So out on a whim I found Simon Reynolds personal blog and managed to find an email belonging to him. So I thought, 'I don't have anything to lose so I may as well message him' and he responded!
I sent him a couple of questions and he thankfully responded, with an amazing and thought provoking response to my questions,
( Simon Reynolds is the author of the books Retromania: Pop Cultures Addiction to its Own Past and recently published - Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow’s Music Today )
Here you go Tom, hope there's something of use here
1. “What drew you to hauntology?”
I suppose you could say I was drawn to it before it was even called hauntology. Specifically it was the near-simultaneous thing of falling in love with Boards of Canada’s Music Has A Right To Children and Position Normal’s Stop Your Nonsense. This would be 1999. Both records have a similar combination of eeriness and elegiac sweetness…. There’s a hip hop influence (samples, and in the case of BoC they use breakbeats as their rhythmic grid) but it’s hip hop disguised and Anglicized. And it’s that element – the combination of nationality and nostalgia that really hooked me, as an expatriate who at that point was in his late thirties and our first child had been born. I was living in New York but increasingly homesick and aware of the passage of time. So all these samples of bygone Britishness – the voices, the pedagogical TV voices in BoC’s case – set up all kinds of reverberations in me. With Boards of Canada, the effect was really potent in terms of triggering memories of my childhood.
Both artists put out more records in this vein – BoC’s Geogaddi – but sort of faded from the scene a bit. Other kinds of music dominated my attention – grime in particular.
But then all of a sudden, in 2005-2006, there were these releases by Ghost Box and Mordant Music and Moon Wiring Club and The Caretaker that were tapping the same sort of matrix of memory. A sort of collective unconscious for people of a certain age, who’d grown up in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s. Often connected to television, and especially children’s television, but really the whole look and feel and sound of that era. It also became apparent for some of the artists, they’d been influenced by BoC and Position Normal and a few other fellow travellers in that vibe, like Broadcast. Or by retro-futurist outfits like Add N To X.
So me and Mark Fisher fastened on this term “hauntology” (borrowed from the philosopher Jacques Derrida) and applied to this area of music, which started growing – there was more and more people operating in this area vicinity. Robin the Fog, Pye Corner Audio, The Advisory Circle, Woebot, Jonny Trunk, EMMplekz…. Coming from a slightly different angle, William Basinski.
The affinities lay in the emphasis on memory (and memory’s fragility), the relationship between the memory and the ghost, and an interest in recording mediums and the way they decayed through time: tape, vinyl, videotape.
There were also things going on in the culture outside of music – like this comedy show Look Around You.
Parodies of popular science programmes and educational programs from the 1970s and 1980s.
2. “How is hauntology evolving with digital technology?”
3. 3. “Thoughts on technology’s role in hauntological art?”
I don’t know if there is a particular relationship to digital technology that applies to all hauntology artists. A lot of them do use sampling. But there are others who prefer analogue hardware synths and even use other electric or acoustic instrumentation. Belbury Poly and Advisory Circle have gone increasingly that way, then there’s the Portuguese outfit Beautify Junkyards.
But certainly when sampling of old records or the voices from old television programs and films is involved, that is a digital technology. It’s one reason why I think of hauntology as a peculiar British mutation of hip hop. And there are in fact hip hop artists who do a kind of hauntology-adjacent thing – J Dilla with tracks like “Lightworks”. He’s not sampling the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but he is sampling something roughly equivalent from America – synth boffin Raymond Scott’s music for a commercial for Bendix, an electronics corporation. In fact, one of the bits used references “the tomorrow people”, that’s how the company described itself. But The Tomorrow People was also the name of a children’s science fiction show in the UK that is exactly the era that Ghost Box and co are obsessed with. And the electronic music and sound FX for the show were created by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, a sideline to their work for BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
As reissued by Jonny Trunk’s Trunk Recordings.
Often with hauntology you have a kind of digitally-enabled harking back to or recreation of analogue era electronic sounds.
In terms of the relationship between hauntology and technology in general, that old cliché of “the ghost inside the machine” is probably applicable.
Hauntology is also bound up with our out-of-control archival culture – the way that the past is stored and readily accessible on the internet in a way that just wasn't possible before the internet and streaming. You can time travel with great ease.
However most of the hauntology artists were on this path before things like YouTube existed. Even in the late 90s, there were subcultures of television collectors who were somehow able to source 1970s programs that had not been played since they were first aired. Maybe through connections at the BBC, or people had just kept VHS recordings of programs made at the time. They would trade stuff, often via the internet.
And then musically, people were chasing obscure vinyl records. It was very much connected to record collecting and esoteric culture-foraging. In that sense, another parallel with hip hop’s culture of “digging in the crates”.
Presumably the next step in hauntology’s relationship with technology will be AI – but I’ve yet to see any evidence of that coming through.
4. “Any advice for an artist integrating hauntology into 3D renders and soundscapes?”
No idea.
In terms of visual art, the people who have hewed closest to hauntology would be Mark Leckey (with “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore”, his video piece composed of old footage of Northern Soul and raves) and Jeremy Deller (particularly with the reenactments of the Miners Strike and the huge piece commemorating the Battle of the Somme with actors all around the country dressed in First World War uniforms and each taking the name of a dead soldier)
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