Indeterminacy and uncertainty is central to the work of current electronica artist Vatican Shadow, who provides a kind of Al-Jazeera-esque wonky commentary on contemporary world events, conjured from minor key strings, muted industrial beats and suffocating reverbs. This sense of creeping drama is a very close relative of 70s and 80s ‘scientific’ library output, fixated with a sense of dread in the face of the progress of technology […]]]>

Part Three: Memory and Engagement – Vatican Shadow and The Caretaker.

Indeterminacy and uncertainty is central to the work of current electronica artist Vatican Shadow, who provides a kind of Al-Jazeera-esque wonky commentary on contemporary world events, conjured from minor key strings, muted industrial beats and suffocating reverbs. This sense of creeping drama is a very close relative of 70s and 80s ‘scientific’ library output, fixated with a sense of dread in the face of the progress of technology and its dehumanizing influence on modern life. The pieces flex and bend under the tension of their soundbite titles, like news snippets marked by their association with recent events, but also suggestive of the problems of engagement.

Like the best of Brian Eno’s ambient output, they soundtrack both everything and nothing – markers of a non-specific space of socio-political imbalance – a sonic terrain of anxiety, which is only set in context by titles, compelling graphics and imagery. Perhaps ultimately these pieces speak only of uncertainty and an inability to comment decisively, any implied commentary only present in the sense of foreboding suggested by the music and its dialogue with the context of electronic music production.

Another highly regarded current practitioner working with similar boundaries is The Caretaker, whose unsettling reverb drenched fragments and snippets of big band jazz and easy listening are said to be inspired by the descent into memory loss through conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. As with Vatican Shadow, this music does not specify its intentions or a context for its innovations, with only song titles as signifiers of a ‘readable’ context.

These works, while inhabiting very different spaces in the search for a temporary narrative, nonetheless exhibit similar ‘coping’ strategies. While Vatican Shadow’s soundtracking of international events might be seen as being ultimately borne out of a sense of powerlessness – it also seems to question the possibilities of participation in those events. The Caretaker seems to soundtrack an idea of memory itself, divorced from any defined context or reference points, which some have compared to the ballroom scene which ends Kubrick’s seminal film The Shining, a signifier of the ways in which a comfortable nostalgia for a recent past informs a troubled present. Both artists rather uncomfortably suggest emotion without clear direction and atmosphere without clear context, the visual images and evocative titles providing the only clues to their engagement with deeply uncertain spaces reserved for our darkest fears and most intimate memories. It seems we’ve strayed a very long way from the comforts of the dancefloor.

READ PART 1 HERE
READ PART 2 HERE

-Written by Mark Williams-

The leftfield zeitgeist, so often the location for the emergence of new genres, innovation and technical progression, is fixated on the skewed, the fractured and the temporary, consuming and regurgitating its production history, while the disco/hip hop/house template on which it was built has gone on, in the hands of mainstream producers, to become just another set of possible moves in the international language of chart hits.

Experimental electronica and its gadget born […]]]>

Part Two: The Unresolved and the Temporary

The leftfield zeitgeist, so often the location for the emergence of new genres, innovation and technical progression, is fixated on the skewed, the fractured and the temporary, consuming and regurgitating its production history, while the disco/hip hop/house template on which it was built has gone on, in the hands of mainstream producers, to become just another set of possible moves in the international language of chart hits.

Experimental electronica and its gadget born DNA has thus gone internal, speaking of the inner space of the individual and maverick experience rather than of aspirations toward a ‘collective’, or of a universally identifiable social experience. Often referencing only itself and its means of production, that experience becomes slowed down, willfully obscured, chewed up, and suggestive of the troubling complexities of the unresolved and temporary.

Any vocals that are presented to us are often in half-phrases and garbled bitspeak, vestiges of soulful heartbreak, suggestive of a longing for meaning and coherence, in stark contrast to the whoops, exhortations and celebrations of dance music 1. The stumbling and evocative utterances on a Burial or Fourtet recording, or the more disturbing growls and pitchshifts of an Andy Stott track, conjure an uncertainty and lack of fixation, which are emblematic of the tracks themselves.

The dead ends of the half formed rhythms, dramatic chops and filtered sweeps serve to reinforce these narratives of uncertainty and impermanence. Grooves are often intentionally stunted and off kilter, with propulsion hindered by repetition and extreme compression, masking any resolution and adding to the sense of a meandering, hovering, hesitant movement in contrast to the ‘straight forward’ motion of time honoured dance grooves. Loops are still very much in evidence, but are fractured by missed beats and half steps, the stuttering half-lives of partially formed patterns, which are further suggestive of an aesthetic of hesitancy and uncertainty.

Indeterminacy is further underlined by the absence of coherent voices to situate any internal dialogue. The site of the social becomes the personal, along with its attendant obfuscations of self-expression. The euphoria of music as a potentially shared platform for social experience is replaced by an internal monologue referring only to itself.

Unsurprisingly much of this current ‘outsider’ electronica is obsessed with memory rather than progress. It’s also haunted with the dwindling of a time where progression from the underground to the genuinely popular was possible. It’s now an infrequent and potentially impassable routing.

80s techno futurism, a common reference point for current electronic producers, foregrounded utopian visions of progress and technological change over and against the post-Ballardian mundanity of the underpass, the housing estate and post-industrial angst. But it is often the more disturbed visions of the latter that informs and underpins much haunted electronica in search of temporary solutions.

-Mark Williams-

Much current experimental electronica continues to grapple with the possibilities of finding an appropriate […]]]>

As the clubbing associations recede with time, the trend in electronica is towards a more self-reflective and inward space, sited in the home listening environment – a trend which first became articulated with terms such as ‘trip hop’ and ‘IDM’, coined to help mark out a space for a more sedentary appreciation of a music removed from the dancing and socializing going on around us.

Much current experimental electronica continues to grapple with the possibilities of finding an appropriate post club context, while building temporary narratives reflective of an uncertain future, where ‘clubbing’ and its hedonistic glory days are brought up sharp against acute socio-economic realities and a changed sense of social interaction.

Electronic records have become self-referential – whether this is to be found in the re-imagined ‘Radiophonic’ noodles and doodles of a bygone age (see previous Haunted House articles) – or in the ‘knackered’ and ‘wonky’ deconstructions of a fuzzily soundtracked past life, when we went ‘out’ just to ‘be’, unfettered by any need for contextual thinking.

Much current electronic experimentation takes its cue from this dialogue – the re-imagined dancefloor is to some extent a signifier of what has been lost…

Part One: ‘Knackered House’

The recently coined electronic sub genres, ‘Knackered House’ and ‘Wonky’, provide us with examples of both revisionism and retro futurism as embodied in skewed and slowed down ‘raves in reverse’, which encapsulate both a nostalgia for the past and an ambivalence about an equally uncertain present. The euphoric pads of uplifting house ‘science’ are morphed and warped, with references to the steely futurism of Detroit techno prevalent in both house and beats producers approaches, those original templates rusted and sun baked, icy future funk tempered by ageing salt water breezes and the nervous smudges of glitchy re-touching.

Much of this output can be seen as springing from an ongoing dialogue with the history and context of electronic music production itself – attempts to find new meanings and coordinates through deconstructed production techniques that themselves hint at fresh contexts and wider cultural significance.

The sonics of dance music’s golden age are still fertile signifiers, both of potential regeneration and current economic austerity. If the rising pads and propulsive breaks of former club glories can be seen as emblematic of ‘dance music 1’, pulsing with the rhythm of new possibilities, many at the controls have chosen to pick over the remains and to reposition the fragments, with twisted beat makers and ‘knackered’ producers soundtracking the new paradigms of a ‘dance music 2’, where time is tight and money tighter, record labels scarce and tangible rewards leaner.

PART 2 TO FOLLOW SOON

-Mark Williams-

These rediscovered artists have in […]]]>

Such is the appetite for real radiophonic inspired recordings that recent reissues have become an industry in themselves, with the now rightly celebrated and previously underrated greats of British electronic experimentation, like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and John Baker, the subject of lavish and brilliantly documented packages. We’re now celebrating an era of British electronic innovation that was both as mainstream as Doctor Who and as underground as anything else in the world in its field.

These rediscovered artists have in turn inspired a new generation of new electronic innovators mixing up a skewed take on their folk history, with wonky forward looking electronics. Check out the intriguing and occasionally certifiable Moon Wiring Club, the bonkers Bee Mask, the post Detroit utopianism of Lone, electro maverick Keith Fullerton Whitman and his reissue programme of obscure electronic curiosities on the Creel Pone label, as well as a whole host of post dubstep purveyors haunted by the city bound, post rave resonances of that other hauntologist’s dream, Burial.

Hot on the heels of all that – innovators both contemporary and recently rediscovered – comes a relatively recent hauntological variant: the faked reissue. Like early hip hop practices with blacked out on body labels and relentless crate digging for the rarest samples, this seems to come from a similar but appropriately skewed place. Inspired perhaps in part by ambitious and rightly applauded reissue programmes such as that of the indefatigable Johnny Trunk at Trunk Records, some of the more canny travellers on the hauntological journey have sought to introduce us to ever more obscure rarities, off the radar since they were recorded, and only now being brought to light. Crate digging of the most blue chip kind you may think, but in this world of information overload, not all is as it seems.

As with the Radiophonic type reissues, context is all here, and like all good subgenres this one has a growing history. You could say it all started with the much-vaunted rediscovery of obscure 70s electronic disco innovators Black Devil Disco Club in 2004, with a Luke Vibert backed release on Lo Records. With a great back story about an obscure 7” single, purchased at a local Boot Fair, and the subsequent rediscovery of a forgotten 70s library music innovator’s excursions into electro disco, it was a leftfield fan’s trip to heaven. That it is rumoured to be the work of electronic maverick Luke Vibert and other label mates doesn’t diminish the fact that many bought the record as a testament to its status as an artefact of a lost time – a re-contextualisation of present innovations through the recently forgotten past.

There are more recent and arguably even more elaborate rumoured hoaxes. There is the case of Ursula Bogner, the intriguingly named German housefrau, and her lost electronic innovations recorded between 1968 and 1988 – which could be seen as a clever attempt to capitalise on the recent celebration of the doyennes of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, with a correspondingly fantastical and intriguing backstory. And then there is Jurgen Muller’s Science of the Sea – a beautifully packaged reissue of a private press of the electronic compositions of a reclusive German scientist in the late 1970s, which surfaced in summer 2011.

Line this up with other documented ‘real’ rediscovery stories, such as Trunk’s promotion of the forgotten library music composer Basil Kirchin, their reissue of the forgotten music to the 1979 BBC TV series Life on Earth by Edward Williams, and their repress of ‘lost’ jazz classics by the Michael Garrick Trio, and you enter a hauntological hemisphere with legitimate re-issues vying for space with fake histories and electronic re-imaginings in a heady whirl of fascination for the obscure, the odd, and the outsider. The fact that some of the above were most likely elaborate PR hoaxes and rumoured to be the work of producer/label owners eager to provide the market with fresh mythology, perhaps still does not diminish their current significance if we see them in the appropriate context. In all cases it is the familiar hauntological subtext that once again proves seductive – the one that speaks of music’s redolent of the whiff of abandoned spaces, decaying architecture and shifted perspectives. The one that taps in most crucially to the idea that each of these remounted pieces of history or fragmentary cultural moments, fake or otherwise, must have a compelling narrative of some kind, one that can help us try to understand a rapidly unfolding and sometimes confusing digital future.

As cultural commentator K Punk – aka academic Mark Fisher – has recently stated in a discussion about the Ghost Box label: “Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déja vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s. Not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box’s hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing; lost programmes, uncommissioned series, pilots that were never followed up … this is sound which offers itself as a series of part-objects, supplements, a collector’s kit for a collection that can never be complete.”

Perhaps it could be argued that what hauntological or hauntologically inspired works do is attract specific attention to the cultural moments that establish their context, whether fake, imaginary or re-contextualised, bringing us into greater proximity to the particular circumstances of their production, further drawing attention to the work’s contextual layers and thus its status as a resonating artwork.

Hauntology, conscious or unconscious, doesn’t just replay the past, it is a function of a desire to understand the issues and problems of the present – or as BOC might have it – the issue of ‘the present inside the past’. It is also a function of the recurring problem of the archive – the incomplete and impossible ordering of the past that informs our notions of both the present and the future.

Furthermore such works draw closer attention to the role of received memory, as well as to the myriad functions of cultural re-contextualisation. More than ever the world wide web gives us access at great speed and in incredible detail to the minutiae of cultural reflection like no other medium ever has before. The past can be endlessly re-played and re-analysed with no escape from the constant re-contextualisation of that history.

Leftfield musical culture is littered with these kinds of fragments, a history written around the specific histories of the loners, the outsiders, and the misunderstood responsible for a never ending archive of ‘lost’ masterpieces. The linking factor to their appeal is often their apparent ambivalence to commercial concerns. This is not the same mechanism as the discovery of a long lost rehearsal tape by a rock band that has since gone on to legendary status. These are satisfyingly fleeting snapshots of moments from an impossibly well-documented cultural history, where no stone can be seen to be left unturned in the blogging culture. It springs from a celebration of the outsider and the leftfield, and is a function of a hauntological impulse to challenge the impossibility of the archive, to summon up remnants, re-process fragments of stories that don’t necessarily join the dots or fit a coherent narrative, but instead mark out the oddness and otherness of a lost time re-projected, that it may help us to imagine a fast unfolding future.

(You can read Part 1 of this feature here: Hauntology made Flesh Part 1)

Recommended listening and browsing:

Boomkat.com
Independent music supplier and purveyor of all things wonky, hauntological and more.

Boards of Canada
Music has the Right to Children
Geogaddi
Boc Maxima
Fanpage

Ghostbox Label
Advisory Circle – Other Channels; As the Crow Flies
The Focus Group – We are all Pan’s People
Belbury Poly – The Willows; From an Ancient Star

New Electronica
Moon Wiring Club – Spare Tabby at the Cats Wedding; Somewhere a Fox is Getting Married; Clutch it Like a Gonk
Bee Mask – Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico
Lone – Everything is Changing Colour; Lemurian; Ecstasy and Friends; Emerald Fantasy tracks
Keith Fullerton Whitman and the Creel Pone reissue label:
Too many to list – dip in
Burial – Burial; Untrue

‘Fakes’
Black Devil Disco Club – Disco Club EP
Ursula Bogner – Recordings 1968-1988
Jurgen Muller – Science of the Sea

Trunk Records
Basil Kerchin – Abstractions of the Industrial North
Edward Williams – Life on Earth
Michael Garrick Trio – Moonscape

Further listening:
Oneohtrix Point Never – Rifts; Returnal; Replica
Kona Triangle – Sing a new Sapling into Existence
Letherette – Letherette EP
Keaver and Brause – The Middle Way
Mount Kimbie – Crooks and Lovers
Jay Bharadia – The Yeticave

In approaching this article, charged as I was with drawing attention to some of the more ‘out there’ fringes of experimental electronica, I was very aware of wanting to find a context for the seemingly endless indie releases available to an insatiable army of fans of the offbeat, the leftfield, the oddball and the generally unclassifiable. Among those with an appetite for the challenging, the freakish, the obscure, the genuinely groundbreaking and, in the […]]]>

HAUNTOLOGY MADE FLESH….
AKA HAUNTOLOGY MADE TO ORDER…

In approaching this article, charged as I was with drawing attention to some of the more ‘out there’ fringes of experimental electronica, I was very aware of wanting to find a context for the seemingly endless indie releases available to an insatiable army of fans of the offbeat, the leftfield, the oddball and the generally unclassifiable. Among those with an appetite for the challenging, the freakish, the obscure, the genuinely groundbreaking and, in the truest sense, the ‘outsider’, there is more opportunity than ever to download, blog, discuss and dissect ever growing ranks of undiscovered gems and lost classics. When boot fairs and record collectors’ conventions gave way to online blogs and forums, the horizons of the online collector were forever expanded and the market place for outsider music would never be the same again.

Online retailers such as Boomkat parade a seemingly unending array of new releases and rarity reissues designed to tempt the left field enthusiast with ever expanding booklets and limited edition gatefolds. This scene in particular has benefitted exponentially from the continuing expansion of electronic subgenres, taking in dubstep and leftfield hip hop through to wonky and off kilter house. But what lies behind this insatiable impulse for rediscovery and its accompanying re-contextualisation of lost musical moments?

It seems sensible to address this area with reference to some of the more current philosophical ideas, which we might use to test the aesthetic statements of some of the protagonists. The ‘buzz’ word I want to address here is ‘hauntology’, a term coined by the (like him or loathe him) French philosopher and academic cause celebre Jacques Derrida. Hauntology, in particular, has most recently become a shorthand for discussions of ‘the past inside the present’; an often ironic recreation or quoting of a fondly remembered past, only to deconstruct it by creating works of art that are fully conscious of these ‘rememberings’, however distorted the results may be.

If one wanted to create a recent hauntological survey with reference to current electronica (hauntological approaches have been identified by critics in current fiction, poetry, architecture, fashion, photography and many other branches of the arts) then it would not be hard to find names that crop up again and again.

The much lauded and highly influential Scots electronica duo Boards Of Canada, with their mysterious lexicon of pagan flashbacks, re-imagined through the lens of 70s tape and camera manipulation, might be prime candidates, with compositions that burn like acid vignettes to a time recently passed, in re-imagined memory – part overt nostalgia, part dread for what we may or may not become. Their composition Music is Math on the dark and complex Geogaddi album from 2002 features a disembodied voice intoning ‘the past inside the present’, as if to provide us with some clue to their already highly mythologised output. The fixation with the instruments of their productions is key to understanding the central tropes which characterise this recurring commentary – radiophonic distortions, tape wow and flutter and surface noise, re-contextualised snippets and samples, all coalescing to present an imaginary world built on the chassis of hip hop dynamics, but with the individual vestiges of their 70s childhoods as a poignant and resonant backdrop. That this music continues to be so influential within the field of leftfield electronica should be no surprise, such is the suggestive and ironic layering of the duo’s keenly wrought structures. To date BOC still have whole Wiki areas devoted to unpicking their more obscure layers and backwards masked points of reference – signs, symbols and sounds seemingly left, like Led Zeppelin and others before them, for the interpretation of eager fans. BOC have traded very effectively on that mystique and, in turn, have inspired a generation of electronica artists who have also tried to exploit that seductive amalgam of reinvention, reflection and re-playing of the past.

Such is the rabid interest in their official and unofficial catalogue, that several of their fansites are devoted to uncovering lost records from a mythical back catalogue which the duo seem very content to keep out of reach. Rumours range from the discovery of private tapes from the 90s, existing in mere handfuls of copies, to a full scale reissue programme which will ultimately reveal the truth and place their whole output in context. The ultimate hauntological players thus themselves become subject to the unwritten laws of the archive, with their own output becoming a fetishized object where rewrites, lost demo versions and renamed tracks become a new currency in the on-going narrative of BOC.

Without the influence of Boards of Canada and the obsessive interest of their fans, we would arguably not have labels like British Ghost Box and their equally individual and ironic take on a peculiarly British world of radiophonic experimentation, public information films, and the lexicon of post war paranoia’s. Once again this is an artfully conceived world of replayed memories and fragments, which haunt the contemporary reality of the actual recordings to the effect that one layer cannot help but re-contextualise, or sometimes deconstruct, the other to often disorienting effect.

-Mark Williams-