Hauntology Parish Newsletter - Christmas Edition: Moon Wiring Club; Dismal 1970s - Stonecirclesampler + Travis Elborough; Sophie Sleigh-Johnson's Code Damp; William Burns's Ghost of An Idea; Mart Avi + Ajukaja

Season's greetings from "a person of gravitas and insight, who says their prayers, and is sensitive to the potential of mission as 'parish-shaped'"

Very quiet in the parish at the moment. The rotten weather isn't helping. 

On the way home after walking the dog over the fields, coming back along Icknield Way, I did spy a bit of commotion: some new arrivals in the village! An American family moving into Hazeldene, that big house on the corner of Penfold Lane. A grey-haired fellow huffing and puffing great plumes of breath into the cold air as he lugged into the house what appeared to be an endless succession of boxes crammed with vinyl records.  "Don't see many of those these days," I commented cheerily - receiving, for my pains, just a scowl.  I shall return at a less-trying time, with a copy of this newsletter and some mince pies. 

But talking of vinyl, parish stalwart Ian Hodgson has a new Moon Wiring Club long-player. 

Yes, that's right - the LP has an equine concept. 

There's also a new artwork approach - dropping the usual MWC style for watercolour painting. 

Says Ian, "I wanted to steer away from those rinsed-into-the-ground Folk Horror tropes, so gave the whole album a (very) loose Undead Dressage feeling (lots of movement)" 

Sound-wise, this is reflected in a switch from the marshy, ambient quease vibe to a brisker, starker sound that coats the beats in ample spooky space. "Funky" is not a word that generally springs to mind when you think of Moon Wiring Club - unless in its other meaning of fusty and unventilated. But listening to the crisply syncopated beats of Horses In Our Blood, I kept thinking of The Meters. 

On the Hodgson mood board for this project: The Residents's "Jambalaya", the sound design and production design of spaghetti westerns (in particular the Klaus Kinski Gothic Western And God Said to Cain  and Matalo! ) and acid westerns (like The Hired Hand).  

And there was I thinking the inspiration came from the unfortunate incident at last year's gymkhana. 

There's a whole backstory to the record. 

Another fine offering from MWC - buy it here. 

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Talking of horses....  at the Horse Hospital in London this Sunday afternoon, there will be an event called Dismal 1970s, involving parishioners Stonecirclesampler and Travis Elborough, along with telly scholar Sophie Sleigh-Johnson  and neo-pulp writer Tim Wells. It is described as "an afternoon of festive-ish words, moving pictures and performances dedicated to the decade of Smash instant potato, public information films and Evans the Arrow". More details about times and tickets here.

Stonecirclesampler  - also known as Luke J Murray, the figure behind The Iceman Junglist Kru and various other haunty entities working in mutations of nuum and drill and wotnot -  has produced a "special limited edition Dismal 1970s cassette...  a super short run only available to attendees" orderable with tickets and to be collected at the event.  

Dismal 1970s participant Sophie Sleigh-Johnson has a new book out via Repeater.

Now it was only recently, wasn't it, that I remarked upon the under-acknowledged intersection between hauntology and British comedy. 

Here's a whole book inspecting that area: "a sometimes comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on."

Here's a warm endorsement from David Tibet of Current 93 renown: "LUCIFER ON THE BUSES! Code: Damp is one of the strangest books I have read. As well as one of the most evocative, lateral, sidereal... an unspellable jewel."

More endorsements and the opportunity to purchase here

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Another addition to the racks at the local library (note the new reduced opening hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, plus Saturday 10 am to noon). Of course you may prefer to support the author by picking up a copy at Book Nook or order directly from Headpress. 

Release irrationale: 

William Burns's Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia examines the use and effect of nostalgia in the Horror and Hauntological realms. It asks why these genres hold such a fascination in popular culture, often inspiring devoted fanbases. From Candyman to The Blair Witch Project, and Dark Shadows to American Horror Story, are the folk horror and found footage phenomena significant artistic responses to political, social, and economic conditions, or simply an aesthetic rebranding of what has come before? How has nostalgia become linked to other concepts (psychogeography, residual haunting) to influence Hauntological music such as Boards of Canada or The Caretaker? What can the ‘urban wyrd’ or faux horror footage tell us about our idealized past? And how will these cultures of nostalgia shape the future?

Combining the author’s analysis with first-hand accounts of fans and creators, Ghost of an Idea offers a critical analysis of our cultural quest to recognize, resurrect, and lay to rest the ghosts of past and present, also summoning up those spectres that may haunt the future.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Seductive Liar, or Are We What We Used to Be?

Chapter 1: Today is Tomorrow’s Yesterday: The Philosophy of Nostalgia

Chapter 2: The Yearning to Return: Folk Horror and Nostalgia

Chapter 3: The Illusionary Precipice: Found Footage and Nostalgia

Chapter 4: The Longing of the Permanently Lost: Franchise Nostalgia

Chapter 5: An Ethereal Composition of Disjointed Memories: Nostalgia as Catalyst for the New

Chapter 6: The Vice of the Aged: Do They Still Got It or Living Off Past Glories?

Chapter 7: The Enemy of Truth: Is Nostalgia Counter-Revolutionary?

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And finally, Estonian exchange student Mart Avi has a new release out, a collaboration with his countryman Ajukaja, bearing the rather sombre title Death of Music.

You can hear it and buy it here.

It's really excellent. To me it has the feel of  a classic "new pop" album -  in the lineage of Lexicon of Love / Sulk / Penthouse and Pavement  - but a new pop album if it had been somehow made after the 1990s. Perhaps in 2001 - the way it folds in rhythmic ideas from hardcore continuum genres and other dance styles of the 1990s - reminds me a bit of Truesteppers, in moments at least. But the songfulness  and the soulfulness - along with the wayward perceptions and intellectual edge - come more from a Scott Walker or Billy Mackenzie sort of place. 

It's a double album too -  a meaty listen that doesn't flag on the quality front.

Release irrationale: 

Certain albums hit like howling bullets at pivotal moments, tearing open the face of music to reveal hidden sonic muscles and fusing them back into something both strangely familiar and yet entirely unrecognisable. We believe this is one of those records.”

The double album Death of Music delivers 16 crooked vocal pops, some ruthless, others unexpectedly disarming. In some songs, Ajukaja & Mart Avi function like a two-headed saurus swinging its spiky tail to shady pop-house smackers. In others, Ajukaja's serene organ licks descend into subterranean caverns, allowing Avi to float to the surface on their wavelengths and turn his voice into billions of extinct moths, enslaved by the moonlight’s pull. There are songs that face destruction and those that seek to prevent it.

One kykeon rap goes, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you don't die!”. Ajukaja & Mart Avi have embraced this notion to create new music that allows them to thrive in the algorithmic wasteland. 13 years in the making, these 66 minutes are packed with lifetimes of truths you didn’t know you needed to know. They are Ajukaja & Mart Avi – two against death.

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Season's greeting from "a person of gravitas and insight, who says their prayers, and is sensitive to the potential of mission as 'parish-shaped' "

Spectres of Mark

The first in a series of zer0 classics is published at the end of this month: a new edition of Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Matt Colquhoun aka Xenogothic supplies an excellent introduction that puts Mark's ideas in the context of the blogging scene of the 2000s and the arc of his intellectual odyssey. And I've contributed a new afterword. 

Despite the melancholy occasion - contemplating the absence of a friend and the glaring gap in the scene where his energy, insight and provocation ought to be -  it was a really enjoyable piece to write. Fun, even. As well as taking the measure of Mark's achievement and reassessing the ideas of hauntology and the retro-critique that we jointly explored, I also took the opportunity to speculate: wondering where he might have taken his thinking next.  It's a tribute to Mark that it's possible to still spark thoughts off his work in his absence.  I expect we will be doing that for a long while to come. 

File under overtaken by events: in the afterword I make a passing reference to "the endless fraudocracy of Boris Johnson". Well, that ended! (Or did it? He's still in Number 10.  And the fraudocracy will doubtless flourish on, even in his - eventual - absence. The fraud is dead, long live the fraud).  

Neon Screams on Repeater Radio this Saturday 21st August - discussion between Kit Mackintosh and me

Tune into Repeater Radio on Saturday 21st August for a dialogue between Neon Screams author Kit Mackintosh and myself - going out at 8 pm UK  / 3 pm East Coast / noon West Coast. 

Or listen to it archived on Mixcloud. 

It's followed by Kit's mix of Neon Screams music at 9 pm UK  / 4 pm East Coast / 1 pm West Coast.

The whole shebang - interview + mix - is repeated for early risers / night owls, starting Sunday 8 am UK / 3 am East Coast / midnight West Coast.

Check out an extract from Neon Screams - on Brooklyn drill - here. 

And here's an interview with Kit Mackintosh at Tribune - "The Musical Future Has Not Been Cancelled"

And here's a review at Aloysius blog. 

phuture dancehall and non-verbal strangeness

 A couple of Repeater-things of interest to the parish - 

Kit Mackintosh whets appetites for his forthcoming Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap and Bashment Made Music New Again with a proof-of-concept mix that vaults through four decades of dancehall delirium. Already aired on Repeater Radio, it's archived for your delectation here. 

Tomorrow, Thursday 18th March, 2 pm Pacific, there's the online launch for Lesley Chow's You're History: The 12 Strangest Women in Pop, a constantly surprising and thought-provoking book  tracing a non-linear lineage through mainstream pop of non-verbal bliss, irruptive sensuality, and mouth-music magic -  a counter-canon of oozy oohs and sweet nothings that takes in Chaka Khan, Janet Jackson, TLC and Tom Tom Club among others. Chow will be in dialogue with parishioner Anwen Crawford. Information about how to attend here.  

In their shared focus on phonetic phuturism and liquified language Neon Screams and You're History are curiously complementary, yet do not overlap at all. 

games people play

Here, archived, is the next installment of Kieran Press-Reynolds show CTRL.ALT. REPEAT for Repeater Radio - part 2 in a 4-part series on the history of videogame musik and how it's influenced pop / unpop - this week heading into the 21st C with Dizzee Rascal, James Ferraro, Minecraft, Undertale and more.

The first installment in the series is here, and here also is Kieran chatting with Repeater man Carl Neville about online micro-genres etc etc.

Some rave-era intersections with videogame musik

The use of PlayStation as a music production tool is another story.

"Edwardian computer-game music"

Repeater Radio launches today!

Launching today is a new venture from Repeater Books - Repeater Radio 

The first two days broadcast, Monday Jan 18 and Tuesday Jan 19, are open-access and streaming right now (6pm to 8 pm GMT).

Here's the Repeater announcement: 

"We are starting small with two hours of original programming per night streamed live on our stand-alone platform.

"In the first two weeks we will launch shows from Repeater writers. Tommy Sissons (A Small Man’s England) presents Rebel Reading List looking at the history of working class literature. Philosopher Tom Whyman (Infinitely Full of Hope), hosts a panel discussion show Time Out Of Joint. Kit Mackintosh (Neon Screams) has a series of mixes exploring the last 15 years of “future music”. Grafton Tanner on the Delusioneering at the centre of neoliberalism.

"All of this plus Michael Grasso on the music of his early-’90s adolescence in Alternatives at the End of History. We Are The Mutants on the pop and outsider culture of the Cold War era (including previews of their coming book on film for Repeater).  Daniel Evans (Desolation Radio)  looking at the petite bourgeoisie, Conscious Lyrics with Julia Digital on female representation in Drum and  Bass and Jungle, Kieran Press-Reynolds’s plunge into the deep end of the internet, Ctrl-Alt-Repeat;  Ned Ward’s weekly literature show Foul Young Mouths.

"As me move into February and beyond we will also be airing Rhian E Jones’ (Clampdown, Paint your Town Red) discussion show on everything you ever wanted to know about Wales, Mariam Rezaei on Turntablism, Grace Blakeley (Stolen) in conversation, Eli Davis (Under My Thumb) and Rhian Jones on the intersections of culture, politics and gender with Handbags and Gladrags, Caroline Diezyn on the history of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, and Jenny Anckorn on the UK art school experience.

"There will be ongoing contributions from Andy Sharp (English Heretic) Matt Colquhoun (Egress, Xenogothic) and a one-off show from Joy White (Terraformed). In addition, legendary facilitator of all things underground Jonny Mugwump (Neon Hospice, Exotic Pylon) will be curating a series of sets and shows from Rebecca Lambert (Lady Liminal), DJ Bunnyhausen & DJ Sarma, Veronica Avola, Lucy Sames, Sophie Cooper and New Noveta.

"We will also be hosting some one-off shows and online events around upcoming Repeater releases, starting in late February with The Repeater Book of the Occult and in March for Lesley Chow’s You’re History.

"It’s called Repeater Radio but will feature audio, video and live streams, film, music and mixes. We have big plans of course, and for that we need to paywall. Five pounds a month for the daily content, 10 pounds a month for the broadcast plus access to the weekly archive, with more tiers, more programming and more features to come from April.

"We will be broadcasting across time-zones to make sure everyone has access. To sign up for more information and get access to the full schedule and show description go here."

And here's Kieran Press-Reynolds's announcement about his Repeater Radio show 

CTRL ALT REPEAT

"Very thrilled to announce that I have a digital culture focused show called CTRL ALT REPEAT coming out on the brand new Repeater Radio channel! My first segment is a 4-episode series on the history of how video game soundtracks & pop music have impacted each other. Make sure to sign up and stay tuned."

Kieran makes his debut this Thursday, January 21. Times below GMT.

Kieran Press-Reynolds in conversation with Carl Neville - 20:00-21:00 Kieran Press-Reynolds | Ctrl Alt Repeat #1 - 21:00-22:00

www.repeater-radio.com  

Christmas bloggage treats

 Unexpected after-Xmas treats from blogger-authors!

Blogger-author Matthew Ingram a.k.a. Woebot reappears with an extensive, rich, attractively illustrated post about recordings that relate to the spiritual concerns of his 2020 book Retreat:  How the Counterculture Invented Wellness. Many surprising inclusions (e.g. Wire's Pink Flag as Zen Album).

Blogger-author Phil Knight returns, after a long silence, with The Interregnum Navigation Bureau, a new blog. It's a space for exploring Phil's declinist view of history and assessing the epistemic / epistemological traumas of this Age of Disintegration - "the stresses and strains that are presently distorting and corroding what was until fairly recently a broad consensus of reality" - the endeavor no doubt feeding into his current work-in-progress. (Or should that be work-in-regress?)

Neon Hospice presents...

 Halloween entertainment for the mind, ears and eyes from Repeater Books

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

                                     


In a couple of weeks, an old and very good mate is publishing a book that has been a passion project for the last several years, involving an astonishing amount of research and trips to far corners of the world. 

That mate is Matthew Ingram, a.k.a Woebot - and although he's put out a pair of compendiums of brilliant bloggage, and a tasty monograph, it would be fair to describe Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness as Matt's first book proper. Published by Repeater on July 14, the debut does not disappoint. Here is my blurb: 

“This richly researched archaeology of the counterculture places health at its core, showing how ideas of healing and therapy were inextricably bound up with the era’s spiritual longings and erotic politics. Each chapter scintillates with surprising revelations, unexpected connections and startling insights”

More info about Retreat and further endorsements can be found at the Repeater website. 

As part of the build-up to publication, Matt has broken out of blog retirement to post a long and probing essay on Woebot, not so much a preview of the book as a side-bar to it - on the relationship between music, Eastern philosophy, spiritual equilibrium, cosmic vibrations, "bliss consciousness" etc. 

Read it here while also listening to this fabulous 2-hour mix of astral sounds Matt has especially prepared for your elevation. Tracklist here. 

Lots of revelations in the mix, here's a couple of that particularly glisked my third eye: 





Not on the mix, but the tune-writer's own version:




Met Mr. Budd a year or two ago, on the streets of South Pasadena (Geeta knows everybody)


                                         

                                                                   The author holds forth...

UTOPIA NOW: Music & Utopia – Carl Neville & Simon Reynolds in conversation

Tomorrow, Wednesday June 17th, at 7pm UK / 2pm East Coast / 11 am West Coast - a YouTube live discussion between Simon Reynolds and Carl Neville on the subject of utopia and music.  Part of a series of virtual events on Utopia, to celebrate a novel of Utopian speculation -Eminent Domain, Carl's new novel for Repeater Books. Questions and comments from viewers welcomed.