Hauntology for a De-New America!

The rise of the retro-analog synth soundtrack in recent horror and science fiction films--both in and out of the mainstream--has brought us into a weird wondrous future alternate reality where perhaps, ideally, orchestral scores will stop. Maybe it's a question of age -- if you were an impressionable American child in 70s then the Carpenter carpets and Goblin pulsing, the sounds of yesterday's vision for the horror future, are now like the mystery of death and eternity tied into some deeper-than-nostalgic tugging, like a rope you're following through the Thing whiteout Arctic storm. But the rope itself is just white noise.

random painting from Night Gallery

There's so many overlapping trails you could get lost right quick without the right guide. So pay me five teen dolor and I'll take you to see Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher, and Ghost Box, all enthralled by the same thing, as I am, this moment of clarity, the Memento moment, when we finally remember that we've forgotten the present, that nostalgia and endless proliferation of media make the present impossible in the face of so much immediate, accessible past. Every moment of the present is now spent either shopping for or cueing up the next experience of the past (the next movie, book, track) or vanishing into the same through our haunted ghost shell eyes and ears. Smoke some weed and watch a movie -- the weed erases the movie as you see it so you can see it again a day later and it doesn't even seem like the same film.

When Reynolds rounds up some writers who best sum up the hauntology sound, he starts out with Matthew Ingram at The Wire ("memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics"and ends up with Dickens and then W.S. Merwin ("Tell me what you see vanishing and I / Will tell you who you are") and it all makes frickin' beautiful eloquent sense.

But mainly, I got here because I love John Carpenter and thanks to Netflix showing me The Machine and Beyond the Black Rainbow, where I was like oh wow, I love these movies but 50% of that love comes solely from their pulsing analog retro-futurist synth scores, both of which are on Spotify, and so the Moog crumb trail widens deeper into the black forest of retro-futurist analog Halloween and the analog synth score style of John Carpenter, and the 70s cryptozoological funk of Goblin lead me unto Ghost Box, Scarfolk Council, and now Simon Reynolds and Ghost of my Life author Mark Fisher, who repurposed Derrida's original (Communist-spectral) meaning towards haunted music, via childhoods spent attuned to quietly forward thinking electronics of BBC's Radiophonic Orchestra, and that decade's openness to the occult, carrying over from the 60s, a whole generation of artists who'd done LSD in the 60s now coming to the adult world and taking over the reins, and children's minds right there in sync with them, in ways we lost in the 80s, when videotape erased the mystery from media through the very act of preserving it.



For me the love affair began Boards of Canada's Music has the Right to Children in 1998 and then Zombi's Cosmos in 2003, tapping for maybe the first time into the retrofuturist analog rainy day weirdness of old 70s filmstrip tape accompaniments for elementary school primers on ESP, Argento frisson and druids. With the advent of digital everything the warm pulsing sound of analog was the first time doubly ghosted, and like a double negative became positive, or in other words, the past sounded warmer and more organic, even more futuristic, than the immediate present. That's hauntology, and I'm hooked... at least until November, when those loathsome orchestras will inevitably return right as night starts lurching way forward thanks to daylight savings, and the orchestra snakes across the stand-still city like a rope of sweaty reflective mylar-enshrouded woe.

Here's my #1 of two Spotify lists:
Heirs of Goblin Carpenter



And now here's some of the more noteworthy soundtracks and soundtrack-ish works.
DESICCATED SWIMMING AREA:

THE NICK (OST)
Cliff Martinez (2014)
Soderbergh's Cinemax series set in turn of the century surgery at the Knickerbocker Hospital would be a bore if the score was in the hands of an orchestral windbag like Howard Shore or John Williams, but Martinez realizes the power of hauntology at its fullest - not the actual past music (which was after all, trying to evoke its own past), but the retro-futurist music of remembering the past, or envisioning brutal operations under primitive instruments still screaming through the emotional machine, the amniotic pulse of analog which now seems so welcomingly inhuman in our overly human age that we cling to it like we would a churning life raft in a brutally tranquil sea.

He's not the visionary filmmaker he once was but Lost Themes lets fans of the master know he's still got the gift of making superbly creepy synth-based music. Each track on here could well be the theme song from a classic early 80s or late 70s opus like Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape from New York, and whatever autumnal sights or sounds you see or are thoughts thinking while listening to JC's masterful mix of piano, electric guitar and analog synths are suddenly fraught with a sudden Panavision ominousness.

Steve Moore's big band going for that Goblin-Carpenter vibe with an intensely percussive and bizarro rock 80s synthesizer twist, NNF calls it "electro-satanic Goblin worship."

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
Sinoa Caves (2014)
For when your floating down the street at dawn, chased in slow motion by your own shadow looming 60 feet tall and with burning coal eyes or are tripping your face off at an airport, part György Ligeti from THE SHINING and part Claudio Simonetti from TENEBRE.

YELLOW (OST)
Antoni Maiovvi (2013) 
Musik for remembering what it felt like as a 16 year-old driving home at night in the rain after seeing The Terminator at an empty theater in Woodbridge, NJ. As we learn in all the great writing on hauntology, that's what the uncanny frisson memory of the mediated grave robbers from outer space medias are for. Maiovvi's soundtrack is for a 'neo-giallo' short film set in Berlin. I'll probably never see it, but I do like the soundtrack.
BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (OST)
Broadcast (2013)

Formerly a late-to-the-trip hop female fronted kind of Stereolab-Combustible Edison hybrid, Broadcast were nothing if not classy, cocktail retro swing-ready, and a touch derivative. Turns out they were just waiting for the 70s BBC ghost documentary childhood analog synth reverie to kick in to become the sickly and glow-in-the dark poster child for the hauntology movement via this merge with amniotic Focus Group. There's presumably some real occult documentary voiceover buried somewhere in this ominous, but always playful mix of tape loops, effect, and poppy little stabs; "the bee colony" is a classic example of their rare ability to bring in vocals without breaking the mood.
In the beginning, as far as this futurist giallo nostalgia went, there was just this bass and drums duo with an intensely percussive and bizarro world synthesizer twist. They've gone on to deliver great neo-giallo work that would be perfect on any Argento or Fulci film from 1971-82.
However you got here, this is where to stay, if  you're me, perusing the Ghost Box catalog, The Belbury Poly can get too upbeat, other acts too newsreel sample crazed but Advisory Circle never waver from the straight up 70s synth analog spookiness. "The Ghost Box aesthetic has expanded beyond spooky public information films full of roll necks and bowl cuts to something involving sharper cheekbones and haircuts. Their palette seems to shift from faded film oranges and browns to black." - Wire (B. Coley 7/15) so true, Wire.

IT FOLLOWS (OST)
Disasterpiece (2014)
From the very first notes of the very first shot, you just know, things are never going to be the same old concept of old sameness again.


COLD IN JULY (OST)



  A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013)

POST SCRIPT:
And then Shout Factory debuts this the same week I'm writing this post... It's cometh. Who says America's behind the screens when it comes to hauntological excavastalgia?