Hauntology (music)

[...] more of a flavour or atmosphere than a style with boundaries",[3] 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".

[1] Other British influences include obscure musique concrète composers and Joe Meek's album I Hear a New World,[3] as well as psychedelia and public information films.

[4] Also important is the appropriation of visual iconography from this earlier period, including graphic design elements of school textbooks, public information posters, and television idents.

[4] Production often foregrounds the grain of the recording, including vinyl noise and tape hiss derived from the degraded musical or spoken word samples commonly used.

"[11] In the mid-2000s, the word began to be more widely appropriated by writers and theorists such as Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, who referred to the work of Philip Jeck, William Basinski, Burial, The Caretaker, and artists associated with the UK label Ghost Box as hauntology.

[12] In a 2006 article for The Wire, Reynolds identified Ghost Box's the Focus Group, Belbury Poly, the Advisory Circle as prominent in the trend, along with Broadcast, the Caretaker, and Mordant Music.

[19] Simon Reynolds in 2011 remarked,There are those who say that hauntology's moment has passed... that a good five or six years after the genre-not-genre coalesced, its set of reference points and sonic tropes has been worn threadbare.

[20] Liam Sprod of 3:AM Magazine stated that "[h]auntology as aesthetics is firmly rooted in the idea of nostalgia as a disruption of time," adding that "[i]nstead of mere repetition, this distance provides a sense of loss and mourning, [...] and revitalizes the potential for a utopianism for the present age".

[23]Hauntological music is stated by academic Sean Albeiz to suggest "an uncanny mixture of shared but faded cultural memories with sinister undercurrents".