Sunday, July 17, 2011

The Hauntological Orchestra are the UK's foremost explorers of the art of audio hauntology - sparkier than a bri-nylon spacesuit, cooler than Jacques Derrida's old fridge-freezer. By turns painfully hip and mind-bogglingly kitsch, the Orchestra exists at the point where the funky but fashionable faux pas gives way to a vintage electronic vibe to die for. Your MC for this night of unbridled pleasure is Jonny Trunk, doyenne of retrofuturist chic, record label magnate, pop-cultural historian and presenter of Resonance104.4fm's acclaimed OST Show.

(italics mine)


Nice to see all that hard theoretical work done by Simon and Mark over the past few years, especially in Mark's attempts to provide music with some kind of forward orietation through reconnecting it with the modernist project, utterly travestied by whoever wrote this.


Who did write it btw? Because they should drop the term hauntology as a far as I can see before they completely devalue it. I mean I know it has underground cache and it's kind of new and makes you sound interesting and cutting-edge but crate-digging chillaxing hipster esoteria is not really my understanding of what Hauntology is all about.


In fact I'd be so bold as to say it's a thoroughgoing mis/nonunderstanding and as such does no-one any favours.



3 comments:

David K Wayne said...

Well, remember Psychogeography? Now appearing as a 'ghost tour' at a CCTV Tesco colony near you.

Once Will Self gets his hands on Hauntology, it's all over...

Ed said...

But on the other hand, if you try to police the borders of hauntology too aggressively, you end up here:

http://apawboy.blogspot.com/2006/12/bogus-man-slight-return-focussed-his.html

Greyhoos said...

@ Wayne: Made me laugh. Indeed.

Yeah, I've been wary of making attempts at writing on this very topic recently, mainly because of this sort of thing. Mark and Simon's work aside, the whole thing was a little too theoretically hazy...so I guess it hasn't been too surprising to see it degenerate into a genericized buzzword/marketing term, lately.