Did Boards of Canada invent the Hauntology genre?

[sheatheman]

i have never used the term once in my entire life. the number of people who could even begin to level a definition of it is less than you'd think. i'd say, maybe a couple thousand people in the entire world...

 

genre names are like some tone deaf autist screaming inside a clear, sound proof booth, holding up a sign with the genre written on it. if you are a musician, they won't bother you as long as you use the sense you are supposed to.

[marf]

i could never get into them. i admire their invention of the polysynth chewed up vhs tape sound. very inventive, but there was that old canadian public tv spot that sounded like BOC. I mean, really really sounded like boc. boc is just too cute for me. i like sinister aphex. true haunted music

[granty]

i have never used the term once in my entire life. the number of people who could even begin to level a definition of it is less than you'd think. i'd say, maybe a couple thousand people in the entire world...

 

genre names are like some tone deaf autist screaming inside a clear, sound proof booth, holding up a sign with the genre written on it. if you are a musician, they won't bother you as long as you use the sense you are supposed to.

 

...says the dude hanging out on an IDM forum

[Rubin Farr]

 

 

Logan's Run

THX 1138

 

The funny thing about these films and some other dystopian films from that era (Westworld and Futureworld, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Clockwork Orange) is how heavy they drew from existing buildings and architecture as sets, often with little if any changes. Especially Logan's Run, I remember as a kid a lot of Fort Worth and Dallas looked like that in the early 90s. It's been augmented or replaced now with new construction.

THX was completely filmed in the San Francisco BART system after it was finished, but before it opened to the public.

[zero]

 

wasn't hauntology as a musical genre conjured up by a writer in a magazine article

 

 

 

Yes, Simon Reynolds in The Wire (in an article on early Ghost Box and some other stuff, would have to dig out the issue to tell you). I know that, for one, Jim Jupp (Belbury Poly) dislikes the term.

 

Derrida invented the term as philosophy jargon, meaning a similar but different thing.

 

 

Another journalist describing hauntology:

 

(from http://thequietus.com/articles/06552-the-shadow-line-review)

 

Those who have tracked the shift towards the ghostly in British underground music over the last couple of years might feel that hauntology is due a critical exorcism by now. For the Thursday evening TV audience, however, it could still require some introduction. To recap, Simon Reynolds appropriated the neologism from the late work of post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida in order to describe a musical aesthetic which manipulates old library recordings, obsolete electronics, static, and musique concrete's repertoire of techniques to produce disquieting, melancholy effects.

 

Where some genres – Britpop serves as straw man here – reach backwards in a nostalgic shirking of the responsibility to produce material which might challenge the listener, hauntology bends towards those instances belonging to the cultural past in which the weird and ambiguous were purposefully cultivated. It returns both to spurts of creativity which didn't find their way into the mainstream and, almost contradictorily, to works which attained so great a familiarity through their exposure to a mass audience that their experimental brio was overlooked.

 

Chronologically-speaking, the lodestone of hauntological thinking is a period which extends from the late 60s to roughly the time of the Miners' Strike. It makes a romantic overture to the cultural – and political – achievements of British social democracy, belying an increasingly widespread yearning for the straighter, and yet far stranger, era before Thatcher's demolition of the Post War consensus. Drawn to the minor-key traumas of the public information film – Gatehouse, come to think of it, isn't a million miles from the unforgettable Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water – as well as the sonic adventurousness of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and audacious grands projets in social housing and town planning, hauntology asks what kinds of futures might have matured from such instances of technical, stylistic, and political innovation in public life.

 

The BBC figures prominently in the preoccupations of this disposition. What emerged from Television Centre and Broadcasting House under a succession of modernising Director-Generals in the 60s and 70s has lately come to emblematise how publicly-funded bodies were once able to broadcast work with intellectual clout equal to social democracy's egalitarian ambitions.

 

A slightly extreme example, perhaps, but one might illustrate what has been lost since then by pointing to a hefty sag in the cerebral pitch of the Corporation's art documentaries: where the 70s gave us the rigorous Marxian demystifications of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, the noughties serve up Andrew Graham-Dixon cooing over the rugs at Petworth. Adam Curtis might come along every couple of years to throw a little light on game theory or macroeconomics using nothing but old tourist promos and the shadier reaches of his iPod, but – due to deregulation - the state broadcaster has become palpably blunted by its subjection to market forces it hasn't always been required to appease.

 

[Salvatorin]

i'd argue in terms of musical styles it was Zoviet France, although for some reason just like Mick Harris/Scorn's influence on dubstep it's never mentioned by anyone

 

 

from 1987

lol you won't be satisfied until the president of music finally has a press conference where he says "zoviet france was an important band" "also coil" "and mike harris influenced dubstep"

[Al N Aafiysh]

 

.

[cwmbrancity]

Coil's true esoteric persuasions make the term hauntology look kinda daft and if you trip through the provenance of all their influences you could compile quite a thesis. Italian horror films of yesteryear have all manner of soundscapes that an active imagination could appreciate (and plunder). It all depends where your focus is throughout art & culture, rather than following a label thats cropped up recently.

 

Also, the British 70's tv programs that some contemporary releases are influenced by are really good fun in themselves and intensely weird for kids telly. Penda's Fen, Children of the Stones & The Owl Service are proper far out & well worth watching.

[Guest yikes]

thanks to everyone who posted videos/music in this thread,a lot of stuff I have never heard of before.....

[i know coil,mick harris,scorn.and library music .but not much else]

i have never heard of "Hauntology" as a genre before.

I am grateful for the musical knowledge and the discussion.

I wish i had something relevant to add but i will keep quiet and haunt

[cwmbrancity]

Cambridge Uni did a conference on aspects of this

 

The Alchemical Landscape:

Counterculture, Occulture and the Geographic Turn

23rd March 2015,

Corpus Christi College,

University of Cambridge

 

(had to be on the 23rd innit)

 

lots of thought provoking material with links to individual talks/contributers:

 

http://thealchemicallandscape.blogspot.co.uk/p/ev.html

[YangYing]

thanks to everyone who posted videos/music in this thread,a lot of stuff I have never heard of before.....

[beerwolf]

This is (surprise surprise) a cool thread to read. Some interesting posts in here.

[BCM]

spookno > hauntology

[Zorro]

Short answer, no.

 

I think the difficulty is that there are many things which could fall under the title. Everyone will I agree (I assume) that Ghost Box typifies the sound, but then what about early Demdike Stare? Svarte Greiner? Moon Wiring Club? If you broaden the net much, a ton of things start to fall in, like (early) BoC, Zoviet France and a lot of Musique Concrete stuff. It becomes difficult to contain.

[marf]

do boc fan sleep with their light on?

[oscillik]

do boc fan sleep with their light on?

depends on what The Brothers' wishes happen to be...

[marf]

seriously, ive never thought boc was spooky. cute music. chill out room music. everyone putting vicks in their facemasks and playing with a pink rubber ball music