation to generation. I don't know if you saw it yet, but. Yeah, well, that's been a, there's a trait in left-wing sort of culture, academic culture. I think Mark Fish used to critique and talk about left nostalgia, but there is this sort of thing of like fetishizing the Paris Commune, 1917. There's various other moments, you know, 1968, these sort of years when it looked like the old order was going to completely collapse, you know.

56:58And it's also like a sort of, it has happened, albeit briefly, and it could happen again, kind of thing. And it sort of appears when the culture seems to be against you and left-wing ideas are very sort of sidelined, you know, long periods of conservatism, there is this sort of thing of people writing books and articles about, you know, the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War or these sort of moments, you know, or Chile, what Allende was doing in Chile before CIA. backed coup you know but i mean i think you know what montani's done is bring all these ideas into very sort of uh the now and sort of you know as a set of policies that he's going to try and achieve so it doesn't there's not really any nostalgia in that project it's a real active project which was the same with like what corbyn was trying to do when he was the leader of the labor party in the uk and and he got people very excited because he had all these ideas that you know probably would be very hard to achieve but you know like every school child should have as a right the ability to learn a musical instrument you know because music education has been cut you know in state schools in the uk over the decades and uh you know a sort of dream wish list of things will make people's lives better you know even though some of these people were kind of throwback figures to the 1970s corbin was like you know from another year almost what he was trying to do was very much like make things better now you know i'm pretty sure that though that both bernie and Zoran in an ad campaign had like Bob Dylan times they are changing or something like they have to you have to go back to that memory of like when things in the past felt like they were going to change yeah I'd be down with that if it was like Sly Stone they used I think that would be a bit more energizing yeah but um yeah that's it is funny you know the left the progressive forward-looking way of culture also has its own enormous array of nostalgic touchstones and in the past, Che Guevara, you know, there's all these sort of rock stars of leftism.

58:54My son did a report on, I can't remember exactly who it was, but it was like leftist podcasters or whatever. And he was like, they seem to be competing to find the most obscure, hipster type figures of the very obscure Soviet figure, you know, and not the obvious leftists from the past, but like very esoteric ones. Interesting. Simon, do you think hauntology, like as we've been talking about it, as you and Mark first coined it in 2005 and like really we stole it we did first like uh ripped off Derrida in 2005 no but you know really really as something that has like a real shape and substance to it as a genre do you do you think that is like a movement or practice was a one-off thing or is it maybe more of a type of aesthetics that emerges in response to certain conditions in society and could emerge again basically like what are the what are the conditions that sort have helped foster ontology or maybe will help foster ontological impulses um i think that kind of thing goes on a lot you know i use this not very popular term conceptronica but the first time i used it actually was way back in the 2000s in some review or other i can't remember what it was but you know i was thinking of things like ontology where it's all very thought out you know like people are very consciously assembled and aesthetic in a very knowing and purposeful way and even when they did a record like Ghostbox would say we have a mood board and we know what the packaging is going to look like what the aesthetic coordinates and cultural references that are probably going to come up.

1:00:22It's not like having exactly a concept record but there's an array of touchstones that they think this particular record will be about. It's very conceptual. I think it's the kind of things my son Kieran writes about are very much in that tradition of, there's a certain sort of randomness and intuitiveness that goes on when making in the music but like the aesthetic is very assembled and it's just it's more to do with like memes and stuff like that it's very thought through a lot of the stuff that comes through in music culture i think to this day so it's not like i think like hauntology was a one-off because it was more like a prefiguring of how music scenes would be going forward which is sort of hyper conscious hyper archival hyper constructed around a constellation of reference points and things.

1:01:05Yeah, you actually have a really beautiful paragraph at the end of your Hauntology chapter in RetroMania that kind of touches upon this. But I'm wondering, does looking at Hauntology teach us anything about how we might go about navigating or mobilizing the culture of the past, this archival culture that the internet puts at our fingertips in a way that feels productive and meaningful and forward-looking as opposed to just sort of like a feel-good escapism. I think you said at the end of the chapter that it introduces like two ways to, if not resist, then perhaps bypass the no future represented by mashups and retro.

1:01:46You had a lot of choice words for mashups and retro at the time. Yeah, I didn't like it at all, I must admit, but with one or two exceptions of where it's really clever, I thought it seemed fairly lowest common denominator stuff but yeah i don't know i'm actually a lot more forgiving to all problems nostalgia and wallowing in the past i think as i've got older like and i spend a lot of time with that and the past is very interesting it's all yeah i get the possessions with things where i want to research them and got obsessed with fringe theater and radical theater in the 70s which is a very stupid obsession because it's impossible to see any of it you know no one is performing it it's just the original play scripts and there's no documentation of it but it's like a whole lost culture of people trying to break all the boundaries in theatre.

1:02:30There was a movement called Pub Theatre, but it's just almost the same as Pub Rock, which was kind of what led to Pub, where people would go in their lunchtimes to see a play very cheaply that would be performed with hardly any costumes or stage props, and just like a very, usually very socialist or left-wing theatre done on a bare bones thing. And you go in your lunch break and see a play performed and then go back to work. it's a whole world I didn't know anything about even though I was alive at that time but I would have been like 12 or 9 or whatever and there's so many interesting things in the 20th century culture that I just find I don't judge anyone for becoming obsessed with the past because things move so fast that there's so many things that you can look at and think wow that was weird or there's some potential in it that could be activated think of all the art movements and music movements.

1:03:20And so I kind of think like archive digging and reactivating forgotten things is very interesting and possibly valuable and possibly things that are relevant to now could come out of them. And, you know, I'm like a, I'm mainly a historian and I teach as well. So that's largely like we'll do the 21st century or things that are happening recently, but a lot of it is history. And I think it's useful to, I think it's important for people to know about it. So I think they're sort of shallow, you know, There's shallow, empty, nostalgic stuff and stuff where it's just like dramas that are set in the past, but only have the decor of the past.

1:03:54It's just picked up on an empty, stylistic level. I'm less interested in that. But knowing about history and exploring history seems like a really interesting, valid, fun, potentially reactivating, valuable ideas thing to do. I think especially like young people today who have grown up only with an understanding of what it means to live alongside the internet and who are kind of like bombarded constantly by a culture that exists in an internal present. and like sometimes when I've spoken to younger people I'm like wow like growing up in the environment you've grown up in I feel like has deprived you of a sense of history in the sense that or cultural history and of a cause and effect in a way that I got because I was able to like exist in the before times a little bit but I feel like maybe before times I like that before times but I I can see how there's like certain groups now I was actually just talking about this in relation to geese where i can see that young people are starting to take an interest in that history and i can see how it would be great to learn from someone like you too as a student right now just a sense of like the oral culture the oral sense of counterculture history that is passed down from generation to generation for example it's weird whenever i'm teaching something i start to think paranoid like how much do i need to explain like for instance say i was doing a class on pirate radio.

1:05:16And I thought, these kids probably have never really listened to radio because their parents, by the time they were kids listening in the car, their parents would have probably started to shift from playing the radio to playing Spotify or something like that in the car. And they probably have no idea, this idea that you listen to the radio and you're waiting for the song that you were excited about and, you know, when will it be next played, you know? And so even to explain the romance and excitement of pirate radio, this sort of illegal stuff bursting onto the airways, so i had to explain what normal radio was like you know and then you just you get like layer on layer of prehistory before you can even talk about the thing you want to talk about oh yeah i've just written a book about the late 80s and early 90s and slacker music and shoegaze and for the intro the intro i realized i'm gonna have to explain a lot of stuff like the older readers who buy it for nostalgia reasons will understand but i should probably jog their memory anyway but hunger readers like you know there was literally no way to find about music except to buy a music paper and they came out on thursday so thursday was like the best day in england well for your music nothing but you would rush down to this shop and there would be the enemy and melody maker and sounds and record mirror and you you know all the news about music and then you'd have the paper in your house and you'd reread it because it would just be lying around your bedroom and you had to go and buy records at a particular place you couldn't hear anything you wanted as soon as you wanted to and it gave a whole different structure to being a music fan but there were so many other things about like life then that i had to sort of sketch out you know how it created a different relationship with music you would go to the record store and like the clerk would you know explain like this happened and then this happened and this happened or your older sister would tell you this happened in music and then this happened and this happened and sometimes i think young people are for example are so interested in something like deftones or duster or the shoegaze artists and like did anyone ever tell you like where that came from and when it happened and what it was in a reaction to and i think that i don't i sound like a little codger here but i was like have we reached a point in history where the younger generations think none of that matters anymore but i think they'll find something when they do look back something productive can come out of it i think well some of them are enormously well informed about particular things particular bands or even scenes and they you know actually told me things but sometimes the whole chronology it doesn't quite piece together you know and i think also the adversarial aspects to music like how punk was a reaction against prog and and the sophisticated steely dan type music you know i think to today's mind there's no problem in liking steely dan and the sex pistols the idea that you choose one or the other it doesn't complete it's all available to you which has definitely got benefits you know in some ways but a dimension of music as history is lost a bit so bringing back to Fisher, Mark Fisher, in his 2012 essay on hauntology for film quarterly, which mostly talks about hauntology in terms of film and television.

1:08:10Fisher wrote, what haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the 21st century is not so much the past as all the lost futures of the 20th century taught us to anticipate. The futures that have been lost were more than a matter of musical style, more broadly and more troublingly. The disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination, the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. As someone whose last book, Future of Mania, that you came on the podcast to talk about was about music that sounds like the future, the history of music that sounded like the future.

1:08:48Does this still feel like the case that it's impossible to imagine a future to you? I feel like right now, the only sort of future people can picture is like a catastrophic one uh whether it's climate catastrophe or it's like ai putting us all out of work or surveillance or just a complete loss of sense of a distinction between reality and fantasy you know with all these deep fakes and ai generated simulacra and you know what is truth you know i think we we can sort of see a future but it's like just pure grimness and horror and that's not a completely new thing i mean i was a kid i used to love reading i used read a lot of science fiction and I particularly like the subset of it, kind of catastrophe fiction, like J.G.

1:09:29Ballard's book, The Drowned World, which is very, I can't remember what caused it in his book, but a drowned world actually is quite a plausible thing. In that book, the tropics have moved north and London is a jungle and flooded and people are fleeing to live in the Arctic regions. So that's actually where it could become more plausible than it was when he wrote it. It's enjoyable because it is a world transformed and you sort of picture your surroundings and you always imagine yourself as a tenacious survivor but you know there's some anxiety in the idea of everything's changed even if it's catastrophic but yeah i think the thing that mark's always imagining a better world an improved world a fairer world an ever more kinder stabler world you know those dreams seem to be hard to imagine but you've got politicians trying to bring that back a little bit in a local way so yeah there doesn't seem to be the storehouse There doesn't seem to be a cultural storehouse of positive images of the near future.

1:10:25You're right that we can, it feels like we can picture it now, maybe more than we could back then, but it's a negative future. And it does feel like we're living through, like, especially here in America, I feel like the second Trump administration, it feels like we're living through something historical. History is moving in a way that it hasn't felt in a while, but it's not moving in a fun direction. Yeah. Things are being broken and broken for good. and there's some kind of descent into something unthinkable that we never thought we'd see. Yeah, so it's pretty grim, but there have been some encouraging signs.

1:10:59Yeah. Well, so I'm not in total despair. And seeing that like one individual could sort of transform the feeling of life so thoroughly also leads you to believe that like someone else could come in or, you know, better forces could come in and also transform things perhaps. In sort of history, still left on history, the sort of idea of the great man theory of history, or the great individual theory of history was very unfashionable. But it does actually show that sort of certain key individuals, whether they have a sort of dark negative charisma or a positive one like Van Damme, like just the most charismatic person on the planet and has absolutely, you know, Trump is infatuated with him, which is amazing.

1:11:39It's like sort of counter magic against the, you know, it's like good magic against bad magic. There's triumph. It does show you that, you know, an individual can make a difference and there are people you can believe in and all that kind of stuff. So it's a sort of, yeah, it's about the agency of the individual and of the collective, I think, is sort of back on the agenda. It's not all impersonal processes. You know, there's going on a lot. Obviously, there are things like the battle for rare minerals, you know, rare earthy minerals or issue of the climate. That's a huge impersonal process. But there is scope for agency, I think.

1:12:14that's the one thing that i think we've been missing to actually start seeing progress and now yeah like we're seeing all you know it kind of just takes one person i mean i know it's been a thrill for emily and i to see someone someone around our age speaking coherently about politics and policy and it's like it's so galvanizing yeah um so who knows maybe it's easier to tip the scale than we thought yeah it's like the same kind of optimism i feel like it's being created by like seeing a band like geese get like mainstream successful you know yeah it's heartening you know in an otherwise you know very disheartening moment indeed every moment maybe there will be a future a book i really liked in recent times was the ministry for the future oh i've heard about this one yeah yeah where you know sort of there's some kind of un body that's job is to come up with clever solution stuff for the climate crisis so that was sort of like kind of very different from the science fiction I used to read when I was a big fan of it as a kid, which tended to be on the dystopian side for the most part.

1:13:13Well, speaking of the future, what are you working on these days? What kind of Simon Reynolds drops can we look forward to? Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's a book about the past, but yeah, I've done a book about the late 80s, early 90s, sort of when I was a youth and very, very excited and very much in the now. And I think, you know, another way, the music was very much bound up with a lot of times working with music from the 60s and the past but kind of at the time me and my sort of comrades running about we thought like they're it's kind of burning up the fuel deposits almost of the past in this sort of apocalyptic way so i'm talking about groups like my bloody valentine and sonic youth and pixies and spaceman three and it felt very now oriented you know it felt like you know even though it had this relationship to the past it was very much like sort of blissed out overwhelming engulfing music that you kind of got lost in yeah it's very intoxicating at the time so yeah Sort of the sequel to rip it up, but not really, because none of the same characters are in it.

1:14:08They're all thrown on history scrap heap and a new cast of characters come through. Part two, if you will, yeah. Yeah, it's sort of like, you know, like, in a lot of ways, it's the opposite to post-punk lot of this music. It wasn't explicitly political. It wasn't critiquing the world. It was much more like we surrender to the awesomeness of the psychedelic now kind of thing. That was the general vibe. Almost like romantic vibes. Exactly, yeah. Very romantic. movement vibes the opposite of gang of four were very anti-romantic and very right dry critique of everything this is like super passionate super losing yourself in bliss kind of moment in music so yeah i've kind of gone back to that tried to understand that moment amazing which seems to be you know shoegaze is like so a now thing isn't it it's so it's so intense like did not have that kids love it at all they love it yeah the gen z's love slow dive yeah it's really like they're bigger than ever yeah it's well well deserved yeah for sure i don't think they've discovered i was having a conversation with someone recently though i don't think the gen z has discovered the pixies like rediscovered the pixies yet though someone was like they've discovered all these things but not the pixies so maybe your book will help usher that i thought they were pixies like It's a hardy perennial.

1:15:27Like I noticed my students, they've all heard. They've all heard The Cure. They've all heard Nirvana. They've all, you know, sort of like the staple gateway music you hear in your teens. I thought the Pixies were like on that list, but maybe not. Yeah, I would agree with that. I feel like they just know the Pixies already. I mean, I feel like they get sampled in a lot of pop music. Oh, right. They haven't got sampled. Yeah. I was in a store and I heard a cover of Where Is My Mind, I think. Or maybe it was on a TV program. It was a kind of almost a single spot. Yeah, they have a lot of needle drops now.

1:15:55Yeah, for sure. I've seen it. Yeah, and there's been so many bands that they love too that have come out that I feel like all you have to do is listen to one Car Seat Hudras song for your Algo to recommend you, the Pixies. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, we look forward to having you back on again when the book comes out. Yeah, that'd be great. Good chat. It is funny. Hortology is now old enough that it can be, to and be, for me, nostalgic. I'm nostalgic about how exciting it was, blogging you know mark fisher would blog someone else would blog i'd be blogging about this thing it's always exciting when you know like something coalesces you know and you're like oh there's something emerging here and it's definitely a thing i don't think any of the bands like the word ontology i don't know there's any band artists who like that word but you know it's just something that was a needed a name maybe not that name because it was sensibilities couples together it's really i really like that moment in music when you can see patterns and because well you know being a critic you know obviously it's like i've got some work to do something i can do here i can make the connections so yeah it was fun fun times it was always fun when it happens thank you for the opportunity to heart back to it yeah thanks so much simon where can people keep tabs on your work are you still doing bliss blog or this blog and yeah several blogs in fact But yeah, that's another throwback.

1:17:17Nostalgia is a weird way that I do. Happy to know it's still around.

1:17:26This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominic. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.

From the publisher

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. On our latest installment, filmmaker and Zohran Video Guy Anthony DiMieri joins us to talk to tell us about the wild twists and turns of his career as an indie filmmaker turned key contributor to the Zohran & SubwayTakes cinematic universes, dark woke, and why everyone is obsessed with Geese. We’re removing the paywall for the next week so you can give it a listen.

You’ll also get an invite to our second reading group meet-up: a discussion of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s seminal 1995 year essay, “The Californian Ideology,” and Fred Turner’s recent article for The Baffler, “The Texan Ideology.” That’s going down on Sunday, January 11.

In 2005, the music and culture critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher (RIP) began using the term hauntology — a riff on “ontology” — to describe an emergent genre in UK music, built from archival recordings from post-war England, vinyl crackle, and haunted, elegiac atmospherics. (Think: Burial, The Caretaker, and the eerie catalog of the label Ghost Box.) They borrowed the term from Jacques Derrida, who used it to describe a present haunted by futures that had never arrived; Reynolds and Fisher heard that idea vibrating through a generation of musicians excavating Britain’s cultural memory.

Fisher explored hauntology’s political dimension, rooting the movement in a longing for Britain’s pre-Thatcherite social democratic past and an affection for cultural touchstones like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Brutalist architecture, and films like The Wickerman. Reynolds, meanwhile, mapped its musical lineage—back to ’90s hauntology predecessors like Boards of Canada and Broadcast, and across the pond to J Dilla-era hip-hop and underground movements like freak folk, hypnagogic pop, and chillwave.

A recent CUJO reading group on the topic inspired us to invite Simon—the author of books like Rip It Up and Start Again, Retromania, and Futuromania (listen to our ep about it!)—to help us mark the 20th anniversary of hauntology and explore what it has to teach us about mobilizing the culture of the past in a way that feels meaningful and even forward-looking

Simon joins us to dig into the cultural factors that gave rise to hauntology, the 21st-century fetish for obsolete media, and the differences between hauntology and simple nostalgia or “retro.” We also talk about the pasts that continue to haunt us—from rave culture to Marxism—and he gives us a sneak peek at his forthcoming book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994, arriving in 2026.

Listen to our HAUNTOLOGY PLAYLIST on Apple Music and YouTube

Read more of Simon on hauntology in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past and over at ReynoldsRetro

Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblog

Follow Simon on X

Additional reading:

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993.

Mark Fisher, “October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder,” 2005.

Simon Reynolds, “Haunted Audio, a/k/a Society of the Spectral: Ghost Box, Mordant Music, and Hauntology,” director’s cut of an article in the November 2006 issue of The Wire.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, chapter 2, 2014.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Ask about this episode

In short

Transcript

More from The Culture Journalist