"Listening To Ghosts" - Hauntology In Sound
When I think of the word "haunting", I immediately think of ghosts, big and old scary houses standing in some unheard of, abandoned town, and that eerie feeling I can sometimes get when I'm alone. These initial images, most definitely conjured up from all those spooky movies me and my mother would watch when I was a child, very quickly intrigued (and terrified) me - but I had no idea that they'd influence so much of my creative work when I became older.
I think I have always been naturally drawn towards sounds that contain melancholy and dissonance, a mix of ethereal, sassy goddesses like Tori Amos and Kristin Hersh to the beautiful chaos of Courtney Love's wild, fuzzy guitars, heart-wrenching wails, and Slipknot as a driving force of thrashing heaviness. My tastes have varied as I've gotten older, but those same fundamental elements are still there and they glow in most of what I make as a musician. These sounds seemed to answer and fulfil a part of myself that have always felt a little lost and otherworldly. Even when I attended a pretty prestigious university, renowned for its unique music department, I still felt an outsider in so many ways. I was never part of the "cool'' jazzy bands, nor did I attend enough parties or white-dominated debates on racial and gender issues - I was a solo artist who wrote a lot of weird and eerie songs about ghosts and I had no interest in trying to be popular with tutors.
At this kind of disheartening time, I was reading lots of Mark Fisher (thank you, mum!) and listening to lots of artists that fell under the umbrella of "hauntology". The word itself intrigued me, naturally, so I dived into book upon book and often landed on Jaques Derrida, a philosopher and writer from the eighties and early nineties, who had apparently coined the term and I instantly fell madly in love with what he was exploring.
"Hauntology" pairs together the words 'ontology' and 'haunting', suggesting "all that can be said to exist does so due to a series of hauntings" (Henriksen, 2016). Our society has been built on the idea that time is linear, that we are constantly evolving and developing our ways of living and creating - however, Hauntology presents an alternative, that perhaps time is something less one-dimensional and in fact, the past, present and future are able to coexist through the acts of recycling and repetition. This is the idea that the past, in all its forms, haunts us as an ominous spectre that lives through the present and futures of our culture. We see much of this in our political and cultural spheres, with similar issues being raised century after century with similar responses and figures in power. Mark Fisher expands on this as a deep relationship between cultural and personal experience, he draws on his own mental health struggles with depression and beautifully links the two as a collective mass longing for the past. I'm sure the phrase, "it was much better back when..." has entered one's mind sometimes in regards to personal experiences and that yearning for what once was continues to haunt us, particularly with the advancement of technology.
In the sonic world, the re-emergence of vinyl and tapes, which Fisher describes as "a yearning for the past...we are constantly mourning something that does not exist and attempting a future that does not exist either..." (2012). Musicians associated with Hauntology were "suffused with an overwhelming melancholy; and they were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory - hence a fascination with television, vinyl, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down." If we take this explanation and apply it to the age we are in, where we can exchange music digitally in a matter of seconds, the sky rocket in sales for physical copies now proves a good example of these ideas around Hauntology. These writers regarded this weaving of pasts, presents and futures as a "spectre" or "ghost".
After reading lots around this concept and scanning the internet for as many forums on the subject as possible, I learned of Ghost Box Records, a music and art label established in 2004, "for a group of artists exploring the misremembered musical history of a parallel world. A world of TV, soundtracks, vintage electronics, folk song, ghostly pop and supernatural folklore. I found artists like Broadcast and Belbury Poly, who were using old analogue equipment, samples from old recordings of documentaries and films, tons of reverbs and delays, dark vocals, produced inside digital music softwares like Cubase. The combination of these sounds birthed so many juxposing ideas, conceptually and musically. Clean, digital sounds against noisy tapes create the haunting, the spectre - the reminder and yearning for the pasts and futures.
The interest in Hauntology on a creative level peaked in the early noughties, with the formation of Ghost Box Records and other artists in sub genres like Ambient Dub and Dark Wave. Burial, a London based musician and producer, did an interview back in 2004 about his uniquely haunting fusion of Dub and Ambient melancholy, with one track "Forgive", which uses only a five second vocal sample from an old Drum n Bass song he liked as a child, which he expressed created a nostalgia for him. The vocal sample is edited to create the impression that the volume is constantly increasing as the song progresses, but actually, everything is looped. Alongside this, he pairs MIDI strings and other small SFX with reverbs and delays, and this juxtaposition of ideas creates the merging of time and space sonically, even if the listener has no idea of the source of the original sample. This is the manifestation of the spectre, "instead of the 'can't wait' of 2-step's anorgasmic anticipation-plateau, Burial is haunted by what once was, what could've been and most keenly, what could still happen."
Another peak in the sound world of Hauntology came around at the beginning of the 2010's, with the sub genre Witch House. This was first flagged up on websites such as Tumblr and Youtube, hosted by a group of unsigned individuals from across the globe interested in hauntology, the occult and death. The aesthetic is derived from classic horror films, such as Psycho, The Exorcist and Posession, as a way of manifesting soundtracks through juxtaposing musical mediums. The intertwining of heavily distorted synths, processed through various reverbs and vintage tape delays, mimicking dramatic horror soundtracks, with 808 drum loops and barely audible vocals is the key basis of Witch House. Musical duo Crystal Castles made this somewhat popular at the start of the last decade, however, artists like Sidewalks and Skeletons have more recently expanded the genre into something that includes more cultural and musical avenues. For example his track, "Slow Motion", released in 2014 uses vocal samples from Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life", nostalgia from his own youth (and mine!). He also does this soncially, with his focus being less on chaotic distortion and piercing screams, but more on ambient erieeness through sample, reverbs and delays. The ominous presence exists throughout, with one sound always coming from another in the past.
I would really recommend reading Jaques Derrida's "Specters of Marx" if you're looking for more insight into the philosophical context into Hauntology and Mark Fisher's "Ghosts Of My Life" if you're interested in the popular culture of Hauntology and how it continues to manifest itself in everything we watch, hear and do. Katy Shaw is also a wonderful writer on Hauntology and on it's impact in the literature world.
"That's what I think art is about, when it's not boring, it's the allowing of ghosts to come back." - Jaques Derrida, 1993
Written by Yanna Avlianos