Hauntology (music)

Hauntology is a music genre or a loosely defined stylistic feature that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past. It developed in the 2000s primarily among British electronic musicians, and typically draws on British cultural sources from the 1940s to the 1970s, including library music, film and TV soundtracks, psychedelia, and public information films, often through the use of sampling. The term was derived from philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of the same name. In the mid-2000s, it was adapted by theorists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. Hauntology is associated with the UK record label Ghost Box, in addition to artists such as the Caretaker, Burial, and Philip Jeck. Music genres hypnagogic pop and chillwave descended from hauntology. In music, hauntology is predominantly associated with a British electronic music trend but it can apply to any art concerned with the aesthetics of the past. The trend is often tied to notions of retrofuturism, whereby artists evoke the past by utilising the "spectral sounds of old music technology". The trend involves the sampling of older sound sources to evoke deep cultural memory. Critic Simon Reynolds stated in a 2006 article that "this strand of 'ghostified' music doesn’t quite constitute a genre, a scene, or even a network. [...] more of a flavour or atmosphere than a style with boundaries", although in a 2017 article he summarized it as a "largely British genre of eerie electronics fixated on ideas of decaying memory and lost futures". A 2009 blog post by academic Adam Harper stated that "[h]auntology is not a genre of art or music, but an aesthetic effect, a way of reading and appreciating art". Hauntological music draws on varied postwar cultural sources from the 1940s through the 1970s which lie outside the usual canon of popular music, including library music, film and television soundtracks, educational music, and the sonic experimentation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, as well as electronic and folk music sources.