Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures Part 3

By now, very little a few haunting refrains lingering at the back of your mind separates you from the desert of the real.

Let's not imagine that this condition afflicts only a few unfortunates. Isn't, in fact, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia the postmodern condition par excellence? The present broken, desolated is constantly erasing itself, leaving few traces. Things catch your attention for a while but you do not remember them for very long. But the old memories persist, intact...Constantly commemorated ... I love 1923...

Do we really have more substance than the ghosts we endlessly applaud?

The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered.

Take care. It's a desert out there...

Memory Disorder: Interview with.

The Caretaker.

The Wire 304, June 2009.

'I have always been fascinated by memory and its recall especially where sound is concerned,' writes James Kirby via email. 'Some things we remember easily and others we never seem to grasp. That idea was developed more on the boxset I did [2006's Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia] which was based around a specific form of amnesia where sufferers can remember things from the past but are unable to remember new things. To recreate that in sound was a challenge that I relished really. I realised the only way was to make a disorientating set with very few reference points. Fragments of melody breaking out of this monotonous tone and audio quagmire. Even if you listen over and over to all the songs you still can't remember when these melodies will come in. You have no favourite tracks, it's like a dream you are trying to remember. Certain things are clear but the details are still buried and distant.'

Kirby's description perfectly captures the unsettling experience of listening to Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia. With the release of the six CD boxset, his project The Caretaker crossed over from being an exercise in atmospheric nostalgia to being a harrowing investigation of memory disorder. The box set is more like a sonic installation than a record, a work whose conceptual and textural richness puts much sound art to shame. The first three Caretaker records Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (1999), A Stairway To The Stars (2001) and We'll All Go Riding On A Rainbow (2003) swathed sampled British tearoom pop in a gaslit halo of reverb and crackle. On Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia the effects and the surface noise take over, so that instead of a gently dubdilapidated pop, there is an unnavigable murk, as abstract and minimal as a Beckett landscape. Echoes and reverberations float free of any originating sound source in a sea of hiss and static. If the earlier records suggested s.p.a.ces that were mildewed but still magnificent grand hotels gone to seed, long abandoned ballrooms Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia invokes sites that have deteriorated into total dereliction, where every unidentified noise is pregnant with menace. The 72 tracks all of them numbered rather than named simulate the amnesiac condition, and the few fragments of well known tunes that occasionally flare in the gloom are intermittent islands of familiarity in a world that has become hostile and unrecognisable.

'Maybe it's a dark humour, a kind of an audio black comedy,' Kirby says of The Caretaker, but the solemnity of the project belies Kirby's reputation as a prankster. His label V/Vm notoriously released a version of Lieutenant Pigeon's 'Mouldy Old Dough' just after appearing on the cover of The Wire 176 under the headline 'Harder! Faster! Louder!', one of a series of manglings of mainstream music tracks by Chris de Burgh, John Lennon and Elton John were also butchered and rea.s.sembled that V/Vm issued.

It is the focus on cultural memory that holds together all of Kirby's work, including the V/Vm mashups. If the V/Vm (sub)versions of pop come from the brash side of postmodern pastiche, then The Caretaker is about the dark side of cultural retrospection. Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia was in many ways an act of diagnosis of a cultural pathology. It might seem strange to describe a culture that is so dominated by past forms as being amnesiac, but the kind of nostalgia that is now so pervasive may best be characterised not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories. Fredric Jameson described one of the impa.s.ses of postmodern culture as the inability 'to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience.' The past keeps coming back because the present cannot be remembered. Memory disorders have recurred as themes in the popular cinema in the past decade or so: it is theoretically pure anterograde amnesia that afflicts Leonard, the lead character in Memento, while the ma.s.sively successful Bourne films were preoccupied with memory loss. It is not surprising that anxieties about memory should continually surface in late capitalism, where, as Jameson and others have argued, perpetual economic instability and the rapid turnover of ephemeral images leads to a breakdown in any coherent sense of temporality.

Kirby has approached the failure of the future from a different angle on another of his projects, 2006's The Death Of Rave. Here, Rave is desubstantialised, stripped of all ba.s.s weight and drum propulsion, reduced to shimmer and haze. The tracks sound like they are being heard from outside a club: a horribly accurate sonic metaphor, perhaps, of our current state of exile from the future-shocking rate of innovation that dance music achieved in the 80s and 90s. 'Yeah, that project really is in its infancy,' Kirby says. 'It came about as part of the V/Vm 365 project where the aim was to make one audio track a day. I used to go Raves when I was younger, went through that whole explosion in electronic music from 1987 to around 1992-93 when it seemed like there was a new genre every single week. It was an amazing time in music to hear so many things happening and so many new possibilities opening up and to see and feel the energy of new music exploding on dancefloors and in clubs. I think The Death Of Rave is about the loss in that spirit and a total loss of energy in most electronic musics across the board. I feel sorry these days for people when I go to clubs as that energy isn't there any more. I mean we have some so called very cool clubs in Berlin such as Watergate and Berghain, but you compare them to those back in the late 80s and early 90s in Manchester and it really is no comparison. Of course new things pop up but the difference now really is that if something explodes then before it can grow naturally people have strangled it to death with parodies online and often a scene or new style is dead before it even surfaces. House and Techno for instance took a long time to mature in Chicago and Detroit, now there is no time, once an idea is out of the rabbit's hat it's copied ad infinitum until the energy is gone. That is the key word 'energy', it's the one thing I have always been inspired by. For me those Death Of Rave tracks are about stripping Rave music from all its energy and spirit of fun taking the audio from the Rave to the grave, if you like.' The tracks are like energy flashbacks, frail figments of Rave reconstructed in a serotonin-depleted brain.

Kirby's other project The Stranger is organised around s.p.a.ce rather than time. 'The Stranger really is a darker version of The Caretaker,' Kirby says, 'and is its closest relative. The Stranger is about creating a physical location in sound. The last alb.u.m for example [2008's Bleaklow] was about the site of Bleaklow which is in the Peak District, it can be a grim place on the dark grey days but also beautiful on sunny days. Weirdly I had a few people get in touch with me who walk up there and they told me I captured the atmosphere perfectly and they used it as they were walking up there. I guess the odd glint of sunshine coming through that slate northern grey sky could be heard aurally.'

Kirby himself now lives in Berlin. 'I moved to Berlin as it has the atmosphere and opportunities of the big city but also there's a lot of s.p.a.ce here to think more and also it's easy to hide away on the dark streets here. Also it's not as brutal as Manchester here, there is more of an openess as people don't follow the media and news so much.' Like The Stranger, though, The Caretaker remains a project rooted in Britishness 'it's often only British music which has been used as source material.' A parallel for The Caretaker's excavation of pre-rock British pop is Dennis Potter's musical drama for television, Pennies From Heaven. 'The use of audio in Pennies From Heaven is amazing along with its vibrancy and colour and of course the way Dennis Potter uses the sadness in the lyrics to keep telling the story is also special as these songs really are stories in themselves. John Clifford and Herk Harvey's film Carnival of Souls (1962) was also a point of reference, the closing scenes in that film could even be audio from A Stairway To The Stars. I only saw that film after people had mentioned it to me. It works a lot that way, people will draw a line to something and I will then investigate that too.'

But of course the main initial impetus for The Caretaker was Kubrick's The Shining. The name 'the caretaker' was taken from the role that Jack Torrance is condemned to forever play in the haunted Overlook hotel ('you've always been the caretaker', Torrance is told in one of the film's most chilling moments). The conceit was simple: inspired by 'the haunting sequences which feature the ballroom music which is playing only in Jack's mind', Kirby thought, why not make a whole alb.u.m of material that might also have played in the Overlook? The Shining soundtrack includes two tracks by Al Bowlly, the between-the-wars crooner whose songs features in many of Potter's dramas, and Kirby sought out music in a similar vein. 'I spent a lot of time searching out music from that era over a two or three year period and constantly started to play around with this source material. The interesting thing for me is the fact that most of that music is about ghosts and loss as it was recorded between both the world wars. It's of a totally different era and had more or less been forgotten. t.i.tles inspired new ideas as did the audio itself. I was fortunate as there was a great record shop near where I was in Stockport which was ran by two old guys and it specialised in 78s. I would take in audio and ask then what was similar and they would scuttle off into the back of the shop and dig out some old catalogue from the 1930s and then pull out vinyls for me. It was an amazing resource sadly which is no longer there as one of the guys pa.s.sed away and the other decided to close the shop. It was like a timewarp in there, like going back 30 or 40 years. They would hand write receipts and half of their stock was in this backroom you were denied access too. They had no idea what I was doing in there buying these records, though one of them told me one time 'You were born in the wrong era as n.o.body is interested in this music who is your age."

Kirby has tuned to more recent history for an upcoming project. 'It has been in my mind for a while to work on a Scragill/Thatcher project and this is the perfect time for this now as we approach the 25th anniversary of the Miners Strike. A lot has been written elsewhere about this conflict and its outcome and legacy, I have been scouring online and also have picked up some amazing footage to reprocess. It will link closely to The Caretaker in terms of its style as it will be like watching a half remembered version due to the processing. Some of the footage is totally ghostlike as it was recorded on VHS tapes from Miners back in 1984, so there is a real loss in quality and the sound fails to match the visuals. It's looking like a dream version maybe. This will be mainly video work with also an incredibly limited vinyl release featuring audio from these videos and some exclusive audio work.' This will fit into a series of re-stagings of the Miners Strike this decade, including Jeremy Deller and Artangel's The Battle Of Orgreave and David Peace's GB84.

Kirby decided to close V/Vm down last year. 'V/Vm was a vehicle for a lot of the work I have done but I think now as music consumers we have reached a point where labels are not so important, what is more important is delivery and availability of work.' It is partly the possibilities for the online distribution of music, which Kirby has always been enthusiastic about, that led him to end V/Vm, but he 'also found I was using the name V/Vm less and less when it comes to new works. I've been working on a very personal alb.u.m in terms of moods I want to convey and I guess I may use my own name for that.' In fact, the alb.u.m, ent.i.tled History Always Favours The Winners, will come out under the name Leyland Kirby ('Leyland is my grandather's and my middle name. There are already too many James Kirby's making music out there, if I believe Google. Now I'm only competing with a glamour model from Sheffield in the Google search.') The Leyland Kirby music was made without the use of samples, but it has clearly been informed by Kirby's time in the vaults. The tracks have an eerily untimely quality, a stately grace, a filmic scope. On 'When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart', a doleful, echo-refracted piano desolately tracks through subdued electronic textures. 'The Sound Of Our Music Vanishing' is a more violent exercise in thwarted recall here it as if the memories are rushing in and being obliterated at the same time, like Basinski if the tapes were being violently shredded instead of gently disintegrating. The epic 'When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die', meanwhile, has a swelling, magisterial melancholy that recalls Angelo Badalamenti.

The Caretaker project continues, however. 'I have started to play shows finally as The Caretaker, usually I just like to let the music just creep out of the speakers as if it's actually the venue playing the audio or that the sounds are in your own mind. I played in Athens last week in a pitch black room which worked well, maybe I can work some visuals into the live process but they would have to add to the audio and not distract the listening process. I am always of course interested in playing more relevant locations, so for instance Blackpool Tower would be amazing as the ballroom there is a great Victorian example and perfect for this particular audio recall.'

'More than anything it's all about research and mood when making the alb.u.ms,' Kirby replies when I ask him how he makes The Caretaker records. 'Knowing the source material, maybe hearing a lyrical phrase which opens up an idea in my mind or indeed just reading something, such as with the Anterograde boxset which sparked off another idea and offered a different tangent and possibility. Without going into the specifics, things are reworked totally in a digital realm until the right mood surfaces. It's very important too that I am in the right mood mentally to make that music which I think comes across certainly in the later alb.u.ms, as opposed maybe to the first alb.u.m. I am getting better at realising the days when I get the best results now when working on a specific project. It's strange really because there is a full range of emotions in the music when I listen back, from loss to happiness, dislocation, regret, longing. Maybe it's the source music itself which inspires this, but there are still for me a lot of personal moments in amongst those alb.u.ms. Maybe even some of my own memories are intertwined in there.'

The word 'research' keeps coming up in Kirby's discussion of The Caretaker project. 'I have been doing a lot of online research in the last couple of years and also have been watching a lot of doc.u.mentaries about people who suffer from brain disorders and memory problems. The last release [2008's Persistent Repet.i.tion of Phrases] was based around a lot of conditions where the sufferer just repeats themselves, so the audio featured a lot of loops and microloops, it was a lot warmer and more gentle than the boxset release. Not all memories are necessarily bad or disturbing memories.' On Persistent Repet.i.tion of Phrases, one of The Wire's top ten records of last year, there was accordingly a return of the some of the prettiness that was absent from Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, but there was also an icy lucidity, an exquisite poise, about the record. It felt like a distillation and a consolidation. 'The challenge now is to move the sound somewhere else brainwise and memory wise, that will take time to find the new direction. More research will have to be done before I find the best pathway for future exploration. I would also love to use this music on film as it would be perfect for this, so maybe a door will open somewhere.'

Home is Where The Haunt is:.

The Shining's Hauntology.

k-punk post, January 23, 2006.

1. The sound of hauntology.

Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension.

The pun hauntology, ontology works in spoken French, after all. In terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here, the recorded voice, the voice no longer the guarantor of presence (Ian P: 'Where does the Singer's voice GO, when it is erased from the dub track?') Not phonocentrism but phonography, sound coming to occupy the dis-place of writing.

Nothing here but us recordings...

2. Ghosts of the Real.

Derrida's neologism uncovers the s.p.a.ce between Being and Nothingness.

The Shining in both book and film versions, and here I suggest a side-stepping of the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians and propose treating the novel and the film as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set of interlocking correspondences and differences, a row of doors is about what lurks, unquiet, in that s.p.a.ce. Insofar as they continue to frighten us once we've left the cinema, the ghosts that dwell here are not supernatural. As with Vertigo (1958), in The Shining it is only when the possibility of supernatural spooks has been laid to rest that we can confront the Real ghosts...or the ghosts of the Real.

3. The haunted ballroom Mark Sinker: 'ALL [Kubrick's] films are fantastically 'listenable' (if you use this in sorta the same sense you use watchable)'

Where does.

The conceit of The Caretaker's Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole alb.u.m's worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining's Overlook Hotel. Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of 20s and 30s tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now', for instance, one of the tracks actually used by Kubrick on The Shining soundtrack, is slurred down, faded in and out, as if it is being heard in the ethereal wireless of the dreaming mind or played on the winding-down gramophone of memory. As Ian Penman wrote of dub: 'It makes of the Voice not a self-possession but a dispossession a 're' possession by the studio, detoured through the hidden circuits of the recording console.'

the singer's voice.

GO?.

4. In the Gold Room.

Jameson: 'it is by the twenties that the hero is haunted and possessed...'

Kubrick's editing of the film does not allow any of the polyvalencies of that phrase, 'It's All Forgotten Now', to go un(re)marked. The uncanniness of the song, today and 25 years ago when the film was released, arises from the (false but unavoidable) impression that it is commenting on itself and its period, as if were an example of the way in which that era of beautiful and d.a.m.ned decadence and Gatsby glamour were painfully, delightfully aware of its own b.u.t.terfly's wing evanescence and fragility. Simultaneously, the song's place in the film it plays in the background as a bewildered Jack speaks to Grady in the bathroom about the fact that Grady has killed himself after brutally murdering his children indicates that what is forgotten may also be preserved: through the mechanism of repression.

I don't have any recollection of that at all.

Why does this Gold Room Pop, all those moonlight serenades and summer romances, have such power? The Caretaker's spectralised versions of those lost tunes only intensifies something that Kubrick, like Dennis Potter, had identified in the pop of the 20s and 30s. I've tried to write before about the peculiar aching quality of these songs that are melancholy even at their most ostensibly joyful, forever condemned to stand in for states that they can evoke but never instantiate.

For Fredric Jameson, the Gold Room revels bespeak a nostalgia for 'the last moment in which a genuine American leisure cla.s.s led an aggressive and ostentatious public existence, in which an American ruling cla.s.s projected a cla.s.s-conscious and unapologetic image of itself and enjoyed its privileges without guilt, openly and armed with its emblems of top-hat and champagne gla.s.s, on the social stage in full view of the other cla.s.ses'. But the significance of this genteel, conspicuous hedonism must be construed psychoa.n.a.lytically as well as merely historically. The 'past' here is not an actual historical period so much as a fantasmatic past, a Time that can only ever be retrospectively retrospectrally posited. The 'haunted ballroom' functions in Jack's libidinal echonomy (to borrow a neologism from Irigaray) as the place of belonging in which, impossibly, the demands of both the paternal and the maternal superegos can be met, the honeyed, dreamy utopia where doing his duty would be equivalent to enjoying himself...Thus, after his conversations with bartender Lloyd and waiter Grady (Jack's frustrations finding a blandly indulgent blank mirror sounding board in the former and a patrician, patriarchal voice in the latter), Jack comes to believe that he would be failing in his duty as a man and a father if he didn't succ.u.mb to his desire to kill his wife and child.

White man's burden, Lloyd...white man's burden...

If the Gold Room seems to be a male s.p.a.ce (it's no accident that the conversation with Grady takes place in the men's room), the place in which Jack via male intermediaries, intercessors working on behalf of the hotel management, the house, the house that pays for his drinks faces up to his 'man's burdens', it is also the s.p.a.ce in which he can succ.u.mb to the injunction of the maternal superego: 'Enjoy'.

Michel Ciment: 'When Jack arrives at the Overlook, he describes this sensation of familiarity, of well-being ('It's very homey'), he would 'like to stay here forever', he confesses even to having 'never been this happy, or comfortable anywhere', refers to a sense of deja vu and has the feeling that he has 'been here before'. 'When someone dreams of a locality or a landscape,' according to Freud, 'and while dreaming thinks "I know this, I've been here before", one is authorised to interpret that place as subst.i.tuting for the genital organs and the maternal body.'

5. Patriarchy/hauntology.

Isn't Freud`s thesis first advanced in Totem and Taboo and then repeated, with a difference, in Moses and Monotheism, simply this: patriarchy is a hauntology? The father whether the obscene Alpha Ape Pere-Jouissance of Totem and Taboo or the severe, forbidding patriarch of Moses and Monotheism is inherently spectral. In both cases, the Father is murdered by his resentful children who want to re-take Eden and access total enjoyment. Their father's blood on their hands, the children discover, too late, that total enjoyment is not possible. Now stricken by guilt, they find that the dead Father survives in the mortification of their own flesh, and in the introjected voice which demands its deadening.

6. A History of Violence.

Ciment: 'The camera itself with its forward, lateral and reverse tracking shots...following a rigorously geometric circuit adds further to the sense of implacable logic and an almost mathematical progression.'

Even before he enters the Overlook, Jack is fleeing his ghosts. And the horror, the absolute horror, is that he haunter and the hunted flees to the place where they are waiting. Such is The Shining's pitiless fatality (and the novel is if anything even more brutal in its diagramming of the network of causeandeffect, the awful Necessity, the 'generalized determinism', of Jack's plight than the film).

Jack has a history of violence. In both novel and film of The Shining, the Torrance family is haunted by the prospect that Jack will hurt Danny...again. Jack has already snapped, drunkenly attacked Danny. An aberration, a miscalculation, 'a momentary loss of muscular coordination. A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second, per second': so Jack tries to convince Wendy, and Wendy tries to convince herself. The novel tells us more. How has it come to this, that a proud man, an educated man, like Jack, is reduced to sitting there, false, greasy grin plastered all over his face, sucking up everything that a smarmy corporate non-ent.i.ty like Stuart Ulman serves up? Why, because he has been sacked from his teaching job for attacking a pupil, of course. That is why Jack will accept, and be glad of, Ulman's menial job in Overlook.

The history of violence goes back even further. One of the things missing from the film but dealt with at some length in the novel is the account of Jack's relationship with his father. It's another version of patriarchy's occult history, now not so secret: abuse begetting abuse. Jack is to Danny as Jack's father was to him. And Danny will be to his child...?

The violence has been pa.s.sed on, like a virus. It's there inside Jack, like a photograph waiting to develop, a recording ready to be played.

Refrain, refrain...

7. Home is where the haunt is.

The word 'haunt' and all the derivations thereof may be one of the closest English word to the German 'unheimlich', whose polysemic connotations and etymological echoes Freud so a.s.siduously, and so famously, unravelled in his essay on 'The Uncanny'. Just as 'German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the 'homely') to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the 'unhomely')' (Freud), so 'haunt' signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it. The OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word 'haunt' as 'to provide with a home, house.'

Fittingly, then, the best interpretations of The Shining position it between melodrama and horror, much as Cronenberg's History of Violence (2005) is positioned between melodrama and the action film. In both cases, the worst Things, the real Horror, is already Inside.... (and what could be worse than that?) You would never hurt Mommie or me, would ya?

8. The house always wins What horrors does the big, looming house present? For the women of Horrodrama, it has threatened non-Being, either because the woman will be unable to differentiate herself from the domestic s.p.a.ce or because as in Rebecca (itself an echo of Jane Eyre) she will be unable to take the place of a spectral-predecessor. Either way, she has no access to the proper name. Jack's curse, on the other hand, is that he is nothing but the carrier of the patronym, and everything he does always will have been the case.

I'm sorry to differ with you, sir. But you are the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I've always been here.

9. I'm right behind you Danny Metz: 'When Jack chases Danny into the maze with ax in hand and states, 'I`m right behind you Danny', he is predicting Danny`s future as well as trying to scare the boy.'

Predicting Danny`s future Jack might be, but that is why he could equally well say 'I'm just ahead of you Danny...' Danny may physically have escaped Jack, but psychically...? The Shining leaves us with the awful suspicion that Danny may become (his) Daddy, that the damage has already been done (had already been done even before he was born), that the photograph has been taken, the recording made; all that is left is the moment of development, of playing back.

Unmask!

(And how does Danny escape from Jack? By walking backwards in his father's footsteps).

10. The No Time of trauma Jack: Mr. Grady. You were the caretaker here. I recognise ya. I saw your picture in the newspapers. You, uh, chopped your wife and daughters up into little bits. And then you blew your brains out.

Grady: That's strange, sir. I don't have any recollection of that at all.

What is the time when Jack meets Grady?

It seems that the murder and suicide has already happened, Grady tells Jack that he had to correct his daughters. Yet not surprisingly Grady has no memory Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now' wafting in the background of any such events.

'I don't have any recollection of that at all.'

(And you think, well, it's not the sort of thing that you'd forget, killing yourself and your children, is it? But of course, it's not the sort of thing that you could possibly remember. It is an exemplary case of that which must be repressed, the traumatic Real.) Jack: Mr. Grady. You were the caretaker here.

Grady: I'm sorry to differ with you, sir. But you are the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I've always been here.

11. Overlooked Overlook: To look over or at from a higher place.

To fail to notice or consider; miss.

Hauntological Blues: Little Axe.

k-punk post, October 3, 2006.

Since we're talking about hauntology, we ought to have mentioned Beloved by now: not only Morrison's novel, but also Demme's astonishing film. It's telling that Demme is celebrated for his silly grand guignol, The Silence of the Lambs, while Beloved is forgotten, repressed, screened out. Hopkins' pantomime ham turn as Lecter surely spooks no-one, whereas Thandie Newton's automaton-stiff, innocent-malevolent performance as Beloved is almost unberable: grotesque, disturbing, moving in equal measure.

Like The Shining a film that was also widely dismissed for nigh on a decade Beloved (1998) reminds us that America, with its anxious hankerings after an 'innocence' it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repet.i.tion, the same old story. The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World...but here they are...

Whereas The Shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the American family and finds an Indian Burial Ground, Beloved pitches us right into the atrocious heart of America's other genocide: slavery and its aftermath. No doubt the film's commercial failure was in part due to the fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too Real. When you leave the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a Real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. Some viewers complain that Beloved should have been recla.s.sifed as Horror...well, so should American history...

Beloved comes to mind often as I listen to Stone Cold Ohio, the outstanding new LP by Little Axe. Little Axe have been releasing records for over a decade now, but, in the 90s, my nervous system amped up by jungle's crazed accelerations, I wasn't ready to be seduced by their lugubrious dub blues. In 2006, however, the haunted bayous of Stone Cold Ohio take their place alongside Burial's phantom-stalked South London and Ghost Box's abandoned television channels in hauntological Now. Since I received Stone Cold Ohio last week, I've listened to little else; and when I wasn't immersed in Stone Cold Ohio I was re-visiting the other four Little Axe LPs. The combination of skin-tingling voices (some original, some sampled) with dub s.p.a.ce and drift is deeply addictive. Little Axe's world is entrancing, vivid, often harrowing; it's easy to get lost in these thickets and fogs, these phantom plantations built on casual cruelty, these makeshift churches that nurtured collective dreams of escape...

Shepherds...

Do you hear the lambs are crying?.

Little Axe's records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption. Yet utopian longings also stir in the fetid swamps and unmarked graveyards; there are moments of unbowed defiance and fugitive joy here too.

I know my name is written in the Kingdom....

Little Axe is Skip McDonald's project. Through his involvement with the likes of Ohio Players, the Sugarhill Gang and Mark Stewart, McDonald has always been a.s.sociated with future-orientated pop. If Little Axe appear at first sight to be a retreat from full-on future shock McDonald returning to his first encounter with music, when he learned blues on his father's guitar we are not dealing here the familiar, tiresome story of a 'mature' disavowal of modernism in the name of a re-treading of Trad form. In fact, Little Axe's anachronistic temporality can be seen as yet another rendering of future shock; except that this time, it is the vast una.s.similable trauma, the SF catastrophe, of slavery that is being confronted. (Perhaps it always was...) Even though Little Axe are apt to be described as 'updating the blues for the 21st century' they could equally be seen as downdating the 21st century into the early 20th. Their dyschronia is reminiscent of those moments in Stephen King's It where old photographs come to (a kind of) life, and there is a hallucinatory suspension of sequentiality. Or, better, to the time slips in Octavia Butler's Kindred, where contemporary characters are abducted back into the waking nightmare of slavery. (The point being: the nightmare never really ended...) There is no doubt that blues has a privileged position in pop's metaphysics of presence: the image of the singer-songwriter alone with his guitar provides rockism with its emblem of authenticity and authorship. But Little Axe's return to the supposed beginnings unsettles this by showing that there were ghosts at the origin. Hauntology is the proper temporal mode for a history made up of gaps, erased names and sudden abductions. The traces of gospel, spirituals and blues out of which Stone Cold Ohio is a.s.sembled are not the relics of a lost presence, but the fragments of a time permanently out of joint. These musics were vast collective works of mourning and melancholia. Little Axe confront American history as a single 'empire of crime', where the War on Terror decried on Stone Cold Ohio's opening track a post 9/11 re-channelling of Blind Willie Johnson's 'If I had My Way' is continuous with the terrordome of slavery.

When I interviewed Skip, he emphasised that Little Axe tracks always begins with the samples. The origin is out of joint. He has described before the anachronising Method-ology he uses to transport himself into the past. 'I like to surf time. What I like to do is study time-periods get right in to 'em, so deep it gets real heavy in there.' McDonald's deep immersion in old music allows him to travel back in time and the ghosts to move forward. It is a kind of possession (recalling Winfrey's claim that she and the cast were 'possessed' when they were making Beloved). Little Axe's records skilfully mystify questions of authorship and attribution, origination and repet.i.tion. It is difficult to disentangle sampling from songwriting, impossible to draw firm lines between a cover version and an original song. Songs are texturally-dense palimpsests, accreted rather than auth.o.r.ed. McDonald's own vocals, by turns doleful, quietly enraged and affirmatory, are often doubled as well as dubbed. They and the modern instrumentation repeatedly sink into grainy sepia and misty trails of reverb, falling into a dyschronic contemporeanity with the crackly samples.

In his landmark piece on Tricky (the piece, really, in which sonic hauntology was first broached), Ian Penman complained about Greil Marcus' 'measured humanism which leaves little room for the UNCANNY in music'. Part of the reason Little Axe are intriguing is that their use of dub makes it possible for us to encounter blues as uncanny and untimely again. Little Axe position blues not as part of American history, as Marcus does, but as one corner of the Black Atlantic. What makes the combination of blues and dub far more than a gimmick is that there is an uncanny logic behind the superimposition of two corners of the Black Atlantic over one another.

Adrian Sherwood's role in the band is crucial. Sherwood has said that Little Axe take inspiration from the thought that there is a common ground to be found in 'the music of Captain Beefheart and Prince Far I, King Tubby and Jimi Hendrix'. In the wrong hands, a syncresis like this could end up as a recipe for stodgy, Whole Earth humanism. But Sherwood is a designer of OtherWorld music, an expert in eeriness, a kind of anti-Jools Holland. What is most pernicious about Holland is the way in which, under his stewardship, pop is de-artificialised, re-naturalised, blokily traced back to a facialised source. Dub, evidently, goes in exactly the opposite direction it estranges the voice, or points up the voice's inherent strangeness. When I interviewed Sherwood, he was delighted by my description of his art as 'schizophonic' Sherwood detaches sounds from sources, or at least occults the relationship between the two. The tyranny of Holland's Later ... has corresponded with the rise of no-nonsense pop which suppresses the role of recording and production. But 'Dub was a breakthrough because the seam of its recording was turned inside out for us to hear and exult in; when we had been used to the "re" of recording being repressed, recessed, as though it really were just a re-presentation of something that already existed in its own right.' (Penman) Hence what I have called dubtraction; and what is subtracted, first of all, is presence. Pierre Schaeffer's term for a sound that is detached from a source is 'acousmatic'. The dub producer, then, is an acousmatician, a manipulator of sonic phantoms that have been detached from live bodies. Dub time is unlive, and the producer's necromantic role his raising of the dead is doubled by his treating of the living as if dead. For Little Axe, as for the bluesmen and the Jamaican singers and players they channel, hauntology is a political gesture: a sign that the dead will not be silenced.

I'm a prisoner.

Somehow I will be free.