Weird Britain in Exile: Ghost Box, Hauntology, and Alternative Heritage

From text to data mediality in corpus-based translation studies

“…The phrase is immediately recognizable, and remains creatively productive -apart from the phrase being repeated as is, the word Communism has often been replaced in blog posts, newspaper features, academic articles and internet memes with a range of topical phenomena: from "the spectre of authoritarian capitalism" (Macfarlane 2020) to the "the spectre of the Unionised Jazz Musician" (Weidler 2013). Passed on through Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993), the phrase also helped lay the foundations for the interdisciplinary study of 'hauntology', a term applied in turn to numerous artistic efforts, particularly in the domain of music (Sexton 2012). Despite this lasting cultural prominence, the spectre never recurs in the Manifesto after the first page.…”

‘Total trash’. Recorded music and the logic of waste

“…The potentially continuous exposure to recorded sound, both online and physically, has implications for the consumption as well as production of music, where the latter is perceived to be inexhaustible or inescapably ‘ubiquitous’ (Kassabian 2013; Reynolds 2011). Specific subgenres such as the sample-based genre of hauntology (Reynolds 2011; Sexton 2012; Roy 2015) emerged in direct relation to musical abundance (or cultural waste).…”

“…repertory – where heritage is better understood in terms of ‘liquid music’ available for streaming 22 . In addition to this, informal memory institutions such as reissue record labels (Dust-to-Digital, Sublime Frequencies, Finders Keepers, Light in the Attic, to name only a few) absorb the waste from past decades in order to generate alternative assemblages and re-readings of musical heritage, consciously opposing ‘more official, mainstream heritage projects’ (Sexton 2012, p. 572). Absorption and transformation are two modes of inheriting the recorded past: ironically, the commercial gesture of reissuing transforms the past into a new commodity, bound to be consumed, forgotten, and wasted.…”

Sounding ruins: reflections on the production of an ‘audio drift’

“…62 There are connections to be made here to electronic voice phenomena (EVP), psychoacoustics and also the recent retrofuturist strain of British electronic music labeled 'hauntology' by critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. Exemplified by the Ghost Box label and artists such as Boards of Canada, Broadcast and The Caretaker, hauntological music is characterized by a lo-fi aesthetic of decay and crackle, tape saturation and hiss, vintage analogue equipment (albeit simulated in many cases) and cultural references from the 1960s and 1970s, used to effect a ghostly infiltration of the present by the recent past 63 and a melancholic sense of loss. 64 The kind of environmental audio I have described differs in its aesthetics and methods, using high quality binaural recording and in situ headphone playback to create auditory phantoms, and hence a more immediate, less stylized and less explicitly melancholic haunting.…”