I went to see Luton punk band UK Decay at a rare hometown gig at the Luton Hat Factory arts centre last Saturday (8/11/2025).  As expected a peak of their set was their 1980 song 'For my country' with its chorus 'for the honour, I don't ask why, it's my pleasure, my honour to die, for my country.'

The song riffs on Wilfred Owen's First World War poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est' which contrasts the reality of soldiers 'guttering, choking, drowning' in a gas attack with 'The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ('It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country').

The poetry of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other First World War poets had a big impact on the first punk generation. Penny Rimbaud of Crass has credited Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), which set Owen's poems to music, as a key influence on his pacifism. But I think most of us probably encountered these poems in school and/or through Brian Gardner's anthology 'Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914-1918', first published in 1964 and reissued in a 1976 paperback edition. A lot of punk anti-war sentiments were expressed through an imagery from this time, and UK Decay's song is a good example from its lyrics to its sleeve.

More Luton stuff:

Marsh House Luton - from punk to henge

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Sorry to hear of the passing today of D'Angelo. Quite a lot of obituaries focusing quite rightly on his sexy neo-soul, but some tough politics in there too. His 2010 album 'Black Messiah' is a classic of radical black liberation theology, the track '1000 deaths' including a sample from murdered Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton:

'Because the people that we're asking for peace

They′re a bunch of megalomaniac war-mongers and they don't even understand what peace means

But we′ve got to fight 'em, we've got to struggle with them

To make them understand what peace means'

Aaron Trinder's 'Free Party: a folk history'  is a documentary telling the story - or at least some of the stories - of the 1980s/90s free party scene. There is a particular focus on the crossover with the earlier free festival /traveller movement,  cross pollinated at Glastonbury and giving rise to Castlemorton in 1992 and much more besides. Interesting interviews feature with people involved at the time with sound systems including Spiral Tribe, Circus Warp, Bedlam and Nottingham's DiY. These help us to see free parties in a longer term historical context - for instance people involved with DiY had previously been involved in hunt sabbing and anarchist activism; Steve Bedlam remains active today with Refugee Community Kitchen.

A recent online fundraiser for the film, with the aim of securing a wider release, featured some additional material including a discussion between Aaron and artist Jeremy Deller. The latter mentions going to Reclaim the Streets parties and reflects on the wider politics of free parties and raves:

'that's what's dangerous when things get joined up. Which never really happened with punk, punk was burnt out so quickly, like two years - gone. Then it was just like bands with Top of the Pops. Dance music affected the whole country, it linked up  with other people, so it was massively political. The songs weren't necessarily but it was the context of what you were doing, and who you were meeting and how you got there. In a way they were more scary, they weren't protest songs but protest behaviour... it's what the state really really  fears, it's people meeting up, forming groups, then those people form bigger groups, it's something you can't really control',

Luton Henge Festival last month (29 July 2025) marked the opening of  Luton Henge, a landscaped space featuring a circle of eight chalk stones that will serve as an outdoor venue for social and cultural events. The festival included music and dance, with Laura Misch playing her saxophone in the sunset. While I was there Bird Rave were doing their thing, dancing in feathered headdresses to classic rave tunes like  'Voodoo Ray' in bird inspired moves that they call 'dancefloor ornithology'. Anyway it was great fun.

The location by Marsh House at the Leagrave end of town is significant, located as it is near to the source of the River Lea and the ancient earthwork of Waulud's Bank. It is also a place linked to Luton's subcultural history. The green barn just about still stands where Crass, Poison Girls and Luton punk band UK Decay played in 1979, and where people also put on jazz funk dances in that period (as recalled by Fahim  Qureshi, see below).

I missed Crass, but it was here around the same time that I saw my first punk gig. From 1977 to at least 1984 there was an annual late summer one day Marsh House Festival. 16 year old me cycled over in 1979 and saw UK Decay and Pneu Mania, as well as 'Stevie's band', a scratch band made up of members of both bands who did a version of YMCA. Also on the bill were local rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket, Arcadaz (jazz/funk band), and acoustic singers Clive Pig and Heinrich Steiner.

Marsh House was originally a farm house for Marsh Farm - the land on which the Marsh Farm council estate was built in the 1960s. In the 1990s, Luton free party collective Exodus started off on this estate and Glenn Jenkins and other people who had been involved in Exodus helped save Marsh House after it was boarded up and threatened with demolition in the 2000s. It now acts as a hub for various community projects, including a music studio.

For me, Marsh House was primarily a place where I went to summer holiday open access playschemes as a kid, charging around the ramshackle adventure playground (getting temporarily banned for stone throwing), bouncing on inflatables and playing softball by the river.  I now know that some of the people who ran those playschemes were part of the local radical/alternative art scene some of whom had previously been involved with Luton Arts Lab and Reflex collective and went on to found the 33 arts centre which gave me a later education in experimental film and theatre-  but that's another story.

Revoluton Arts  who put on the Henge festival and are based at Marsh House are a descendent of these multi-faceted efforts to make things happen in my home town. They have done some interviews with people involved in some of these past projects, interesting to hear Fahim Qureshi (who I remember from the anti-racist movement of that time), Glenn Jenkins and Linda 'Muddie' Farrell (who worked on playschemes and helped set up 33) talk about the River Lea and its wildlife. Guess I followed that river down to London but never stop Luton.

As for the stone circle, I used to be cynical about contemporary efforts to recreate ancient looking monuments but I have seen the Brockley stone circle on Hilly Fields near where I live now become a focus in the south london park where it dates back only to 2000. At the end of the day the combination of stone, sky and people is as real today as it ever was. Build it they will come. 

More Luton stuff:

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Brooklyn-based producer Michael Claus produces sounds at the intersection of tech house, dub techno, and glitchy rave. Previous tapes on 100% Silk mined moodier, lush dub
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Field Records continue their run of essential archival vinyl reissues with a beautifully remastered edition of Stephen Hitchell's 2009 ambient dub techno masterpiece under his Variant
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Inverted Audio Record Store has been invited by Rinse FM to take part in Counter Culture, the station's ongoing radio series spotlighting specialist record stores. The
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Friday 6 February, Paris bass collective WizZ links up with Inverted Audio for a full-spectrum night of future-facing club pressure - moving through bass weight, dub
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Swiss producer Ben Kaczor returns with 'Peace In Mind', a deep and driving four-track EP on Berlin-based label Stólar, featuring a remix from Spanish producer Tibi
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And here's an interesting take on the Cocteau Twins

Early on, Jack was one of Sounds's main writers about reggae and dancehall. Jamaican music,  as I noted here, received sustained and serious coverage by the paper, far more than you'd imagine given its reputation as an oracle for Oi! and NWBHM. You'll find many pieces by Jack in that post. 

As I also noted in an earlier post here, his pen name is possibly an alias taken from the science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron. 

Looking at the Rock Back Pages bio, I see Jack actually wrote for a while for Melody Maker, in 1998, a good while after my time there was up. This makes him one of those rare examples of the "inkie clean sweep" - someone who wrote for all three leading UK weeklies. (Another would be Vivien Goldman). 

 (Sorry - I don't count Record Mirror as "leading". Mind you, there are even-rarer examples of people who wrote for all four, I believe). 

As a counterbalance to the recent Japan-love posts, here is  Jonh Wilde both befuddled by and scornful of the veneration for David Sylvian (including his usually closely aesthetically aligned comrade Chris Roberts, whose viewpoint is incorporated into the review) 

I do find bracing these Radically Other takes on bands you love - and I've never forgotten the voice like hair lacquer line. 

 "Musicians", loosely understood, although Malcolm had broken out as a performing artist by the time he wrote this for the NME Christmas look-back on '82 / look-forward to '83.

The Stooges: Side Two

By Jonathan Richman

Fusion Magazine, Oct. 16, 1970

It happened to The Doors. They were loved in '66 for their new approach, hated in '68 for their pretensions, and are right at this minute being courted again 'cause Morrison is so funny and after all they really can play.

Meanwhile another segment of the audience had never heard of them in '66, bought all their albums from July '67 to mid '69 and now is losing interest.

Now it's The Stooges.

Among others, I've changed my opinion because they've changed some ways, and because I've changed my mind specifically about Iggy's stage show.

In mid '69 a few local critics and I thought they were a powerful band with a tough sound who made the Ten Years After crowd puke, knew what a song was and had a sense of humor. But the main thing we were interested in, and what most viewers talked about, was Iggy.

The Stooges ' "Phenomenon" = The Actions of Iggy

A pleasant change from the style of Joe Cocker, Robert Plant, and many schmucky stage performers, Iggy looked exciting on stage, could talk intelligently off stage, seemed a powerful person and one with beautiful ideas and taste. These 'old' Stooges were beautiful because they were so honest, I love their first album. It is unlike much else, exciting, really sexy and funny. "No Fun" and "Not Right" lead a list of songs which don't wear thin after lots of listening...

Terrific Ron Asheton

The main thing I liked about the first album (at first without realizing it, and the group's artistic standout both live and recorded) was guitarist Ron Asheton. I now think that most of what is good in The Stooges' sound and image is his responsibility. The reason I like their live shows better than recordings is that you can hear Ron at ear-splitting volume.

Asheton is most exciting on stage where Marshall amplifiers with volume on full, and treble, bass middle and prescence controls on approximately half (plus Vox fuzz, Vox wah-wah, a newly added Binson echorec and a red Fender Stratocaster enable him to produce stunning guitar sound.

These all contribute to Ron's near-perfect image. That guitar, used by most of the surf groups, "Buddy Holly" and others, symbolized white rock and roll. Of course it's red, symbolically a violent color often favored by kids who like to act tough. Perhaps, back in Michigan, Ron has a red & white full dress Harley Davidson cycle; maybe a black 50's Lincoln Continental or Chrysler Imperial or a 1957 Thunderbird.

You see Marshall amps look tough. So do his wide stance, sober but child-like expression, sunglasses and the Nazi symbols he attaches to his belongings. I always wonder if he plans these things.

Their second album, to keep you up to date on their artistic slide, features songs with less staying power than those of the first. These songs have little to say other that how "loose" Iggy is and how we'd all better look out. The first was also better 'cause one heard more Ron Asheton. He plays some nice savage parts ("On the Street," Loose", "1970") and one patrician pretty one ("Dirt"). Outside of his contributions I don't see anything interesting on it.

Novelty Factor

Two things about the Stooges wear thin with repetition:

1. Many of their songs.

2. Iggy's stage performance.

The latter becomes more like watching a magician from behind. Assumed spontaneity is revealed as calculation. The show became humorous, an amusing night out, until I realized the audience segment was fooled into fear by Iggy, fooled into regarding him as a daring, fearless man, sent by God to test your ego hangups. Then it started to stink, bringing us to the next section titled

The Obvious and Forgotten Devices used by Iggy or Iggy's "Charisma" Exposed and Analyzed

Since Iggy's exposure (artistically harmful, perhaps), to the Big City's bright lights and wordy critics there has been talk of Iggy's ability "to make anyone feel uptight."

He's so powerful people in the audience just can't stand up to him, we are told.

He's so charismatic, one doesn't want to, they say.

All right, now look. Charismatic or not, any stage performer has advantages about which any 11-year old bully instinctively knows, but which many rock critics, especially female, have forgotten.

First off, the things Iggy does which have caused admiration, wonderment and anger involve things like leaping into the audience, getting fresh with women, spilling drinks on people, dancing on tables, sitting on people's laps and occasionally pushing people out of chairs. We are led to believe that the "victims" in the audience are too "uptight" to do anything. Well, why shouldn't people be nervous?

When a stage performer leaves his stage, goes into the audience and singles out one person for anything, he will usually be nervous. Watch "The Tonight Show" when Carson plays "Stump the Band." It's obviously in fun, but still with all those eyes on them most people are relieved when through with the TV camera.

Throw in sexual aspects to the above and think of how tensions would obviously increase. You see, circus clowns have used this device for 100 years. They run through the crowd with custard pie and water pail in hand and stare out customers (except, having some good taste and some sense, only briefly) letting the customer toy with the idea that maybe the clown will do him in and letting him go just a bit edgy. Why then were these clowns not called charismatic geniuses? artists? stars? Because Iggy does this kind of thing but plays to the audience's biggest collective weakness, its sexual identity.

He's out to show how loose he is and how uptight you are and I don't think it's charming. I think it's bush league and sucks. Some people wonder why Iggy hasn't been attacked. How miraculous, they say Iggy is fearless we are told.

Be serious, out there! Who wants to hit a stage performer? In spite of Iggy's tactics there are people who have senses of humor. Well, this is part of the act, good luck to him say the better adjusted. By the third time I saw them I no longer saw humor nor did I see Iggy as a performer. I saw him as a man using little judgement or taste and tensely awaited a confrontation that didn't happen.

"Shit, one of these days some guy's gonna haul off and...."

I've heard that a few times. If that does happen it will be because someone has decided that Iggy Stooge has overstepped his bounds as a performer and is acting in such a manner as to offer us not entertainment but a severe imposition.

Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the parish hall party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.

The anniversary celebration came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but clean forgot about my other favorite record label of the 21st Century, Ghost Box.   The two imprints seemed linked in my mind as heroic projects - both in their different ways manifestations of archive fever, the disinterment of buried futures.... and sources of immense ongoing pleasure for this listener.   

My feelings about Ghost Box are expressed best in this thing I wrote for the 10th Anniversary in 2015. 

Twenty years - goodness me, how time has flown by! Two whole decades since me and the late Reverend Fisher started rambling on about hauntology (although of course the entity had been taking nebulous form for a goodly while before its christening).  

Chiltern Radio's Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick kindly invited me to chat with them about the anniversary for their show Cujo (short for The Culture Journalist) . You can eavesdrop on the witterings over here.   

Further musings on this merry-melancholy subject at the end of this newsletter, but first some new news - activity in the parish. 

A bursting hamper of Moon Wiring Club music - the double-CD / double-LP  Gruesome Shrewd and a cassette, Grisly Exaggerated - across which Ian Hodgson develops a new sound, at once recognisably MWC and a defamiliarizing extension. Avail yourself of the "Grisly Bundle" at his online shoppe and get a taster with this film below.

Trying to capture its qualities for myself, a couple of phrases sprung to mind...."Time becomes a quicksand" is one, and the other  is "stretchy". As it happens, Ian himself uses the phrase "endless elongation" in the release-rationale below. 

These tracks reminds me of the process by which Brighton or Blackpool rock is made: a thick slab of taffy gets extruded out to enormous length, in the process thinning out while still retaining its internal patterning.  It's the vocal element, more pronounced and grotesquely deformed than ever, that forms the "lettering" inside the stick of rock that is each sprawling track on Gruesome and Grisly.  

As it turns out, the idea of tooth-enamel-eroding souvenir treats bought at the seaside is a suitable  thought given that the albums are loosely inspired by coach tours and the sensation of temporal suspension experienced while on holiday. Take it away, Ian: 

"One of the main aesthetic influences was what I describe as 'Coach World' ~ that feeling on a holiday (or long journey) that you've got to spend 18 hours on a coach. At first you think 'I'm going to snap' but then after 3 hours you get into a different rhythm and before long (after 8 hours) you kind of can't remember what life was like before you started the journey ~ hence entering Coach World. What I wanted was music that has something of that endless elongation vibe. Initially daunting, then meditative, then you don't want to leave and have to listen again.... 

Another aesthetic influence was the idea of Holiday Memory ~  a fleeting moment of a holiday situation (going around an art gallery for example), where you can remember with clarity (or what your brain thinks is clarity) a specific moment (the angle of the walls, how the lighting looked, spotlights on glass, colours maybe scents or what you were feeling) forever hightened in your mind in a specific way (because you are on holiday) but you have little or no memory of what preceded / succeeded that moment. So you end up with a loop of thought, or a series of loops as a memory of a holiday from 20, 30, 40+ years ago. Over time they might not all even be from the same holiday.... This concept was something that kept popping into my mind as I assembled the music, sort of 'bursts of heightened memory looping'. 

"Sonic Procedure wise, I was getting bored of limited melodic chord changes and wanted something that had a bit of distance from what my standard compositional impulses were. Essentially the majority of the music is comprised of micro-samples (like a snap blast of fuzzy background music on a VHS tape documentary c1982) that are then cleaned up a bit and subjected to endless processes (re-sampling is apparently the key word here). After doing this for several months I had a substantial wonky library of component tune elements that were then deployed in the guiding service of the Gruesome Shrewd package holiday aesthetic. 

What I found was that generally the tracks fell into 3 styles ~ 

a) Sludgy Psyche Rock 

b) 80s Corporate Corroded 

c) Ambient Slurry (naturally there was also a judicious application of disembodied voices). 

I suppose you could say this sort of sound world is Chopped + Screwed (which does sound a little like Gruesome Shrewd) but whereas (in my non-expert knowledge) C&S tends to have that nice thick syrupy sound + big bass + distortion, I'd say there's something different going on with GS/GE even though some of the production techniques would be fairly similar. It's sort of elongated chewing toffee bar mids rather than cough syrup mixture lows. 

Compositionally I wanted something that sounded different to the more DAW / Electronica aspects of some MWC stuff ~ 'here are the beats / here goes the bass / that melody works as a chorus / tighten up that bit / move the last bit to the beginning as it has a better hook' etc. When putting these tracks together, quite often I went against my instincts and instead of tightening things up, deliberately left things more loose and allowed elements to play out / loop for longer... 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Coaches - specifically the rippled patterns of rain streaking down the windows of a coach in motion - is one of the mental images that often comes to mind when listening to the music of Lo Five. Another is the foreshortening effect on your visual range caused by light drizzle, a muffling of distance. Something about the grey-scale shimmer summons those mundane-mystical moments where boredom and bliss are so very close indeed.

There is a new Lo Five record -  Superdank, released on Lunar Module, a CD-oriented imprint of Castles in Space - and it pulls me into its paradoxically inertial motion as irresistibly as ever. Slipping Time's moorings again....

Release rationale: 

Lo Five is as proud as he is anxious to present SUPERDANK, a CD album packed to the green gills with heavy dubs for sleepy schlubs.

SUPERDANK is ostensibly presented as a collection of hardware stoner jams, structured in the form of an hour long edible-induced psycho-narrative, taking the listener on an aural voyage - kicking off at pleasant buzztown, calling past existential paranoiaville, then landing back in the relative safety of sofaborough in time for tea and crumpets.

But what is SUPERDANK? What does it mean?

If we were were inclined to illustrate the vibe, we'd say it's along the lines of:

• Forgetting you had an A-level exam because you were busy making the world's largest hash brown

• Having a panic attack in the shower because you couldn't gauge how hot the water was

• Claiming to have invented the story to The Matrix before watching The Matrix

• Using the pages of a bible for cigarette paper after running out of Rizlas

Is SUPERDANK a flimsy concept designed to package a bunch of disparate tracks we weren't sure wether to release or not? Or is it more of a subconscious collective fugue state, woven into the very fabric of our confused mental substrate? Maybe it's both? Who cares?

In either case draw the blinds, turn off your mobile and settle in for a trip you'll potentially regret forever, because it's time... for SUPERDANK...

Lunar Module is thrilled to present the latest album from Wirral based sonic alchemist Neil Grant, better known as Lo Five - a record that feels like it was beamed in from a parallel dimension where melody and madness hold hands.

In an era dominated by algorithmic predictability, Lo Five remains that rarest of artists: a producer whose music is unashamedly strange yet somehow impossibly tuneful. It's the sound of a Commodore 64 dreaming it's a jazz orchestra, or a broken music box trying to remember a rave from 1993 - familiar enough to hum along, alien enough to make the hairs on your neck stand up in delighted confusion.

Beyond the speakers, Neil Grant is a quietly heroic figure in the UK electronic underground. The time he pours into supporting fellow artists - organising events, mentoring newcomers, championing overlooked talent - make him as vital a community builder as he is an innovator in the studio.

This new Lo Five album is more than a collection of tracks; it's a reminder that electronic music can still surprise, unsettle, and seduce in equal measure. It's strange. It's tuneful. It's essential. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

American exchange student Daniel Lopatin has a fab new album out, Tranquilizer. 

Over at Line Noise, though, Ben Cardew invokes conceptronica in trying to explain why's he not feeling this new Oneohtrix Point Never record. 

Although tickled by this idea that I danced myself right out the womb,  I have to do whatever the opposite of co-sign is here: partly because I don't generally find Dan's conceptual apparatus to be overbearing, it works more as a bonus supplement for the listener, but also because I loved Tranquilizer on first listen, as a simple flood of aural pleasure, no cerebration required. (I also don't think Oneohtrix has ever really been in the business of making people dance, so it seems an odd expectation).   The conceptual aspect seem to work primarily as a germinal spur for the artist. In this case, the procedure  involves sample CDs from the 1990s as a source that is then put through a series of processes - sounds connotative of luxury, relaxation, high-quality, are then tesselated in ways that are weirder and more abstract than their original intended function, but retain the aura of polish and professionalism

There seems to be a spectrum of ways artists in this approximate area operate. Some have a defined framing concept from the start (The Caretaker, or Debit), others work with a procedure or an idea of what the starter material is going to be (restriction, or focus, as the mother of invention). Some (Ghost Box for example) have a mood board, a constellation of musical and non-musical reference points and coordinates that give the project its consistency without overdetermining it. And then others still grope about in the formless dark, molding and grappling without any premeditated notion of where they are going, following intuition and instinct until a direction or shape emerges (I imagine this is how Autechre go about it). In the end, it doesn't really matter - the outcome is all that counts. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Up at the Insitute, there's been a flurry of archival activity.

Notably Jean-Michel Jarre's very vaporwave looking if not sounding experimental electronic album of 1972, Deserted Palace

And also collations of work by Bernie Parmegiani and by ex-wife Jean Schwarz 

The Bernie collection includes his marvelous music for this marvelous animation by Piotr Kamler, which almost singlehandedly propelled me into the (once fevered, now somewhat dormant) obsession with experimental animation as fitfully still expressed at the blog Dreams, Built By Hand and its attendant ever-growing playlist, which would take at least a week to watch through. You'll notice that "L'araignéléphant" - it translates as "The Spider Elephant" - is the first film at the top of that playlist. 

Another archival release of recent years, now itself reissued in spiffed up form, comes from our Irish affiliates the Miúin label:   Kilkenny Electroacoustic Lab Volume 1 now comes with a book and a poster. 

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The half-lives of hauntology continue - word reaches me of this book, out on Reaktion next summer. 

By my count, this is the fourth substantial book on the H-zone (not counting the A Year in the Country ever-growing seriess of volume, or the 'pastoral horror'  microgenre or  'scarred by 70s kids tell'-sploitation subset).

I suppose the first would be our dear lost boy's Ghosts of My Life. 

I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. 

The whole Spike issue is themed around nostalgia and related subjects and well worth a peruse.

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I suppose it's nice to have done a book that enjoys a half-life or two... it is surprising how often I still get asked to comment on these sort of themes: retro-paralysis, cultural stagnation, hauntology... 

I don't mind, but in truth my mind has moved on to other preoccupations... mainly the ideas surrounding the new book, due out in June next year. 

Which as it happens has a completely different perspective on "the rhetorics of temporality"  than Retromania. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Keeping the retrochat going have been other writers with books that either extend the polemic or refute it.... 

In the first camp, there's W. David Marx with Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, for which I gave this blurb: 

"The first quarter of the 21st Century had a paradoxical feeling - so much happened and yet nothing happened at all. A triumph of forensic research and pattern recognition, Blank Space cuts through the bustle and the babble, makes a senseless time make sense. W. David Marx diagnoses the malaise and even proposes a course of treatment. This is a book that's fun to agree with and even more fun to argue with." 

Here is a fairly positive response to Marx's argument from Celine Nguyen at Asterisk and a far less friendly take from Emily Watlington at Artnews. Here's an extract at The Atlantic.

(The one thing I didn't get with Marx's book is why he titled it Blank Space, which to me seems like either a positive image - possibility, an open frontier - or a neutral one. As a trope of barrenness in re.  the first 25 years of the 21stC it doesn't quite compute for me).  

As regards the counter-argument, the Full Space perspective -  "these be years of plenty, innovations up the wazoo, you just need to  gouge loose the wax clogging up your ears, O geriatics" - there's the fairly recent book Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age by Liam Inscoe-Jones. 

Here is a wide-ranging discussion Inscoe-Jones had with Chal Ravens at Tribune a few months ago, and which has suddenly jumped out from behind the paywall. It's title is Has Pop Finally Eaten Itself?  (Variations on that trope certainly have eaten themselves by this point!)

The piece's url, I note wryly, includes the words "after-retromania". 

Would that we were! In both senses of the word -  the discourse, and the underlying phenomenon itself.

Clearly there's enough evidence - currently, but probably at most moments in the history of pop culture, apart from very obvious surge phases like mid-Sixties or punk/New Wave -  that could be marshalled to sustain either argument.  

There's always a ton of lame stuff around - revival, retread, remake, etc.

Equally, you can always point to people doing cool things in music - even during the years when I was writing Retromania, I never had any trouble coming up with a substantial end-of-year list of music I liked and thought was doing interesting things.  Inventive, if not quite innovative. 

The problem is more on the level of: what is the most that you can imagine happening with this cool / clever / inventive / conceivably even innovative  music? Is it going to break out all across the surfaces of everyday life? Shake things up? 

I would say "is it going to change the sound of the radio?" (thinking of Timbaland, or New Wave, or psychedelia - the instantiation of a new sonic template on a culture-wide basis). 

But radio isn't a thing anymore. Who listens to the radio?  

That is the big structural problem, which Ravens and Inscoe-Jones touch on in their dialogue. Monoculture still exists, but its mechanisms now - TikTok etc - agitate against anything lasting or substantial. 

In terms of "change the sound of the radio" - the last time that happened as far as I can tell is the Auto-Tune trap moment. (Which is the last moment I personally listened to the radio regularly). (And which was also my kind of "psychedelic rap" as opposed to the stuff Inscoe-Jones reps for - Danny Brown etc). 

But then again.... doesn't it all seem so trivial, as something to be concerned about, next to what's happening in this country, and in too many other places around the world - including the UK? Political retromania is the true nightmare.

Bevis Frond addresses the Anxiety of Influence in song -  appropriately using the most Oedipus Complex-obsessed, Norman O.Brown-stanning man in rock, Jim Morrison, although it's a different Jim who forever shadows his (re)creative efforts. 

"I took an album from the ancient unit

And I walked on down the hall

"Jimi, I want to kill you"

He stood before me in a vision

With treasured secrets of the blues

A voice rang out from battered speakers

 "You are not fit to shine my shoes".

Jeff Lynne, virtually a Bloomian archetype of the "weak rocker", here on "Beatles Forever" fesses up to his unrecoupable artistic debts. But  then chickened out and didn't release the track.  

Key couplet: 

I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care

I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs

Full lyric: 

Beatles forever

Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da

There's something about a Beatles song, that lives forevermore

The beauty of the harmonies, the sound of the Fab Four

All their music will live on and on (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)

They really taught the world to sing (She came in through the bathroom window)

Beatles forever, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"

Beatles forever, "All You Need Is Love", yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," wooh

Beatles forever, "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" (number nine)

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care

I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs

Makes you wonder how they did it (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)

I wish I knew the secret, yeah yeah yeah (She came in through the bathroom window)

Beatles forever, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and ever

Beatles forever, "Nowhere Man" and "Penny Lane", yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"

Beatles forever, "Get Back" and "Yesterday"

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

All the children sing

Beatles forever, "Please Please Me", "Eleanor Rigby"

Beatles forever, "I Am The Walrus" (yeah yeah yeah) goo-goo g'joob

Beatles forever, "She Loves You", ooh, "Day Tripper"

Beatles forever, "Eight Days A Week", "Magical Mystery Tour"

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

Ah ah-ah-ah-ah, ah-ah ah-ah, ah-ah-all-ah

Ah, feel the beat, ah-ah-ah-ah, gotta move your feet ah-ah ah-ah

Rhythm and blues, ah-ah-ah-ah, pretty tune

Ah, rock and roll, ah-ah-ah-ah, eternity, ah-ah ah-ah

Started out, ah-ah ah-ah, as Merseybeat

Beatles forever

Beatles forever, yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!  

This  BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance. 

Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score. 

And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.

As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West). 

There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962. 

The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the  mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.

I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.

There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness. 

One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:

"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "  

Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"

Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800

The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.

"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors... 

And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters. 

In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility.  Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today

"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled. 

Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes

   These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. 

an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798

I wonder if Wordsworth would have approved of this tribute? 

Busy bee

Buzzing all day long

What's the hurry?

There's surely something wrong

I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright

'Cause your friends are picking flowers

Take away all my light

But you see busy bee

It's all for love

People pick them

You lick them all for love

Lalalalala...

She was a virgin, of humble origin

She knew of no sin

Her eyes as bright as the stars without light

Spent all the night

 Someone asked me what I meant by this term….

"Hyperstasis" is a concept I came up with after listening to a bunch of new electronic dance albums that had been hyped by music journalists, and having this mixed response: being quite impressed by the intelligence and diversity of the music, while ultimately being dissatisfied because nothing on the record ever really felt to me like it was "totally new" or "the future". (Which is the sensation I got all the time from electronic dance music in the Nineties, that the music was hurtling into the future and mutating wildly into all kinds of unprecedented forms). Often I concluded that the artists had managed to avoid being indebted to a single source by being diversely derivative.

Hyperstasis is a paradox, similar to the idea of "running on the spot", or the hamster who cycles endlessly and frenetically on his wheel. The "hyper" element is the way that the music, across the whole of an album but sometimes also within any given track, shuttles back and forth across a kind of grid-space of influences and sources. It is recombinant without ever quite innovating. It moves at a great speed and with great fluency within terra cognita, the sonic territory of the already known. But it never quite manages to push into the unknown and take the listener "out there".

Hyperstasis is a condition that afflicts individual artists and pieces of music. But it is also a condition that can trap an entire genre or field of music. It is not such a terrible state of affairs: good records still come out, often a lot of them. Hyperstasis is not a state of entropy and inertia so much as a febrile stage that follows a period of earlier creativity, which generated a lot of material to be reworked and recombined.  But the suspicion is that the frenzy of hyperstasis is what precedes a final collapse.

^^^^^^^

Although I have no recollection of taking it from somewhere or even seeing it before I started using it circa 2009-10… it seemed like a word that would have to have been invented for some other purpose. I did look it up once and seem to recall it had some very specific meaning in physics or maybe finance. 

It feels to me to have some vague kinship with stagflation, but there isn't a direct correlation or analogy - more that both words describe something oxymoronic, "shouldn't be happening", worst of both worlds syndrome.

~

Historians of retro concur that the first time "retro" was used in its current way was in France in the early '70s, with the phrase mode rétro - the retro style - to describe a spate of historical films about France during World War 2, which then sparked a 1940s fashion revival.

Here is an interview with Michel Foucault from July 1974 in which he caustically castigates the trend. It's from Cahiers du Cinema and it's titled ANTI-RETRO'  and Foucault's interlocutors are Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana. Translated by Annwyl Williams.  Disappointingly the word "retro" never passes the lips of MF himself. In truth, the discussion is not really about retro as we would understand the term - depthless and dehistoricized duplication of the past -  but about historical revisionism and popular memory.

CAHIERS: Let's take as our starting point the journalistic phenomenon of the 'retro style', One might simply ask: How is it that films like Lacomhe Lucien or The Night Porter are possible today? Why are they so immensely popular? We think there are three levels that ought to be taken into account. First, the political conjuncture. Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new type of relation to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is being created, one that indicates very clearly - and in a way that is plain to everyone - the death of Gaullism. We therefore have to see, in so far as Gaullism remains very closely associated with the period of the Resistance, how this manifests itself in the films that are being made. Second, how can bourgeois ideology be mounting an attack in the breaches of orthodox Marxism - call it rigid, economistic, mechanistic , whatever you like - which for a very long time has provided the only grid for interpreting social phenomena? Finally, where do militants fit into all this, since militants are consumers and sometimes producers of films?

What has happened since Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity is that the floodgates have opened. Something which until then had been completely suppressed, that is to say banned, is being openly voiced. Why?

​FOUCAULT: That can be explained, I think, by the fact that the history of the War and what happened before and after the War has never really been inscribed in anything other than wholly official histories. These official histories are basically centred on Gaullism which, on the one hand, Was the only way of writing that history in terms of an honourable nationalism and, on the other hand, was the only way of casting the Great Man, the man of the right and of outdated nineteenth-century nationalisms, in a historical role. 

It boils down to the fact that France was exonerated by de Gaulle, and on the other hand the right - and we all know how it behaved at the time of the War - found itself purified and sanctified by de Gaulle. Suddenly the right and France were reconciled in this way of making history: don't forget that nationalism was the climate in which nineteenth-century history (and especially its teaching) were born. 

What has never been described is what happened in the very depths of the country from 1936 on, and even from the end of the First World War to the Liberation. 

CAHIERS: So, what has perhaps been happening since The Sorrow and the Pity is that the truth is making its return into history. The question is whether it's really the truth. 

FOUCAULT: That has to be linked to the fact that the end of Gaullism has put a stop to this justification of the right by de Gaulle and the episode in question. The old Petainist right, the old collaborationist, Maurrasian and reactionary right which camouflaged itself as best it could behind de Gaulle, now considers itself entitled to produce a new version of its own history. This old right which, since Tardieu, had been disenfranchised historically and politically, is coming to the fore again.

It supported Giscard explicitly. It no longer needs to wear a mask, and so it can write its own history. And among the factors that explain Giscard's current acceptance by half the French (plus two hundred thousand), one mustn't forget films like those we're talking about - whatever the film-makers actually intended. The fact that all that has actually been shown has allowed the right to re-form along certain lines. In the same way that, inversely, it's the blurring of the distinctions between the nationalist right and the collaborationist right that has made these films possible. It's all part of the same thing. 

CAHIERS; This piece of history is therefore being rewritten both in the cinema and on television, with debates like those on Dossiers de I'ecran (which chose the theme of the French under the Occupation twice in two months). Film-makers considered to be more or less on the left are also apparently involved in this rewriting of history. That's something we have to investigate.

FOUCAULT: I don't think things are that simple. What I was saying a moment ago was very schematic. Let me continue.

There's a real battle going on. And what's at stake is what might be roughly called popular memory. It's absolutely true that ordinary people, I mean those who don't have the right to writing, the right to make books themselves, to compose their own history, these people nevertheless have a way of registering history, of remembering it, living it and using it. This popular history was, up to a point, more alive and even more clearly formulated in the nineteenth century when you had, for example, a whole tradition of struggles relived orally or in texts, songs, etc. 

But the fact is that a whole series of apparatuses has been established ('popular literature', cheap books, but also what is taught in school) to block this development of popular memory, and you could say that the project has been, relatively speaking, very successful. The historical knowledge that the working class has about itself is becoming less all the time. When you think, for example, about what the workers knew about their own history at the end of the nineteenth century, and what the tradition of trade unionism - using the term 'tradition' in its full sense - represented up until the First World War, it amounted to something pretty substantial. That has been gradually disappearing. It's disappearing all the time, although it hasn't actually been lost. 

Nowadays, cheap books are no longer enough. There are much more efficient channels in the form of television and cinema. And I think the whole effort has tended towards a recoding of popular memory which exists but has no way of formally expressing itself. People are shown not what they have been but what they must remember they have been. 

Since memory is an important factor in struggle (indeed, it's within a kind of conscious dynamic of history that struggles develop), if you hold people's memory, you hold their dynamism. And you also hold their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. You make sure that they no longer know what the Resistance was actually about ... 

It's along some such lines, I think, that these films have to be understood. What they're saying, roughly, is that there has been no popular struggle in the twentieth century. This statement has been formulated twice, in two different ways. The first time immediately after the War , when the message was a simple one: 'The twentieth century, what a century of heroes! Churchill, de Gaulle, all those parachute landings, airborne missions, etc.' Which was a way of saying: 'There was no popular struggle, that was the true struggle: But no one, as yet, has said directly: 'There Was no popular struggle.' 

The other, more recent way - sceptical or cynical, as you wish - consists in opting for statement pure and simple: 'Well, just look at what happened. Did you see any struggles? Can you see anyone rebelling, taking up arms?' 

CAHIERS: There's a kind of rumour that's been going round since, perhaps, The Sarrow and the Pity. Namely: the people of France, in the main, didn't resist, they even accepted collaboration, they accepted the Germans, they swallowed the lot. The question is what that really means. And it does indeed seem that what is at stake is the popular struggle, or rather people's memory of it.

FOUCAULT: Exactly. That memory has to be seized, governed, controlled, told what to remember. And when you see these films, you learn what to remember: 'Don't believe everything you were once told. There are no heroes. And if there are no heroes, that's because there's no Struggle.' Hence a kind of ambiguity: on the one hand, 'there are no heroes' positively debunks a whole mythology of the war hero in the Burt Lancaster mould. It's a way of saying: 'War isn't that at al1!' Hence an initial impression that historical untruths are being stripped away: finally we're going to be told why we don't all have to identify with de Gaulle or the members of the Normandy-Niemen mission, etc. But hidden beneath the phrase 'There were no heroes' is another phrase which is the real message-'There was no struggle': That's how the process works. 

CAHIERS: There's something else that explains why these films are successful. They make use of the resentment felt by those who did indeed struggle against those who did not. For example, in The Sorrow and the Pity people active in the Resistance see the citizens of a town in central France doing nothing, and recognize this response for what it is. It's their resentment that comes across more than anything; they forget that they struggled. 

FOUCAULT: What's politically important, to my mind, more than this or that film, is the the fact that there's a series - the network that's made up of all these films and the place they 'occupy' (no pun intended). In other words, what is important is the question: 'Is it possible, at the present time, to make a film that's positive about the struggles of the Resistance?' And of course you realize that it isn't. The impression you have is that people would find it a bit of a joke, or else, quite simply, that no one would go and see it.

​I quite like The Sorrow and the Pity. I don't think it was a bad thing to have done. Perhaps I'm wrong, that's not what matters. What matters is that this series of films corresponds exactly to the fact that it is now impossible - as each of the films emphasizes - to make a film about the positive struggles that may have taken place in France around the time of the War and the Resistance. 

CAHIERS: Yes. It's the first thing they say if you criticize a film like Malle's. 'What would you have done instead?' is always the reply. And of course we don't have an answer. The left should be beginning to have a point of view on this, but in fact it has yet to be properly worked out.

Then again, this raises the old problem of how to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero. 

FOUCAULT. The difficulties don't revolve around the hero so much as around the question of struggle. Can you make a film depicting a struggle without making the characters into heroes in the traditional sense? It's an old problem: how did history come to speak as it does and to recuperate the past, if not via a procedure which was that of the epic, that's to say, by telling its own story in the heroic mode? That's how the history of the French Revolution was written. The cinema proceeded in the same way. The strategy can always be ironically reversed: 'No, look, there are no heroes, we're all worthless, etc.'

CAHIERS: Let's come back to the 'retro style'. The bourgeoisie has been relatively successful from its own point of view in focusing attention on a historical period (the 1940s) which highlights both its strong and its weak points. For on the one hand that's where the bourgeoisie is most easily unmasked (it laid the ground for Nazism and collaboration), and on the other hand that's where today it tries to justify, in the most cynical way possible, its historical attitude. The problem is: how can we produce a positive account of this same historical period? We - that is, the generation that took part in the struggles of 1968 or Lip. Is this the point on which we should go in and fight, with the idea of possibly, in some way or another, taking the ideological lead? For it's true that the bourgeoisie is on the offensive as well as on the defensive on this question of its recenc history. On the defensive strategically, on the offensive tactically since it has found its strong point, the thing that enables it best co manipulate the facts. But ought we simply - defensively - co be re-establishing the historical truth? Ought we not to be finding the point which, ideologically, would take us into the breach? Is this automatically the Resistance? Why not 1789 or 1968? 

FOUCAULT: As far as these films are concerned, I wonder whether something else couldn't be done on the same topic. And by 'topic' I don't mean showing struggles or showing that there were none. What I'm thinking is that its historically true that among ordinary French people there was, at the time of the War, a kind of refusal of war. Now where did that come from? From a whole series of episodes that no one talks about, neither the right because it wishes to hide them, nor the left because it does not want to compromise itself with anything that goes against 'national honour'. 

During the First World War, after all, some seven or eight million lads were conscripted. For four years they had a terrible life, they saw millions and millions of people dying around them. Back home in 1920, what did they have to look forward co? A right-wing government, total economic exploitation and finally, in 1932, an economic crisis and unemployment. How could these men, who had been packed into the trenches, still be in favour of war during the decades 1920-30 and 1930-40? In the case of the Germans, defeat rekindled their nationalist instincts, so that this distaste for war was overcome by the desire for revenge. But when all is said and done, people don't like fighting bourgeois wars, with the officers involved, for the gains involved. I believe that was an important phenom_ enon in the working class. And when, in 1940, you have men driving their bikes into a ditch and saying, 'I'm going home', you can't just say, 'What a bunch of cowards' and you can't hide it either. It has co be seen as part of the whole sequence. This disobeying of national orders has to be traced back to its roots. And what happened during the Resistance is the opposite of what we are shown: that's to say that the process of repoliticization, remobilization, the taste for struggle was gradually revived in the working class. It slowly began to revive after the rise of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War. What the films show is the reverse process: after the great dream of 1939, which was shattered in 1940, people just give up. This process did indeed take place, but within another much longer process which was moving in the opposite direction and which, beginning with the distaste for war, ended in the middle of the Occupation with the realization that there had to be a struggle. As for the theme 'There are no heroes, everyone's a coward', you have to ask yourself where it comes from and what it grows out of. After all, have there ever been any films about mutiny? 

CAHlERS: Yes. There was Kubrick's film (Paths of Glory), which was banned in France.

FOUCAULT: I believe that this disobedience in the context of national armed struggles had a positive political meaning. The historical theme of Lacombe Lucien's family could be picked up again if taken back to Ypres and Douaumont ...

CAHIERS: Which poses the problem of popular memory, of its own particular sense of time, which doesn't correspond at all to the timing of events like changes of government or declarations of war ... 

​FOUCAULT: The aim of school history has always been to show how people got killed and how very heroic they were. Look what they did to Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars ... 

​CAHIERS: A certain number of films , Malle's and Cavani's included, tend to abandon any attempt to deal with Nazism and fascism historically or in terms of the struggle they provoked. Instead of this, or as well as this, they hold another discourse, usually a sexual one. What do you make of this other discourse? 

FOUCAULT: But isn't it quite different in Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter? Personally, I think that in Lacombe Lucien the erotic, passionate aspect has a function that's fairly easy to pinpoint. It's basically a way of reconciling the anti-hero, of saying that he's not as anti-heroic as all that. If all power relationships are indeed distorted by him, and if he renders them ineffective, by contrast, just when you think that for him all erotic relationships are similarly warped, a true relationship is discovered and he loves the girl. On the one hand there is the machinery of power which leads Lucien more and more, from the puncture onwards, towards a kind of madness. And on the other hand there is the machinery of love which seems to be following the same pattern, which seems to be distorted and which, on the contrary, works in the opposite direction and re-establishes Lucien at the end as the beautiful naked boy living in the fields with a girl. 

And so there's a kind of fairly facile antithesis between power and love. Whereas in The Night Porter the problem is - in general as in the present conjuncture - a very important one: it's that of the love of power. 

Power has an erotic charge. And this brings us to a historical problem: how is it that Nazism, whose representatives were pitiful, pathetic, puritanical figures, Victorian spinsters with (at best) secret vices, how is it that it can have become, nowadays and everywhere, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature the world over, the absolute reference of eroticism? A whole sleazy erotic imaginary is now placed under the sign of Nazism. Which basically poses a serious problem: how can power be desirable? No one finds power desirable any more. This kind of affective, erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, the power of a ruler, no longer exists. The monarchy and its rituals were made to evoke this kind of erotic relation to power. The great apparatuses of ​Stalin, and even of Hider, were also created for that purpose. But this has all disintegrated and it's clear that one cannot love Brezhnev or Pompidou or Nixon. It was perhaps possible, at a pinch, to love de Gaulle or Kennedy or Churchill. But what's happening now? Are we not seeing the beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, developed at one derisory, pathetic extreme by the sex shops with Nazi emblems that you find in the United States, and (in a much more tolerable but equally derisory version) in Giscard d'Estaing's attitude when he says, 'We'll march along the streets in suits shaking people's hands, and the kids will have a half-day holiday.' There's no doubt that Giscard fought part of his electoral campaign not just on his physical presence but also on a certain eroticization of his personal self, his elegance. 

CAHIERS: That's how he projected himself in an election poster, the one where his daughter is facing him. 

FOUCAUlT: That's right. He is looking at France but she is looking at him. Power becomes seductive once again.

CAHIERS: That's something that struck us during the election campaign, especially in the big television debate between Mitterrand and Giscard; they were on quite different territory. Mitterrand seemed like a politician of the old school, belonging to an old-fashioned left. He was trying to sell ideas, themselves dated and slightly quaint, and he did so with great dignity. Giscard on the other hand was selling the idea of power as if he were marketing a cheese. 

FOUCAULT: Even quite recently, you had to apologize for being in power. Power had to be erased and not show itself as such. That was, up to a point, how democratic republics functioned: the problem was to render power sufficiently insidious and invisible so that it became impossible to get a hold on what it did or where it was.

Nowadays (and in this de Gaulle played a very important role), power is no longer hidden, it is proud to be there and actually says: 'Love me , because I am power.'

​CAHIERS: Perhaps we should speak about the fact that Marxist discourse, as it has been functioning for some time, is somehow unable satisfactorily to account for fascism. Historically speaking, Marxism has accounted for the Nazi phenomenon in an economistic, determinist way, completely ignor ing what was specific to the ideology of Nazism. You can't help wondering how someone like Malle, well enough in touch with developments on the left, can play on this weakness, fall into this gap. 

FOUCAULT: Marxism defined nazism and fascism as 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary fraction of the bourgeoisie'. This is a definition completely lacking in content, and one which lacks a whole series of articulations. What is missing in particular is the fact that Nazism and fascism were made possible only by the existence within the general population of a relatively large fraction willing to take on and be responsible  for a certain number of state functions: repression, control, law and order. That, I think, is an important aspect of Nazism. The fact that it penetrated the general population so deeply and that some power was effectively delegated to certain people on the margins. That's where the word 'dictatorship' is both generally true and relatively false. When you think of the power an individual could possess under a Nazi regime from the moment he joined the SS or became a Party member! He could actually kill his neighbour, appropriate his wife and his house! That's where Lacombe Lucien is interesting, because it shows that side well. The fact is that, contrary to what one usually understands by dictatorship, that's to say the power of one individual, in a regime like that the most detestable, but in a sense the most intoxicating, part of power was given to a large number of people. It was the SS man who had the power to kill and to rape ... 

CAHIERS: That's where orthodox Marxism breaks down. Because this implies that there has to be a discourse on desire. 

​FOUCAULT: On desire and on power ... 

CAHIERS: That's also where films like Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter are relatively 'strong'. They can handle a discourse on desire and power in a way that seems coherent. 

FOUCAULT: In The Night Porter it's interesting to see how, in Nazism, the power of one man was taken up by many people and put to work. That sort of mock tribunal they set up is fascinating. Because from one angle it begins to look like a psychotherapy group, but in fact its power structure is that of a secret society. It's basically an SS cell that has re-formed, that gives itself legal powers different from and in opposition to the power at the centre. We have to remember how power was dispersed, how it was invested within the population itself, we have to remember this impressive displacement of power that Nazism brought about in a society like German society. It is untrue to say that Nazism was the power of the big industrialists continued in another form. It wasn't the power of the top brass reinforced. It was that too, but only on a certain level. 

CAHIERS: Indeed, that's an interesting aspect of the film. But what seemed very questionable to us was that it seemed to be saying: 'If you're a typical SS man, that's how you behave. But if on top of that you have a certain "notion of expenditure", that's the formula for a great erotic adventure.' So the film never abandons the idea of seduction. 

FOUCAULT: Yes, it's like Lacombe Lucien in that respect. For Nazism never gave anyone a pound of butter, it never gave anything but power. You have to ask yourself, if this regime was nothing other than a bloody dictatorship, how on 3 May 1945 there were still Germans fighting on to the last drop of blood, if these people were not attached to power in some way. Of course, you have to take into account all the pressures, denunciations ...

CAHIERS: But if there were denunciations and pressures, there must have been ​people to do the denouncing. How did people get caught up in it all? How were they ever conned by this redistribution of power in their favour?

FOUCAULT: In Lacomhe Lucien, as in The Night Porter, this excessive power that is given to them is converted back into love. It's very clear at the end of The Night Porter, with the recreation around Max, in his room, of a kind of concentration camp in miniature, where he is dying of hunger. There love has converted power, super-power, into total powerlessness. Roughly the same reconciliation occurs, in a sense, in Lacomhe Lucien, where love takes the excess of power by which it has been trapped and converts it inca a rural nakedness miles away from the Gestapo's shady hotel, miles away also from the farm where the pigs are being killed. 

CAHIERS: Are we then perhaps beginning to explain the problem you were posing earlier: how is it that Nazism, which was a puritanical, repressive system, is now universally eroticized? Some kind of displacement takes place: a problem which is central and which people don't wish to confront, the problem of power, is bypassed or rather completely displaced towards the sexual. So that this eroticization is really a displacement, a form of repression ... 

FOUCAULT: The problem is indeed a very difficult one and it has not perhaps been sufficiently studied, even by Reich. How is it that power is desirable and is actually desired? The procedures through which this eroticization is transmitted, reinforced, and so on, are clear enough. But for it to happen in the first place, the attachment co power, the acceptance of power by those over whom it is exercised, must already be erotic. 

CAHIERS: What makes it all the more difficult is that the representation of power is rarely erotic. De Gaulle and Hitler weren't exactly attractive. 

FOUCAULT: That's right, and I wonder whether in Marxist analyses one doesn't sacrifice a little too much to the abstract character of the idea of freedom. In a regime like the Nazi regime, it's quite clear that there's no freedom. But not having freedom doesn't mean that you don't have power. 

CAHIERS: It's on the level of the cinema and television, television being entirely controlled by power, that historical discourse has the greatest impact. Which implies a political responsibility. It seems to us that people are increasingly aware of it. For some years now, in the cinema, there has been more and more talk of history, politics, struggle ... 

FOUCAULT: There's a battle going on for history, around the history that's now in the making, and it is very interesting. People want to codify, to stifle What I have called 'popular memory', and also to propose, to impose a grid for interpreting the present. Until 1968 popular struggles had to do with folk tradition. For some they had no connection at all with anything going on in the present. After 1968 all popular struggles, whether in South America or in Africa, find an echo, a resonance. No longer can this separation, this sore of geographical cordon sanitaire, be established. Popular struggles have become not something that is happening now, but something that might always happen, in our system. And so they have to be set at a distance once again. How? Not by interpreting them directly - you would only lay yourself open to all the contradictions - but by proposing a historical interpretation of popular struggles from our own past, to show that in fact they never took place! Before 1968, it was: 'It won't happen, because it only happens elsewhere'; now it's: 'It won't happen, because it has never happened! Even something like the Resistance, the stuff of so many dreams, just look at it ... Nothing there. An empty shell, completely hollow!' Which is another way of saying: 'In Chile, don't worry, the peasants don't give a damn. In France too: a few troublemakers and their antics won't affect anything fundamental.' 

CAHIERS: For us, the important thing when one reacts to that, against that, is to realize that it's not enough to re-establish the truth, to say, about the Maquis for example, 'No, I was there, it didn't happen like that at all!' We believe that to conduct the ideological struggle effectively on the kind of terrain that these films lead into you have to have a wider, more comprehensive system of references - of positive references. For many people, for example, that consists in reappropriating the 'history of France'. It was against this background that we spent some time on Moi, Pierre Riviere . .. because we realized that in the end, and paradoxically, it helped us to explain Lacombe Lucien, that the comparison brought out a number of things. For example, one significant difference is that Pierre Riviere is a man who writes, who commits a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory. Malle's hero, on the other hand, is presented as a halfwit, as someone who goes through everything, history, the War, collaboration, without building on his experiences. And it's there that the theme of memory, of popular memory, can help us to make the distinction between someone, Pierre Riviere, who uses a language that is not his and is forced to kill to obtain the right to do so, and the character created by Malle and Modiano 8 who proves, precisely by not building on anything that happens to him, that there is nothing worth remembering. It's a pity you haven't seen The Courage of the People. It's a Bolivian film, which was made for the speClfic purpose of providing an exhibit for a dossier. This film, which can be seen everywhere except in Bolivia, because of the regime, is played by those who actually took part in the real-life drama it recreates (a miners' strike and its bloody repression) - they undertake to represent themselves so that no one will forget. 

It's interesting to see that, on a minimum level, every film is a potential archive and that, in the context of a struggle, one can take this idea one step further: people put together a film intending it to be an exhibit. And you can analyse that in two radically different ways: either the film is about power or it represents the victims of that power, the exploited classes who, without the help of the cinematographic apparatus, with very ​little knowledge of how films are made and distributed, take on their own representation, give evidence for history. Rather as Pierre Riviere gave evidence, that's to say, began to write, knowing that sooner or later he would appear before a court and that everyone had to understand what he had to say. 

What's important in The Courage of the People is that the demand actually came from the people. It was through a survey that the director first learned of the demand, and it was those who had lived through the event who asked for it to be memorized. 

​FOUCAULT: The people create their own archives. 

CAHIERS: The difference between Pierre Riviere and Lacombe Lucien is that Pierre Riviere does everything to enable us to discuss his history after his death. Whereas, even if Lacombe is a real character or one who might have existed, he is only ever the object of another's discourse. for purposes that are not his own. 

There are two things that are successful in the cinema now. On the one hand, historical documents, which have an important role to play. In Toute une vie, for example, they are very important. Or in films by Marcel Ophuls or Harris and Sedouy, when you see Duclos waving his arms about in 1936 and in 1939, these scenes from real life are moving. And on the other hand, fictional characters who, at a given moment in history, compress social relations, historical relations, into the smallest possible space. That's why Lacombe Lucien works so well. Lacombe is a Frenchman under the Occupation, someone very ordinary who stands in a concrete relationship to Nazism, to the countryside, to local government, etc. We have to be aware of this way of personifying history, of bringing it to life in a character, or a group of characters who, at a given moment, stand in a privileged relationship to power. 

There are lots of characters in the history of the workers' movement whom we don't know about: lots of heroes in the history of the working class who have been totally repressed. And I believe that something important is at stake here. Marxism doesn't need to make any more films about Lenin, there are more than enough already. 

FOUCAULT: What you are saying is important. It's a characteristic of many Marxists today. They don't know very much about history. They spend their time saying that history is being overlooked, but are only capable themselves of commenting on texts: 'What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that?' But that is Marxism if not another way of analysing history itself? In my opinion, the left, France, is not very interested in history. It used to be. In the nineteenth century you could say that Michelet represented the left at a given moment. There was also Jaures, and then a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez etc.). Today that has virtually dried up. Whereas it could be an impressi"e movement of writers and film-makers. There was of course Aragon and Les ​Cloches de Bale, ​which is a very great historical novel. But it doesn't amount to much, if you think of what that could represent in a society whose intellectuals are, after all, more or less steeped in Marxism. 

CAHIERS: Film-making brings in something new again in this respect: 'live' history ... What relation do American people have to history, now that they see the Vietnam War every evening on television as they eat their supper? 

FOUCAULT: As soon as you begin to see images of war every evening, war becomes utterly accepted. In other words, extremely boring - you would certainly prefer to watch something else. But once it becomes boring, it's accepted. You don't even watch it. So what do you have to do for this news, as it appears on film, to be reactivated as news that is historically important? 

CAHIERS: Have you seen Les Camisards?

​FOUCAULT: Yes, I liked it a lot. Historically it's beyond reproach. It's a beautiful film, it's intelligent, it explains so much.

CAHIERS: I think that's the direction film-makers should be taking. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning, another problem that must be mentioned is the confused response of the far left to certain aspects of Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter, the sexual aspect especially. How might the right take advantage of this confusion? 

FOUCAULT: On this subject of what you call the far left, I don't really know what to think. I'm not even sure whether it still exists. All the same, a huge balance sheet has to be drawn up for the activities of the far left since 1968: the conclusions are negative on the one side and positive on the other. It's true that the far left has been responsible for a whole lot of important ideas in a number of areas: sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, housing, medicine. It has also been responsible for the diffusion of modes of action-which continues to be important. The far left has been important in the kinds of action it has taken as well as in the themes it has pursued. But there is also a negative balance in terms of certain Stalinist, terrorist, organizational practices. And there is equally a misapprehension of certain currents running wide and deep which have just resulted in thirteen million votes for Mitterrand, and which have always been neglected on the pretext that that was just politicking, party politics. Any number of aspects have been neglected, notably the fact that the desire to defeat the right has for some years, some months, been a very important political factor among the masses. The far left didn't have this desire because its definition of the masses was wrong and because it didn't really understand what it means to want to win. To avoid the risk of having victory snatched away it prefers not to run the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be recuperated. Personally, I'm not so sure.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Interesting that Asterix the Gaul, comic strip about plucky native resistance to Roman imperialism,  started the very year that Charles de Gaulle, hero of the Resistance, launches the Fifth Republic...

Mind you, other people have diagnosed it as being an allegory of American cultural imperialism, or even the Algerian war of independence... 

One intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay had not quit Siouxsie and the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop...

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

Sleeve notes for In A Moment... (Ghost Box compilation, 2015)

Tell me what you see vanishing and I

Will tell you who you are

 W.S. Merwin, "For Now"

It's a moment that a music journalist dreads - when an acquaintance or recently acquired friend shyly pipes up, "Actually, I've been making some music myself...   would really like to know what you think of it...." 

When it happens, it always feels like no good can come of this.  It's almost guaranteed that you'll have to work up some sort of considered-seeming reaction that, despite your best efforts, will be transparently polite, the strain of finding something nice to say awfully evident.  And then the burgeoning friendship takes a big hit, because as much as people say they want your honest critical reaction...

Ten years ago or so, I got that familiar slightly sick feeling when Julian House - who I'd been chatting with via email for a while - offered to send me some music.  I dutifully listened, with zero expectations beyond the necessity of an awkward exchange in the near-future.  Little did I know that the recordings Julian sent - early sound-sketches by himself, as The Focus Group - followed shortly by the first EP from his accomplice Jim Jupp, as Belbury Poly - would end up being my favorite music of the past decade.  Or that their label - Ghost Box - would soon assume a talismanic significance in my mental landscape.

I suspect Julian got more than he'd bargained for as well...

There are those who like to imagine that the reason I love Ghost Box is because the music - in tandem with Julian's design ("packaging that's wrapped inside the music", to quote his own words about library records) and the scaffolding of concepts and allusions surrounding the project, makes for a superb screen upon which to project theories.  Certainly Ghost Box lends itself to that kind of speculative thinking, as the output of dozens of blogs and the profusion of magazine thinkpieces over the last decade testifies.  But the truth is simply that the music Julian & Jim have put out is what I listen to incessantly: for pleasure, for comfort, for strange delight.  Hardly any of the records I raved about or end-of-year-listed in 2005 are things I still play. But I have never stopped listening to Hey Let Loose Your Love or The Willows.   

I used the word "comfort" above. One of the things some people don't seem to get about Ghost Box - and perhaps they're thrown off by the name - is that this isn't meant to be some hair-raising, soul-harrowing trip into necromantic darkness.   It's much gentler than that, a twisting or tinting of the everyday. Softly spooky, sweetly creepy, Ghost Box enfolds the listener in a cosy unease. It's umheimlich you can live with, live inside. No, we are not dealing with Gothshit or pierced-dick second-wave industrial shlock here.  Yes, humour is involved: in the artwork, the song titles, the fabric of the sound itself, with its queer mix of solemn and jaunty.  A humour of a particular poker-face kind that reminds me of old dear comrades from long-ago campaigns of mischief and obfuscation. That's a personal resonance, but it illustrates a wider public fact: the existence of an Anglo-Surrealist continuum that crops up repeatedly across the generations, based each time around slightly different constellations of esoteric erudition and arcane research.

This is possibly the point at which to point out that Ghost Box aren't alone.  Before the label started, back in the Nineties, there were precursors:  Boards of Canada, Position Normal, Mount Vernon Arts Lab, Broadcast, Add N to (X), Pram, Plone, Stereolab. (A few of these are friends of Julian and Jim, and/or record cover design clients of Julian's).  When Ghost Box launched in 2005, it entered an emerging cultural field that had already started to bestow totemic stature on entities like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and bygone regions of sound like library music and DIY concrete /electronic (maverick composers like F.C. Judd, Basil Kirchin, Tristam Cary, Daphne Oram, Ron Geesin, and Desmond Leslie).   Ghost Box found itself in alignment with other operators who'd found their own way to similar sets of preoccupations: Mordant Music,  Moon Wiring Club,  James Kirby a/k/a The Caretaker,  English Heretic, Trunk Records, Cate Brooks of King of Woolworths and later the Café Kaput label. Within a few years Ghost Box were joined by new fellow travelers such as Pye Corner Audio, Burial, Woebot, Robin the Fog, Sarah Angliss, the West Country wyrdtronica / pastoral-industrial crew (Farmer Glitch, Kemper Norton, IX Tab),  West Norwood Cassette Library, Demdike Stare, Ekoplekz, and A Year In The Country.  There were even remote cousins overseas, from Andrew Pekler in Germany to Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, William Basinski, James Ferraro, and Oneohtrix Point Never in the United States. 

Even just focusing consideration to the U.K., the field is really quite crowded now, and I haven't mentioned certain blatantly indebted post-GB operatives, or all of the contributors to Ghost Box's Studies Series and Other Voices split 7-inch singles. Nor the seepage into other art forms *, notably the film Berberian Sound Studio.   Wikipedia may not accept it **, but have no doubt:  this is a definite "thing" we're talking about, an objectively existing zone. 

Ghost Box have remained central in whatever you want to call this "this" ***, and indeed - to my ears and eyes - they've operated at a slight elevation to most everybody else in the parish, their output characterized by consistency in both the "quality standards" and "thematic coherence" senses.  Their achievement partly entails a synthesis of existing tendencies, partly a broadening out into a richer frame of reference and resonance, but most of all, the sheer consummate-ness of how they've gone about things.  

From the start, the label's releases were designed - literally - to form a set, a format modelled on university course books or the classic grid cover template of Penguin / Pelican / Peregrine paperbacks.  The look of the releases made you want to own them all. But more than a mere design fetish, the packaging is the outward display of a continuity of sound and sensibility. When other artists - like Cate Brooks as The Advisory Circle, or Pye Corner Audio - have contributed to the label, they have sounded more Ghost Box-y compared to their regular output. And no slight intended to them or their other releases, they've done their best work for Ghost Box.  Something about the ideas-frame, the sense of occasion in joining that "set", perhaps even the name "Ghost Box" - like all great group or label names, it's a miniature poem, a condensed manifesto - seemed to make these talents raise their game. 

This isn't the time and place - nor is there the space - to explore thoroughly the huge inventory of themes and obsessions that make up the Ghost(Box)world: tales of cosmic horror and pastoral uncanny by gentlemen occultists like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen;  the U.K.'s status as the country with the highest number of ghost sightings in the world and as the culture that invented the ghost story;  eccentric scholars of history and the occult like T.C. Lethbridge, M.B. Devot, and Ronald Hutton;  British horror movies of the Hammer and Tigon school, especially those with a bucolic-pagan tinge like The Wicker Man; the inappropriately disturbing - by today's sanitised standards -  children's television series of the 1970s involving the supernatural or apocalyptic, along with the era's excessively terrifying Public Information Films;  Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's Smallfilms animations like Bagpuss and The Clangers;  the planning-for-tomorrow spirit of post-WW2 Britain that encompassed Brutalist architecture, the Open University, the polytechnics....  Treatises have been written on all of this (I've penned a few myself) and right now there are people beavering away at PhD's making all the right connections.

But here might be the time and the place to talk about... time and place, the two over-arching concepts that unify and permeate Ghost Box's output. Perhaps they are really just different sides of the same coin:  Great Britain during the period book-ended by the creation of the Welfare State and by Thatcher's electoral landslide, which inaugurated the post-socialist era in which we grimly find ourselves still.  Deeply imprinted memories of this bygone Britain are the source of the music's allure and its poignant charge. Taylor Parkes captures this when he writes that "anyone born between the early 60s and the early 70s is at risk from the past in some ways. Being the generation who were raised in one kind of Britain (a cosy-but-progressive social democracy, where the arts were valued and thought was encouraged) and then came of age in another, there's a sort of dissonance and suppressed fury there which makes our nostalgia deeper and more painful than it should be. That sense of an inheritance having been snatched away, of being a motherless child..... I always thought of the Ghost Box stuff, for instance, as a howl of separation anxiety."

Ghost Box struck a particularly plangent chord with me, not just because of the middle age I'd decisively arrived at circa 2005, but because I was an expatriate who had been living in America for a decade by that point.  That made me an exile in space and time.  Hearing records like Sketches and Spells and Hey Let Loose Your Love, Farmer's Angle and The Willows...   later The Advisory Circle's Mind How You Go and Other Channels...   I felt a sense of recognition and connection  -  self-recognition and self-reconnection - that's probably similar to say, how a migrant Jamaican feels listening to reggae:  an organic bond to music that sound-tracked everyday life going back as far as you can remember.  Ghost Box is "roots 'n culture" for me and for my kind. 

The label's releases have filled me with mournful wonder at the thought of the country I'd grown up in during the Sixties and Seventies, a country that has subsequently been very deliberately eroded away.   A time/place where/when a young mind could access all kinds of cultural riches and frissons through the local library (and the inter-library loan system), through a public broadcasting culture that was dedicated to challenging viewers and listeners with unsettling children's programs like The Changes, The Children of The Stones, and The Clifton House Mystery, peculiar plays like Stargazy on Zummerdown, radiophonic dramas and soundscapes like Inferno Revisited and Inventions for Radio.    

Which is not to say that Ghost Box only works for a particular generation of Britons, by working on the elegiac centers of the brain, trigging the memory-embedded cues of incidental music and bygone TV scores.  I've been surprised - reassured too - by the appeal of the label to much younger and wholly non-British fans and critics, like Stylus and Pitchfork writer Mike Powell, who memorably described The Focus Group sound as resembling "a museum come to life".

Still Ghost Box does seem to have a particularly potent effect on those entering that phase of life when memories flash into your consciousness unbidden, at once astonishingly vivid yet mundane and unremarkable, as if they are files that the brain is submitting for deletion.   An involuntary condition that Nina Power crystallizes with this rueful admission: "the thing I find strangest and most unsettling about getting older is the sheer weight of memory - unwanted, everyday, melancholic, heavy, strange, like limescale on a filament."

So does that mean this music is purely a delicious wallow in nostalgia? I don't think so (Ghost Box's contingent of younger fans surely proves that). At the same time, nostalgia itself is a complicated business, not something that can be instantly dismissed or scorned, rather an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.  I believe a distinction can be made between "good retro" and "bad retro" that's as crucial as the difference between good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. In what must have been the first published piece on Ghost Box outside the blog circuit, Matthew Ingram, reviewing Hey Let Loose Your Love for The Wire, characterised the music as "an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically-motivated exploration of the power not just of one's childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. Memory in the work of The Focus Group...  is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics." 

Any person's make-up is necessarily 99 percent composed of the past.  As a matter of policy - reflecting a "be here now" stance or philosophical orientation towards The Future - you might shun nostalgia and resist revisiting the past as much as you're able to.  But sooner or later, the past will visit you.  Ultimately there is no escaping its visitations, its revenant apparitions.  This is the Ghost Box sensation: an alloy of intimacy and otherness, like a part of yourself you'd lost or forgotten, returned whether you want it or not. 

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner famously wrote. "It's not even past."  Ghost Box have expressed their appreciation of Boards of Canada's version of that idea: a compulsion to uncover "the past inside the present."  Jim Jupp speaks in interviews sometimes of Ghost Box's world as "a kind of an 'all at once' place where all of the popular culture from 1958 to 1978 is somehow happening at the same time."  Even more mystically, Jim has talked about the concept of  "eternalism",  suggesting that Ghost Box emanates from -  or at least proposes the existence of  -  "a world where time has no existence at all and contemporary sounds and references seem no more or less important than ones from the past or future.... Everything that has happened and will happen and all parallel world outcomes are superimposed in one block time."  This idea - that all moments in time are taking place at once - isn't as loopy as it sounds, or at least it has been seriously entertained by philosophers like J.W. Dunne, whose dream-research-influenced theories were popularized by J.B. Priestley amongst others in the mid-20th Century. Dunne's An Experiment With Time also inspired the 1970s ATV children's drama Timeslip.

The forward-moving, one-directional flow of Time might indeed be an illusion. But that's not much help to me, trapped inside that illusion as I am, with no access to a "time bubble" like the one that allows the Timeslip kids to travel back and forth across the decades.  I admire and envy the mystics and the supernaturalists; I would like to believe in magic more than I actually do.  Music is the closest I get to religion; it's the Force I can't explain. So I return to the point I began with: all these philosophical fancies and theoretical adventures that Ghost Box sets in motion would not count for anything if the music didn't (in)substantiate them.

It's the sheer musicality of Ghost Box that gets short shrifted in all the high-powered intellectual debates.  The shocking from-another-time beauty of "Sundial" and "Osprey" by The Advisory Circle. The macabre whimsy of Belbury Poly tunes like "The Willows" and "Insect Prospectus", banging nightclub tracks in that parallel world where Dr. Phibes and Jerry Cornelius really existed. The eldritch sound-contraptions collated on The Transactional Dharma of Roj.  The gorgeous electronic rhapsody that is "Almost There"  by John Foxx and The Belbury Circle, one of the best things that Foxx & Brooks have ever done, which is really saying something if you think about it. Above all, The Focus Group's miniatures like "Modern Harp,"  "Frumious Numinous" and "The Leaving" -  to my mind some of the most quietly radical, gently deranging music of the 21st Century, cascades-in-reverse whose oneiric flutter never fails to lift me away.  

In these and other moments, Ghost Box has abolished time for me, unlocked memory, transported me elsewhere and elsewhen. 

2025 Footnotes

*   the seepage into other art forms

Rather thin evidence presented here - surprisingly it slipped my mind about Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which might be visual art's haunty masterpiece. 

There is also the phenomenon of re-enactment art, in particular the huge public artwork orchestrated by Jeremy Deller, 2016's We're Here Because We're Here,  that has an explicitly ghostly aspect: the apparition of First World War soldiers in public places like railway stations and shopping malls, each volunteer-actor having been assigned the identity of an actual combatant who died during the Somme. When a passer-by approached them to ask what's going on, the spectral soldier did not speak but shows them a card with the name of the slain man. However, at intervals, the troops do break into a chanted song: "We're Here Because We're Here". I can't recall if this was a bitter, fatalistic-at-the-futility ditty chanted by actual soldiers during the not-so-Great War.

I'm sure there are further latter day film examples that could be included (Strickland's In Fabric, notably) and the subject of  haunty TV comedy is not fully dealt with in this liner note but gets more of a reckoning here. 

** "Wikipedia may not accept" 

Below are the full, carefully preserved deliberations on whether or not to allow hauntology-the-music-genre to have an entry. 

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Consensus is to delete -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 14:19, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Hauntology (musical genre) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | views) - (View log • AfD statistics)

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Neologism made up by one reviewer. Ridernyc (talk) 04:50, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

• Delete hoax Shii (tock) 16:22, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Music-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:08, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete - Hauntology is not commonly considered a musical genre. Therefor hauntology (musical genre) should be deleted and not (!) redirected. gidonb (talk) 21:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect to Ghost Box Records. Almost the whole thing could be comfortably placed in the "Aesthetics" section with little modification. — Gwalla | Talk 21:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Why would we take unsourced information from here to expand the unsourced information there? Ridernyc (talk) 23:14, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

• Comment From what I could find, the very existence of hauntology as a musical style is rejected by the relevant musical community. This community claims that what is described as hauntology is an effect at most. Between the strong "hoax" and light "unsourced", I think the term "fringe POV" covers hauntology (musical genre) best. In either case, the combination of hauntology with the words musical genre and the contents of this article are misleading and should be deleted. gidonb (talk) 00:38, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete Totally subjective and undefinable and unsourced term for another music sub genre. Guyonthesubway (talk) 19:09, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete. It definitely seems to lack notability. I looked at the fifth reference, and IT SOURCES WIKIPEDIA! Ha, what a joke for that to be cited on wikipedia. Backtable Speak to meconcerning my deeds. 00:49, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
• Delete The sources citated actually indicate pretty clearly that it is not a musical genre and that it is a neologism.--SabreBD (talk) 10:28, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

"Hoax", "fringe POV" - haha! The whole cabal discussion has a ludicrous yet faintly sinister air about it, it's like some phantasm from Foucault's brain. 

However I believe that there is nowadays a subsection on hauntology as music genre within the Wiki entry on hauntology

*** whatever you want to call this "this"

Note how deftly and considerately I avoid using the H-word throughout this sleeve note! 

Related Thoughts

This is from a conversation I had with Richard Lockley-Hobson

I think every country or nationality, let's say, has its own Hauntology. Potentially anyway. This sort of cultural or para-cultural substrate of common experience that you don't really notice until it's gone.

Certainly the cluster of music that, for better or worse, I've come to call Hauntology, is very British, and also generational, it resonates for people who were children in the 1960s/70s and a little bit 80s. But non Brits do seem to pick up on aspects that do something for them, a non specific evocative-ness and out-of-timey effect.

What further defines it as sensation is this odd alloy of intimacy and otherness... A part of yourself you'd lost or forgotten that's returned to yourself. A self othering. In that sense definite analogies with analysis in the Freudian sense. Which makes sense if one is talking about cultural unconscious, etc.

So it's not a totally othering, disorientating experience, as in mystical, paranormal, or hallucinatory, like drug experiences or going insane. It's gentler, a twisting, or tinting of the everyday. Rather than deranging, a sort of cosy mild unease or dissociative feeling. Reverie rather than Rapture, in the Saint Theresa sense.

The one thing that came through more clearly when doing the chapter in Retromania, was the extent to which my sense of Hauntology-as-music-genre, and my affection for it, is based around nationality. And I make this opposition between nationality and nationalism. Nationalism is political and it's an ideology of national greatness or exceptionality. Nationality is pre-political I think - it's the things I share with all other Britons including so many I have nothing in common with politically or in terms of chosen allegiances (musical, artistic, etc). Nationality in that sense is the pre-chosen, the given rather than what you consciously seek out or align yourself with. There's this term people use, I'm not sure of the provenance in terms of either who coined it or even what discipline it comes from (Sociology? Anthropology), but the term is "lifeworld" - and I guess it means the realm of customs, everyday life, accents, gestures, rituals, routines, habits, common sense, food etc. I suppose Antonio Gramsci would say this kind of stuff is actually ideological, it's part of hegemony (Roland Barthes also analysed this kind of thing under Mythologies). But to me it's more like the common inheritance of phrase and fable, idiom, and also, the arbitrary stylistic and design quirks of the typography used on everyday articles, the look of shops and public institutions, etc.

I was just in the UK last week and being an expatriate now I notice this stuff that I would not have noticed when I lived there and it was all I knew. Also I just learned to drive so I'm paying more attention, but you know, things like road signs - where my mum lives in west Hertfordshire, signs like "weak bridges" or "traffic calming area" (for a zone with bumps in the road to stop drivers going too fast and running over little kids, presumably!). It's in that kind of thing that the soul of a nation resides. That's where Hauntology does cross over into the realm of the hobbyist, which is frankly nostalgic and fetishistic of the bygone, musty, etcetera.

A lot of Hauntology taps into this kind of thing, and largely the elements of the nation-soul or lifeworld that are fading away. Although whenever I go to England I am quite amazed by how unchanged it is, indistinguishable, in large part, from the 1970s or 80s Britain, that I remember. Old people still look the same. The main differences between then and now seems to be mobile phones and coffee.

In an interview  recently I was asked if I missed London. And I said this:

I do miss London, and England, for loads of reasons, too many to list really. Beyond friends and family, just the fabric of daily life. The hedgerows and meadows and copses. The calm modulated tones of Radio Four. The weather - I actually miss things like rain, sudden showers, mist, fog, frost. There are about 20 different kinds of rain in the UK, whereas in LA, when it does rain - which is rarely - it's more like an on/off switch, like a shower. London specifically, obviously I miss the parks - Brockwell Park and Hampstead Heath, above all. I think they have idyllic connotations partly because I was born in London and lived there until the age of 4, so a place like Brockwell Park on a really nice day has a kind of dream-like quality to me. Quite a lot of things that I miss about the UK are actually gone or are going (like record shops, the weekly music press, the BBC). So the homesickness is about a country that doesn't even exist anymore. Yet conversely, whenever I go back, especially once I get outside London to places like the Tring/Berkhamstead area, where my parents live, or Durham and Swaledale in North Yorkshire, where my aunt and uncle live - I get a striking sense that the UK hasn't actually changed that much since I was a boy. Old people look more or less the same, the landscape is more or less the same, except that haystacks now get covered in black bin-liners. There's still allotments and canals, with brightly coloured barges and flooded fields beside them. Pubs and beer gardens. Village fetes, etc. Everyone has science fiction phones, people are dressing a bit sharper and flashier and punk rock is taught in middle school, as part of popular culture courses. But essentially, at heart, the country is the same. For better and worse.

Bonus Beats

Some clever and beautiful things other people have written about Ghost Box - including clever things somehow written about Ghost Box before Ghost Box even existed.

"Songs are like lopsided Victorian automata, instruments mismatch in incongruent tempos... and sequences frequently crumble into soft-edged bliss before one's ears. It is almost as if the very action of their exposure is the agent of their collapse. Stranger still, though plainly audible, occasionally the music seems to disappear from earshot, becoming proverbially invisible, sinking into the netherworld of the unconscious. Recurrent themes serve as mnemonics luring the listener's attention to the surface. Pieced together from the mustiest samples - children's exercise records, vintage BBC drama, clunky Brit jazz and (most pertinently) library records, this is an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically motivated exploration of the power of not just one's childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. In the work of The Focus Group and House's partners Belbury Poly and Eric Zann... memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics" 

- Matthew Ingram, on Hey Let Loose Your Love for The Wire, 2005  

"Ghostbox artists deal in a very British style of sound manipulation; perhaps it could be called music-hall concrète.... Sketches and Spells by The Focus Group reveals them as non-idiomatic cratediggers searching for the bits other than the beats, for the reflective moments that the headz miss. This is music by and for shoppers who come home with dirt ingrained deep into their fingerprints from flipping through stacks of old books and records at jumble sales and charity shops. It is as refreshing as the cup of hot tea served by the church bric-a-brac stall where you've failed to find anything interesting among the Sven Hassel novels and stained flannel shirts. Sketches and Spells is as warm and strange as a clockwork sunrise accompanied by a dawn chorus of steam driven birds. Super-dry jazz hi-hat work mixes with offhand synth-bass and slivered chirrups of sound sliced thin enough to be just impossible to place. There's a lot of percussion but it's the click-clack sticks, spacious triangles and tentative, carefully considered woodblocks of primary school rather than the dense free-for-all of the hippie jam (you can almost smell the wood-shavings covering childish vomit.)" 

- Patrick McNally, Stylus, 2005 

"The affect produced by Ghost Box's releases (sound AND images, the latter absolutely integral) are the direct inverse of irritating PoMo citation-blitz. The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten , the poorly remembered and the confabulated.... Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are dup

director's cut of piece in the The Guardian, roughly a year ago  - with the follow-up blog pieces below

I started blogging in 2002.  Prior to that I'd operated a website for around six years, but what grabbed me about blogging was the speed and the responsiveness - the way blogs picked up on what other blogs posted and responded almost in real time. I wanted to jump right into the midst of this crackling synergy between blogs. So I did.

The blogging circuit I joined was just one corner of an ever-growing blogosphere. Even within music,  my blog's primary focus, there was a whole other - and larger - network of MP3 blogs. Still, my particular neighbourhood was bustling all through the 2000s. Out of its fractious ferment emerged cult figures like K-punk, a.k.a Mark Fisher, one of the most widely read and revered left-wing thinkers of our time, and the prolific architecture critic and author Owen Hatherley. Then there were those like me who fit a different archetype: already a professional writer but who relished the freedom of style and tone offered by blogging.  

Today, there are still plenty of active music blogs. They encompass established critics like Richard Williams, anonymous unknowns unloading a lifetime's knowledge and passion such as Aloysius , K-punk-descended blogs like Xenogothic that move fluently between pop culture and theory, and the amiable anecdotes and keen observations of  musicians like Wreckless Eric. 

What's changed - what's gone - is inter-blog communication. The argumentative back-and-forth, the pass-the-baton discussions that rippled across the scene, the spats and the feuds - these are things of the past. If community persists, it's on the level of any individual blog's comment box.  I prize the unusual perspectives and weird erudition of my regular commenters, while wondering why so few of them operate their own blogs.

It's easy to pinpoint what caused the fall-off:  social media. On Facebook, once copious bloggers craft miniature essays to an invited audience only. Twitter - at least when it was good - supplied even more instant feedback for rapid-fire opinionators. There are other rival repositories of bloggy informality, like  podcasts. Just generally there's more news 'n' views bombarding us than ever. Now wonder the blogs have been shunted to the side.

I miss the interblog chatter of the 2000s but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal.  I'd do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed  5000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy.  No rules about structure or consistency of tone.  A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero duty to "do my research" before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it's nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.   

"Ramble" is the right word.  Blogging, I can meander, take short cuts, and trespass into fields where I don't belong.  Because I'm not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise. It's highly unlikely I could persuade a magazine to let me write an essay  comparing Bob Fosse and Lenny Bruce https://shockandawesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/03/showbiz-against-showbiz-bob-lenny.html

 or find a thread connecting Fellini's Amarcord, Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, and Tati's Playtime

https://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/05/decline-of-wes-or-three-movies-three.html

In recent months, I've  ruminated about Wiki-Fear and the sticky way that upsetting information attaches itself to favorite artists and their music, remembered the suggestive Flake commercials of my youth, https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/10/flakeatio.html

looked at fame-as-royalty and royalty-as-celebrity via Dame Edna Everage and Clive James

https://shockandawesimonreynolds2.blogspot.com/2023/08/grotesque-with-gratitude-rip-edna-barry.html, and a dedicated a brief blog to a single scene in the film Charlie Bubbles involving Albert Finney protractedly masticating a bacon sandwich  https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2023/06/chew-very-much.html

As those examples show, one of the great thing about blogging for a professional journalist is that you can write about topics that aren't topical. You are unshackled from release schedules. An old record or TV program you've stumbled upon, or simply remembered, is fair game. YouTube's arrival in 2005 brought a new dimension to blogging. The two go together so well because they are both handmaidens of 21st Century archive fever, instruments of the atemporal culture brought about by the internet, social media, and streaming.

The motto at the top of my primary outlet Blissblog https://blissout.blogspot.com/ twists Tricky lyric's "my brain thinks bomb-like". My brain thinks blog-like: the digressive rhythms, the lurching between tones, it's how my mind moves, when it's not behaving itself in print.  I realized that I had, if not a problem, then perhaps some kind of disorder, when I started to spin off satellite blogs, initially dedicated to specialized zones of my brain  (the books Energy Flash, Retromania, Shock and Awe) but soon splintering to encompass particular obsessions and modes. Probably the most enjoyable to write - maybe to read too, although I couldn't say - is Hardly Baked 2 https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/. Fragmented fumbles towards a thesis, sometimes based around ancient pop videos, occasionally entirely pictorial, these posts are, as the blog name makes clear, unfinished work. Often they're completed, or expanded beyond anything I could have dreamt, by the comments below. But at the moment of posting, I've no idea whether this one will spark a discussion or plop into the void.  

Freedom and doing it for free go together. I've resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I'd start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work.  But if it's not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch. And for every post published, there's five that never get beyond notepad scrawls or fumes in the back of my mind.

I can't imagine ever stopping blogging.  Perhaps eventually there'll just be a few of us still standing. But I'm heartened that some of the younger generation have caught the bug - including my own son Kieran Press-Reynolds, who operates his own outlet and contributes to the collective music blog No Bells

https://nobells.blog/babyxsosas-houseparty/

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Guardian asked me to write about blogging. 

One thing I observe is that although the freedom and fun offered by the format endures, the inter-blog communication of the heyday has faded away.  At least, in this particular corner of the 'sphere. 

Blogging has become more of a solitary activity. A blogpost will be sparked by something "out there," or by something within, but rarely in response to another blog. 

This reminded me that the last time I did a bit of meta-blogging -  the 20th anniversary rumination of a year ago -  I'd intended to do a follow up: a tribute to the blogs of yesteryear, nodes in a network that once crackled like the synapses of an ever-growing mega-brain. Here, belatedly, is a sketch towards such a memorial. 

In the beginning... what sparked my interest was a bunch of blogs and blog-like entities whose existence I noticed around 2000 or so. There was Tom Ewing's outlets New York London Paris Munich and Freaky Trigger, Tim Finney's Skykicking,  Jess Harvell's blogs (Let's Build A Car, Technicolor, Rebellious Jukebox, others still?). Then there was Alastair Fitchett's webzine Tangents, featuring contributors like Kevin Pearce (under the name John Carney, for reasons unknown). And Robin Carmody's website Elidor (later on he blogged at House At World's End and Sea Songs and also here). 

All sorts of oddball characters sprouted up around then, offering skewed perspectives and obsessive accumulations of knowledge.  There was Josh Kortbein (who still maintains Joshblog). Scott of Somedisco.  David Howie aka I Have Zero Money. Others still. 

So the scene was bubbling before I jumped into the fray in October 2002. Still, it's fair to say that the launch of Blissblog had an accelerant effect. I must have been one of the first pros to start a music blog, although I'd had a website since 1996. 

Another accelerant was the excitement about grime - at that point such an emergent sound it wasn't even known as grime yet.  Wot-U-Call-It represented probably around 70% of the spur for me to start the blog - at the time I was largely taken out of journalistic commission by Rip It Up and Start Again and I desperately wanted to shout about this latest insurgency from the nuum zone. But I also just fancied having an opinions outlet - fancied joining in the arguments. Skiving off work while staying sat in front of the screen, in those first three years of blogging I generated probably a book's worth of text even while writing a not-short book on postpunk. 

Everyone knows about K-punk and Woebot (at the start known as That Was A Naughty Bit of Crap) (and which went away, then came back, then went away, came back and then went away yet again - but currently still exists). (And who remembers woebot.tv?)

There was also Luke Davis's heronbone (urgent dispatches from the frontlines of grime, but also poetry and psychogeography), Silverdollarcircle (similarly pirate radio focused),  Martin Clark's Blackdown, John Eden at Uncarved, Paul Meme's Grievous Angel....

(A precursor to this kind of nuum-oriented bloggige was turn-of-millennium webzine Hyperdub, launched by Kode9 well before the label of the same name, and a place where Mark Fisher did some of his earliest public writing about music (under the name Mark De' Rosario) alongside UKdance forum stalwart Bat, Kevin Martin,  Kodwo Eshun, and indeed myself. The Hyperdub archives used to be maintained by bloggish entity Riddim.ca, but have now sadly disappeared. A couple of the proto-K-punk's pieces can be found here, though.)

Adjacent to this cluster but pursuing his own obsessions (Cabaret Voltaire, bleep, etc) and probably more aligned with dubstep than grime, there was Nick Edwards's once-prolific, long-shuttered Gutterbreaks.   Then there was History Is Made At Night, an archaeology of rave and club lore - and the interface between dance culture and politics -  maintained by Neil Transpontine to this day. And the bashmentological analyses of scholar Wayne Marshall at Wayne & Wax.

Getting deeper into the 2000s, the sporadic but extensive posts of Leaving Earth, by the enigmatic Taninian, claimed treasure in underappreciated genres like wobble and skwee, reassessed The Rave LP, and lost me a little with the paeans to postdubstep-as-revolution.  Other electronic-music slanted blogs came and went - Acid Nouveaux, Mentasms, Sonic Truth, Mutant Technology, Drumtrip, Musings of a Socialist Japanologist, Tufluv, World of Stelfox, MNML SSGS - saying interesting things for a year or two before going silent. Probably the most impressive of the second wave of electronic music oriented blogz was Adam Harper's Rouge's Foam.

Rewind a bit: by the mid-2000s, the scene was cleaving between the grimy nuum end of things and the poptimistic cru, each represented by a forum, although neither was as monolithically committed in stance or subject matter as the other might like to make out.  Still, you could have good arguments about these kinds of issues with the likes of Zoilus (aka Carl Wilson), Utopian TurtleTop. Koganbot, Nick Southall's Auspicious Fish, Jane Dark's Sugarhigh. Less-good arguments with others.  

Anti-rockist (OG anti-rockist 4 life) but in an orbit of his own: Momus, elegant and incisive public essayist rather than blogger per se, but hosting a lot of action in the comments. The blog was once called Click Opera, I believe.

When grime faded as a conversation-starter and centripetal agent,  hauntology - for a while, for some -  provided a new focus....   

Now there was a bunch of blogs whose preexisting obsessions with retro design, vintage TV, bygone modernist aesthetics, and sundry musty esoterica placed them in proximity to the H-zone, among them Toys and Techniques, Feuilleton, Rockets and Rayguns, Dispokino, I Hate This Film, and The Sound of Eye.  Then there was collective blog Found Objects.

There was another and quite separate gaggle that included Kid Shirt  (aka Kek-W), An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming  (aka Loki aka Saxon Roach) and Farmer-Glitch  (aka Stephen Ives) who could be considered fellow-travelers, albeit approaching the H-zone from a different angle: that esoterrorist thread running from Coil-y industrial to the eldritch fringes of rave and UK techno (The Black Dog and that sort of thing).  Funnily enough, their very proximity made them sniffy about the H-word -  both as concept and in terms of the output getting bigged up. Some of this blog cluster generated its own wyrdtronic output, via alter-egos like IX-Tab, Hacker Farm, Kemper Norton.... 

Other bloggers stepped into the sonic fray: Gutterbreaks became Ekoplekz and half of eMMplekz, Woebot became a musical as well as textual entity, and K-punk created a bunch of audio essays/ sound artworks. 

While Mark Fisher was a pillar of our end of the scene, K-punk also played a central role in a separate circuit of renegade-academic and philosophy-politics blogs. Not a neighbourhood I frequented much, but Alex Williams at Splintering Bone Ashes had some things to say while Steven Shaviro still does The Pinocchio Theory. 

Quite a lot of people on this circuit became authors (and /or fulfilled other functions) within the Zer0 / Repeater empire: Xenogothic's Matt Colquhoun,  Robin James of  It's Her Factory, Dominic Fox of Poetix. 

Others came to  the imprints via different paths: Carl Neville aka the Impostume, Phil Knight with his mystifyingly closed-and-erased The Phil Zone and later ceased-but-not-deleted The Interregnum Navigation Service.  Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy and The Measures Taken, Alex Niven of The Fantastic Hope, Rhian E. Jones with Velvet Coalmine. There was a cluster of collective blogs oriented around decades - the '70s, '80s, '90s - that involved many of these people and lively places they were for a while.

And then there were those who pursued their own completely personal path into the scene (and out again), helped in some cases by geographical distance - operating in a completely different hemisphere. Anwen Crawford (another who mystifyingly deleted their back pages - in this case fangirl),  Sam Macklin a.k.a connect_icut with Bubblegum Cage III, Geeta Dayal with The Original Soundtrack (now she has a Patreon), Jon Dale with Worlds of Possibility and Attic Plan and  Astronauts Notepad, Sam Davies's Zone Styx Travelcard, Aaron Grossman's Airport Through the Trees, Graham Sanford's Our God Is Speed,  Tim 'Space' Debris's Cardrossmaniac2,  W. David Marx's Néojaponisme, Oliver Craner, Beyond the Implode, Baal at Erase the World, Tom May's Where Shingle Meets Raincoat, Seb's And You May Find Yourself... , Dan Barrow's porridge-free zones The End Times and A Scarlet Tracery....   

Some of these bloggers were already writing in "proper" publications; some started after blogging....

It was interesting to see who out of the already-renowned professionals jumped into the fray and those who stayed aloof. For a virtuoso ranter like Neil Kulkarni, blogging was a natural playpen.  Ian Penman seemed unleashed by the format, frothing torrentially at The Pill Box - until he stopped, abruptly, for "reasons unknown". Chuck Eddy is a copious blogger at Eliminated For Reasons of Space.  David Stubbs has blogged sporadically over the years;  Richard Williams does it more regularly at The Blue Moment. Both these Melody Maker legends, though, are more like online essayists; they don't display that driveling incontinence that is the hallmark of the born-to-blog. 

But there were other pros who seemed to disdain the thought of writing for free.  One or two seemed faintly t

There were various alternatives to blogs that went through vogues - livejournals and tumblrs  - but I never really cathected with  either of these mode-zones, couldn't see what they brought that was a bonus.

And today...  As I say in the column, there's still loads of blogs -  loads of specifically music blogs or mostly-music blogs. Some started relatively recently, like the sporadic but very interesting Aloysius,  the work of Dissensus bod Mvuent, and Infinite Speeds, a Substack by Vincent Jenewein exploring interfaces between philosophical concepts and the materialities of electronic sound + rhythm. Others, I'm unclear when they started but they have entered my ken only recently, like Lost Tempo (another Substack), the work of regular commenter Matt M.  And I see that ex-editor of The Wire Derek Walmsley, who used to have a blog back in the 2000s, recently started a new one: Slow Motion.

There are generation-or-two-below-me oriented entities somewhere between a one-person magazine and a collective blog. Like Joshua Minsoo Kim's Toneglow (another Substack). Like No Bells. To which my own flesh-and-blood contributes, while also operating his own KPRblog (currently surveying 2023 in music). 

So I wind to a close, with so many names unmentioned. 

Forgive me - it's almost certainly by accident. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Xenogothic with some thoughts on blogging.  

Among many other things, Matt talks about blogs operated by musicians, by the likes of Deerhunter and Phil Elverum, as a whole other field of bloggy action. I suppose Momus's Click Opera,  mentioned in the previous Blissblog post about blogs then and now, counts in this category. In an earlier longer version of the Guardian column, I did link to a currently active music-maker blog that I enjoy: Wreckless Eric's Ericland. 

I have been going back and adding more blogs and bloggers that I remembered from the olden days to that post. But there are still swathes of blogging that I didn't cover - even within the music blogging arena.

For instance, I don't talk about MP3 blogs. But then they were never something I got into. The free MP3s seemed as unenticing as the flexi singles attached to fanzines back in the day. And the textual element rarely seemed as interesting as the output of the blogs I considered my true neighbours.

There was a whole other phase of hyperactive blogging I clean forgot about - all the blogs associated with hypnagogic pop and that late 2000s / early 2010s emergence of largely-online DIY micro-genres like witch house and vaporwave.  Blogs such as 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Visitation Rites and Gorilla vs. Bear and Rose Quartz that would be shepherded for a while under the Pitchfork-hosted mantle of Altered Zones.  I tried to evoke its neophiliac fever in this piece:

On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there's no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one's name out there. Stimuli streams in, largely via the Web; creativity streams out, largely via the Web. Today's musician is a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.... This scene is about being engulfed and enthused, carried along by the currents of the new. Drifting not sifting. 

Another huge wave of blog energy - and one that had a huge effect on me, albeit not necessarily for the good - was the whole-album sharing blogs. Some of these didn't just offer an album cover image and a link to Rapidshare / Megaupload  / Mediafire, but had proper textual content: well-written and informative, if rarely polemical or argument-starting. Serious curatorial activity, as undertaken by the likes of Mutant Sounds, Continuo's, Twice Zonked!, A Closet of Curiosities... I wrote about that scene in this piece for The Wire on "sharity" blogs. Even interviewed a couple of figures behind blogs.  That scene is much declined from its height but there's sharity soljas out there still, digging strange shit up... 

Yet another still active sub-subculture of music blogging: the "imaginary albums" blogs. This overlaps with the sharity in so far as they sometimes - not always - share their recreation of the rumored but never released album. Some of these blogs generate an enormous amount of counterfactual text, as discussed in this essay of mine on alternative history and music: 

Fans for years have been creating unfinished or unreleased albums like Beach Boys's  Smile, Hendrix's First Rays of the New Rising Sun, The Beatles's  Get Back, the Who's Lifehouse - using bootlegs, demos, out-takes... Today there is a whole realm of blogs dedicated to this practice - Albums That Never Were, A Crazy Gift of Time, Albums That Should Exist, Albums I Wish Existed… Usually they create fake artwork for the counterfactual albums. 

Some of these blogs, such as Strawberry Peppers, don't stop at creating imaginary albums and record covers - they write incredibly detailed and extensive alternative histories of worlds where the Beatles didn't split up, or where David Bowie joined the Rolling Stones, or where the Soft Machine's Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen don't leave the band, or alternate timelines where Syd Barrett stayed in Pink Floyd.  A kind of counter-discographical mania erupts.  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In addition to Xenogothic, there's been some other post-Guardian-piece posts -  a few from blogs I know well (like Feuilleton), most from blogs I'd never come across before:  Torpedo The Ark, Bhagpuss, The Sphinx. Somewhere amidst all that chatter I gleaned that there's been  unconnected blog talk going on too, at The Lazarus Corporation, at Velcro City Tourist Board, and in a piece about the internet getting weird again by Anil Dash for Rolling Stone.