YOU CHEAT, MADAM

I certainly do, sir. But I also WIN.

Sonic hauntology does enforce attention. It does enforce concentration.

… I would have had no idea, which may be why I’m so far off on a lot of my musings, here. Apartment dwelling, grown up latch-key kid, me. I grew up in empty houses with the television on in one room and the radio on in another — a clock wrapped in a hot-water bottle, basically. My clock radio plays me to sleep, volumes up to wake me in the morning, and I’ve generally got a playlist going all the hours in between. I get a brief adrenaline spike when my iPod battery dies when I’m out. The only time I haven’t got music at some volume is when I’m with someone else, and focussed on them. All sound, especially music, is ambient to me unless I’ve consciously stopped doing everything else to just listen (usually a new track, or when I need to cycle my brain). The only sound that enforces my attention is absolute silence.

Main problem seems to be that we’re not looking for new places to ship our poor folks, exiles, undesirables, and criminals anymore. </sarcasm>

Seriously though, the socio-economics of the US — no matter how much it might suck for the UK folks getting paid in USD — make it very hard to make a case for sending hundreds (thousands) of settlers into space. I mean, most scenarios we’re talking about here — setting up a system where in twenty years a small camp of scientists go up to research to see if we can send ten or so more people in another twenty years, in the hopes that in fifty years we could set up a little area where maybe fifty whole scientists could possibly start thinking about bringing up their families, too… Where’s the _drive_ there? Hell, I don’t wanna fund that shit, either. And I fucking LOVE space.

We used to, let’s face it, fund preliminary expeditions to see if there was anything useful there, and then fling thousands of people at the wall in the hopes that 1% of them would survive and make someplace hospitable. And when we couldn’t find volunteers, we sent prisoners.

Lemme clarify: I’m not advocating emptying out prison system into space. That’s more than a little problematic on several levels, morality aside.

But until we’ve got enough people clamouring to move up there — some reason other than “maybe we should think about expanding, possibly, y’know” — until we give folks some reason to gather up the slightest bit of what they own, kiss their extended families goodbye forever, and fucking set forth to tame the wild planet against all odds, knowing that one in five will die within a year, and they’re gonna need to just keep breeding until they STICK… we’re not getting to Mars. You don’t settle a new frontier by making it comfortable _first_. You go, and you beat the fuck out of it, and you tell it I BLED ON IT, I LIVE HERE NOW, and you dare it to argue.

Wandering around ruined islands, surrounded by infinite oceans and the slow creaks and groans of deteriorating machines, piecing together a mysterious world that no longer works

This. It’s odd, much of the talk of stuff that isn’t strictly music on this thread (my own comments included) are pretty much just describing Ambient of some fashion — but no one’s coming right out and saying ambient, not as a huge, sweeping generalization at least. A lot of the ambient out there, it’s very… god, what’s the word, it _moves_, at least. It’s the sound of things making noise. It’s the breath of the world, whatever world that is. Even the crackle-hiss layered on a lot of tracks I wouldn’t necessarily call under the Hauntology umbrella, well that’s a sound of life layered on, too, even when it elicits the past.

Warren’s got a line in Dok that, if I recall correctly, came out of an earlier work — paraphrasing ’cause it’s not right on me at hand — about going to the graveyard and listening to the sticky sussurus of decomposition, and about standing up higher and listening to the world resonating with its own stark mediocrity.

(Which probably had nothing to do with hauntology in either context. But it’s two really hard and lovely lines, isn’t it?)

To point, though, if you unlayer anything by Burial, fuck if it’s not just little ten second cries of every mediocre musak-wail of the past thirty years, isn’t it? Without the heartbeat in the background, and the sound of bubble thin walls straining outward while the world drowns, it may as well be any little love-diddy, and little singalong pop keen, any refined-and-looped feel-sound in an Audi commercial. Just tossing the beat-layer on top really just pulls it up to an Audi-Hybrid commercial. Lookit, there’s a car racing along an open road, with “Loving you” playing in the sunlight. It’s the sticky sussurus — (you know why that line stays with me? Because it _aches_. It’s hummingbird wings dipped in hot wax and straining in painful death.) — of meat falling off the bones of the world that makes Burial haunted. It’s not the creepy filtered voices (or every boy-band tune would qualify), it’s not the beat, it’s not the words, it’s not even the occasional creak of machinery — it’s that dripping, sticky sound that the music plays fast around for fear of getting caught, spreading decay. Not so much the music in the next room, but the fear that by observing (hearing) the music in the next room, we’ve alerted it to our presence and the decay has spread. Y’know, maybe. I’ll bet there are real words for all of what I just said there.

Wouldn’t that have to be TWO plasma globes?

I wasn’t going to say it. I was going to ignore it and leave the thread on track. I said to myself “Self, don’t you dare link the musical telsa coils what arc between two great glowing globes, and we’ll all be all right.” I did not, apparently, cc you on that internal memo.

Hope you’re enjoying them…

YES.

Oh! Actually — would slideshare work? It’s dead simple, but hitting the right or left half of the screen flips the pages.

If you don’t care about the branding bit at the bottom, you can put one together in a few minutes with the thing we’re running all our widgets on: sprout .

G’morning, Whitechapel. Here’s your FREAKANGELS. (Ooh, the little window looks particularly lovely this week, doesn’t it?)

It’s almost June (canyoubelieveitaaaaawheredidMaygo?) — how’d we all do this month?

I’m just thinking that limiting ‘hauntology’ to ‘the past haunting the present’ deprives this clever little concept of its nuance and overarching ’spectrality’ as applied to culture/history/et cetera.

It just hit quiet here, and there are a few foghorns outside (there will be more in the morning), and shuffle just spun up Tom Waits — Tom, who has always been able to summon somewhere with effortless ease. His somewhere is often a yellow-lit place, with horns or railroads nearby, the wrong side of several tracks, a little rough and tumble, but they melt the snow with the salt of the earth. But that’s not hauntology — those places are still very much alive, still there, no dustier than they were 20 or fifty years ago, no risk of being forgotten just yet. Escaped, maybe, but not killed.

But places can die, of course. When I was a girl the west coast was a wonderland of nearly abandoned beach towns and used-to-be amusement parks, shards of boardwalks and dark circles where carousels used to sit being sandswept to grey as rust-rigor set in. Broken horses in closed shop windows with glass eyes glazing over as the magic shriveled in the cold sun. Places that were supposed to be Hope-On-The-Sea — where money was pumped in earnest because everyone would flock to them forever. And before Disney bought a few of them and the rest were lost, you could drive a few hours anywhere and hit ghost-towns — bleached, long-abandoned gold-dreams hardening to black iron and bone. Where pyrite and witch-loads tricked settlers into blood and starvation. There was a soundtrack to both desert and shore, the wind calling the beat of horses real or fantastic, the crying of metal against metal, the water or sand roaring a bass-line so loud you couldn’t hear it anymore.

That informs my feelings for hauntology — even though much of what’s out there now summons city streets, rain, and dying music scenes I never met — because I grew up in a country-state that’s kept alive only by the water we imagine to be real, and as soon as place is neglected it shakes off all sign that humans ever touched it, leaving bleached alien artifacts, maybe a cowskull, maybe a seashell, or maybe nothing at all if you blink or look away. The world has always been full of ghosts, and just a moment off the beaten track would find them.

If I’d grown up somewhere else (and sometimes I did) I’d have swamp haints and weeping vines, alien abductions and crop circles, or crack houses and urban blight to recall (and sometimes I do). Sometimes places were supposed to be, but didn’t. The world is full of ghosts.

What’s beautiful about the sounds of else-maybe-dead-but-forget-me-not is, to me, that sometimes it is only three rooms away, even in the middle of the day, even in the middle of the city, even with the crush of people around to swear they hear it too. It’s a mass-hallucination, a shared memory of something that never could have happened, a misheard lyric that always comes out the same, a paranormal event caught on tape, for once and forever. The world has always been full of ghosts, but now everyone sees them, always knew they were there, and rewrite old logs to lie the fact that they weren’t there yesterday and we weren’t expecting them tomorrow.

So many are in mourning for tomorrows we were promised and never found, as many as say “do you remember when?” with a sigh, as many as say “if only”. I don’t think ghosts need, by their nature, to be from the past or the future, particularly — they need only not be expected here and now to be haunting.

See, I don’t want to talk about this because I’m not a 40 year old that was paying attention the whole time, but hauntology strikes me as a logical progression from, god help me, the short-lived and quickly-went-to-shit mashup phase we hit two years ago. Because I’ve spent a lot of time in cars in the middle of no-where, and you know I’ll go back to radio every time…

But when you hit just between two transmission zones, or you’re scanning for channels in the middle of two cities, in the middle of the night, you’ll sometimes hit on a mashup that’s just absolutely perfect — you’ll picket fence between two stations or a station and dead air, and suddenly you’ve got Funky Town and some revival music playing in tandem for a few miles. And sometimes it’s hilarious, it’s one of those unexpected surprises you only get once in a lifetime. And sometimes of course, it’s crap, and the mash-up scene started forcing it and they were 700 shit songs to one gem. I don’t think you can force delight.

The hauntology scene is DXing on a controlled scale (I am a NERD you just lemme natter for a second) I really think it is. It’s a signal that’s _maybe_ coming from three rooms away, but who knows? Maybe it’s four hundred miles. Maybe it’s twenty years. Maybe it’s a radio show some kid in texas recorded in his basement and the people moving into the house accidentally hit play while they were clearing shit out for a rumpus room. It doesn’t always make sense, and it’s always the middle of the night, because AM transmissions travel longer distances when the sun goes down. It’s also a lot easier to hear when the world goes quiet. It also, by its very nature, has to come over on what’s otherwise a hiss channel. i think that’s why it’s spooky, when it’s done right. Because we always kinda want to hear something, but it’s always a surprise when a signal breaks through.

(There’s something to be said for the nerd DXing on the SETI project, but that’s when I start sounding lame. Lamer.) I know it’s a bit of a stretch to apply listening for voices to recorded and dj’ed music — there’s a control on one that’s not on the other — but the end result, if every time the _listener_ gets a new album or hits a show they hear something they weren’t expecting from somewhere/when that’s familiar but they can’t immediately place, hm?