Exclusive Shindig! Qobuz playlist #21: The Roots And Branches Of… Hauntology
We’re very excited to be media partners with the truly unique online streaming platform and download store Qobuz. This month, the 21st of our monthly bespoke playlists, which take in all manner of genres and sub-genres, scenes and beyond, then and now, looks at the roots and routes of a music form that some may refer to as Hauntology
Play here or use the scrollable frame with tracklist the bottom of the page. You can sign up for a free trial today. Plans start from £10.83 per month. For more on Qobuz read our interview with MD Dan Mackta here
What’s in a word? A lot, and not a lot, so it seems.
In our 160th issue writer Camilla Aisa wrote a fascinating account on the back of William Burns’ new book Ghost Of An Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror And The Spectre Of Nostalgia (Headpress).
A quick search on the internet will unearth countless academic papers on the subject, and the term “Hauntology” of course comes from the father of Deconstructivism Jacques Derrida from his 1993 book ‘Spectres Of Marx’. Increasingly the word “Hauntology” has quite literally been associated with music. To call it a genre would be wrong. It’s something that’s more of an aesthetic or feeling. Jonny Trunk of Trunk Records told Camilla how a certain form of music from the past was inspiring and igniting a number of similarly minded music makers, collectors, and record label owners. “There were records we were all into back in the early ’90s,” he explains, “early electronics stuff, weird plugged-in acid- folk, moments from Midnight Cowboy, Tom Dissevelt, Silver Apples, ’80s charity shop fodder with a Moog. That was normal record collecting for us (wanting the cheap music that was overlooked and discarded), not really a predecessor of hauntology but a sonic influence, which is why you hear that sound echoed in retro- futurist bands like Broadcast. When I started exploring this all it was simply because of the time I grew up and the fact that the music coming out of the TV was more interesting than the music being made in the rock / pop world.”
Buy the magazine to read Camilla’s fantastic interviews and commentary on this most beguiling of late 20th and 21st century phenomena, and the various books for even deeper insights. You’ll enter a world of cold war paranoia, sci-fi, folk-horror literature and cinema and an array of music forms from the past 60 or more years guaranteed to thrill.
For me, “Hauntology”, or whatever you want to call it, comes from a state and place of mind that many people of my age entertain with the passage of time. As Ghostbox stated, there’s a strong element of a “half-remembered past” to everything that inhabits the cultural and theory free side of this dialectic. It’s the shows we watched as small children in the ’70s, the folksy but slightly sinister Oliver Postgate animations, namely Bagpuss, and the literally petrifying supernatural (something so very important) Children Of The Stones. Tom Baker’s Dr Who edged towards the Cold War as did we. Synths were the opposite of folk, the music we knew from hippy-dippy teachers. Folk was about our collected past. Synths were the sound of the future, as seen on Tomorrow’s World. There was also something of the nuclear age and the fear of annihilation we all felt as the ’80s unfolded. Threads on the TV and records by gloomy Sheffield industrialists, like The Human League. All of this, along with ghosts, public information films that scared the hell out of us, and watching horror films from behind the sofa formed this “half-remembered past”. I’m no longer sure what is real and what isn’t, but from my perspective this 50 track playlist goes some way of explaining the haunted in “Hauntology”.
We have the electronic originators of the ’60s, some gently spooked psychedelia, folk, library music, jazz, and Kosmiche-informed synth sounds of the ’70s and ’80s giving away to the renaissance of whatever this music is now.
One thing that runs through it from start to finish is that sense of an intwined future and past where the outcome of ghosts and computers somehow aligns.
Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills
