Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures Part 4

Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly.

'Myself and my friend Jim Jupp had been making music, independently and together for a while, and also obsessing over the same things the cosmic horror of Machen, Lovecraft, the Radiophonic Workshop, weird folk and the occult. We realised that we wanted to put our music out, but also create our own world where we could play with all these reference points. Starting our own label was the only way to do it.' Julian House is describing how he and his school-friend Jim Jupp came to found the Ghost Box label.

Off-kilter bucolic, drenched in an over-exposed post-psyche-delic sun, Ghost Box recordings are uneasy listening to the letter. If nostalgia famously means 'homesickness', then Ghost Box sound is about unhomesickness, about the uncanny spectres entering the domestic environment through the cathode ray tube. At one level, the Ghost Box is television itself; or a television that has disappeared, itself become a ghost, a conduit to the Other Side, now only remembered by those of a certain age. No doubt there comes a point when every generation starts pining for the artefacts of its childhood but was there something special about the TV of the 1970s which Ghost Box releases obsessively reference?

'I think there definitely was something powerful about the children's TV from that period,' House maintains. 'I think it was just after the 60s, these musicians and animators, film makers had come through the psychedelic thing and acid folk, they had these strange dark obsessions that they put into their TV programmes. Also, someone like Nigel Kneale had obviously come from a tradition of HP Lovecraft 20th century science used as a background to cosmic horror and the occult. The themes he explored in the Quaterma.s.s series eventually found their way into Doctor Who, Children of the Stones, Sapphire and Steel. If you look at the BBC Radiophonic workshop, people like David Cain also studied medieval music, and he did a great dark folky electronic alb.u.m called The Seasons. And a few of Paddy Kingsland's arrangements bring to mind Pentangle. It's like there was this strange past/future thing which had come through psychedelia.'

The affect produced by Ghost Box's releases (sound and images, the latter absolutely integral) are the direct inverse of irritating postmodern citation-blitz. The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a c.o.c.ksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten, the poorly remembered and the confabulated. Listening to sample-based sonic genres like Jungle and early hip-hop you typically found yourself experiencing dej vudu or dej entendu, in which a familiar sound, estranged by sampling, nagged just beyond recognisability. Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial dej vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s: not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box's hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing: forgotten programmes, uncommissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up.

Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, Eric Zann names from an alternative 70s that never ended, a digitally-reconstructed world in which a.n.a.logue rules forever, a time-scrambled Moorc.o.c.kian near-past. This return to the a.n.a.logue via the digital is one of the ways in which Ghost Box records are not straight-up simulations of the past. 'We like to confuse the boundaries between a.n.a.logue and digital. Jim uses a combination of a.n.a.logue synths and digital technology. In the Focus Group stuff there are samples of old percussion alb.u.ms and digital effects, electronic sounds generated on the computer and processed found sounds. I think it's do with this s.p.a.ce between what happens in the computer and what happens outside of it. The recording of s.p.a.ce, real reverb/room sound and the virtual s.p.a.ce on the hard drive. Like different dimensions.'

'It was bang on 1980 when Fairlights and DX7s appeared in electronic music,' Jupp points out. 'I suppose that digital technology is a tipping point in culture in general, even in the way that television is made.' Yet Belbury Poly's sound relies on digital equipment. 'At the heart of it is a computer and we don't hide that fact. Having said that, I'm sitting in the studio now and it's mostly a.n.a.logue synths and a pile of acoustic instruments, what we do couldn't exist without hip-hop and sampling culture and the access to cheap electronic instruments. It's revisiting old textures and old imagined worlds with new tools.'

Jupp laughs when I suggest that there was a certain grain to 70s British culture that got smoothed away by 80s style culture gloss. 'It's almost as if we became totally Americanised, got our teeth fixed and had a proper wash. I was talking to someone the other day whose girlfriend can't stand him watching old sitcoms, she always calls it grot TV. I know what she means. But maybe in TV, radio and records then there was a feel that was washed clean in the 80s when everything was angular, digital, American, upbeat and colourful.'

Ghost Box explore a sonic continuum which stretches from the quirkily cheery to the insinuatingly sinister. The most obvious predecessors lie in 'functional music', sounds designed to hover at the edge of perceptibility, not to hog centre-stage: signature tunes, incidental music, music that is instantly recognizable but whose authors, more often (self-)styled as technicians rather than artists, remain anonymous. The Radiophonic Workshop (whose two 'stars', Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, became widely recognised only after their deaths) would be the obvious template. House agrees: 'I think the key reference is the Radiophonic Workshop, which is wildly experimental (Britain's electronic avant garde, the equivalent of GRM Pierre Schaeffer in France etc.) but it's also incredibly evocative of radio and television with which we grew up. It's got a sort of duality to it, it's haunting in its own right but also serves as a memory trigger. I think this dim, half remembered aspect of old Hammer films, Doctor Who, Quaterma.s.s is important it's not like an I Love 1974 reminiscence. Rather than being just nostalgia, it's triggering something darker, you're remembering the strange ideas in these programmes, the stuff under the surface, rather than just knowing the theme tune. I think this is why Library music is such an influence you listen to the alb.u.ms divorced from context and it operates on an unconscious level, like musical cues for missing visuals.

When I grew up Doctor Who episodes like The Sea Devils haunted me, the way slightly shaky monsters and sets have their own uncanny horror. The loud blasts of Atonal music. The first time I saw the Hammer film of Quaterma.s.s and the Pit really affected me. And those dimly remembered eastern European animations had a certain quality. Also, certain public information films and adverts.'

Ghost Box preside over a (slightly) alternative world in which the Radiophonic Workshop were more important than the Beatles. In a sense that is our world, because the Workshop rendered even the most experimental rock obsolete even before it had happened. But of course you are not comparing like with like here; the Beatles occupied front stage in the Pop Spectacle, whereas the Radiophonic Workshop insinuated their jingles, idents, themes and special FX into the weft of everyday life. The Workshop was properly unheimlich, unhomely, fundamentally tied up with a domestic environment that had been invaded by media.

Naturally, Ghost Box have been accused of nostalgia, and of course this plays a part in their appeal. But their aesthetic in fact exhibits a more paradoxical impulse: in a culture dominated by retrospection, what they are nostalgic for is nothing less than (popular) modernism itself. Ghost Box are at their most beguiling when they foreground dyschronia, broken time as on Belbury Poly's 'Caermaen' (from 2004's The Willows) and 'Wetland' (from 2006's The Owl's Map) where folk voices summoned from beyond the grave are made to sing new songs. Dyschronia is integral to the Focus Group's whole methodology; the joins are too audible, the samples too jagged, for their tracks to sound like refurbished artefacts.

In any case, at their best, Ghost Box conjure a past that never was. Their artwork fuses the look of comprehensive school text books and public service manuals with allusions to weird fiction, a fusion that has more to do with the compressions and conflations of dreamwork than with memory. House himself talks of 'a strange dream of a school textbook'. The implicit demand for such a s.p.a.ce in Ghost Box inevitably reminds us that the period since 1979 in Britain has seen the gradual but remorseless destruction of the very concept of the public. At the same time, Ghost Box also remind us that the people who worked in the Radiophonic Workshop were effectively public servants, that they were employed to produce a weird public s.p.a.ce a public s.p.a.ce very different from the bureaucratic dreariness invoked by neoliberal propaganda.

Public s.p.a.ce has been consumed and replaced by something like the third place exemplified by franchise coffee bars. These s.p.a.ces are uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness, and the monotony of the Starbucks environment is both rea.s.suring and oddly disorientating; inside the pod, it's possible to literally forget what city you are in. What I have called nomadalgia is the sense of unease that these anonymous environments, more or less the same the world over, provoke; the travel sickness produced by moving through s.p.a.ces that could be anywhere. My, I... what happened to Our s.p.a.ce, or the idea of a public that was not reducible to an aggregate of consumer preferences?

In Ghost Box, the lost concept of the public has a very palpable presence-in-absence, via samples of public service announcements. (Incidentally one connection between rave and Ghost Box is the Prodigy's sampling of this kind of announcement on 'Charly'.) Public service announcements remembered because they could often be disquieting, particularly for children const.i.tute a kind of reservoir of collective unconscious material. The disinterment of such broadcasts now cannot but play as the demand for a return of the very concept of public service. Ghost Box repeatedly invoke public bodies through names (Belbury Poly, the Advisory Circle) and also forms (the tourist brochure, the textbook).

Confronted with capital's intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this flashy trash were devoted to a public good? If for no other reason, Ghost Box is worth treasuring because they make us pose that question with renewed force.

The Ache of Nostalgia:.

The Advisory Circle.

'The Advisory Circle helping you make the right decisions.' With its suggestions of a benevolent bureaucracy, The Advisory Circle was always the perfect name for a Ghost Box act. On Mind How You Go (2005), producer and vinyl archivist Jon Brooks produced a kind of Anglo-a.n.a.logue pastoralism that is as affecting as anything that the label has released. In what has since been established to be the customary Ghost Box fashion, Brooks's a.n.a.logue synthesizer doodles all the more powerful, somehow, for their una.s.suming slightness gently trigger drifts down (false) memory lanes, inducing you to recall a ma.s.s mediated past which you never quite experienced. Mind How You Go frequently invokes that talisman of 1970s paternalism, the Public Information Film, and it's perhaps no accident that the rise of Ghost Box has coincided with the emergence of YouTube, which has made public information films and other such street furniture of 1970s audiovisual experience widely available again.

What Brooks captures extremely poignantly is the conflicted cl.u.s.ter of emotions involved in nostalgic longing. 'Mind How You Go' and 'Nuclear Substation' summon remembered sunlight from childhood summers even as their doleful melodies are laced with a deep sense of loss. Yet there's a very definite but subdued joy here, too, in the way that a track such as 'Osprey' achieves a kind of faltering soaring. It's not for nothing that the word ache is often a.s.sociated with nostalgia; and The Advisory Circle's music positively aches with a sadness that is simultaneously painful and enjoyable. 2011's As The Crow Flies felt folkier than The Advisory Circle's previous releases, with acoustic guitars creeping over the a.n.a.logue synthesizers like ivy spreading over the frontage of a brutalist building. The alb.u.m's closing track, 'Lonely Signalman', brings these different textures together beautifully: its vocodered refrain ('signalman lives all alone/ signalman is all alone') is simultaneously playful and plangent, a combination that is typical of Brooks's work. I asked Brooks about the roots of the exquisite sadness that colours his music.

'A lot of it stems from my childhood. Without wishing to go too far down the 'tortured artist' path, I will say that my upbringing was a cyclic period of safety, security, contentment, anxiety, despair and sadness. As an adult, I've managed to work through a lot of these childhood feelings and channel them into what I'm doing musically. Thankfully, I can now make sense of a lot of stuff that happened back then; I can balance this against any residual scars I might be left with. I'm not saying I'm glad that I had a turbulent childhood, but for what it's worth, it has shaped my art, quite indelibly.'

A paradoxical impulse lies behind Brooks's work. He is fascinated by functional culture that which we don't consciously hear or see but which shapes our experience of environments yet the attention on what was background necessarily pushes it into the foreground. 2011's Music For Dieter Rams, a homage to the designer best known for his work with Braun released under Brooks's name, was an attempt to bring functional music together with functional design. Rams's slogan 'less, but better' could equally apply to the original conception of Ambient music. After all, What was the ambition for Ambient if not that music attain the una.s.suming ubiquity of many of Rams's products all those radios, coffee makers and calculators which were embedded into everyday life, their designer unknown to the general public? Perhaps for that reason, Brooks isn't the first artist to dedicate music to Rams: Alva Noto devoted two wonderfully eerie tracks on his For 2 alb.u.m to the designer. It's those things lurking at the background of attention, things that we took for granted at the time, which now evoke the past most powerfully.

'With hindsight,' Brooks says, 'the fact that these things are so evocative of the past, accentuates and crystallises my interest in them; but actually, I've always been interested in things 'in the background' for me, that's where the really interesting stuff has always been. As a kid, I was equally fascinated by library music used on TV (or TV themes) as I was about pop music; things that we weren't supposed to take any real notice of. I used to look out for TV test transmissions, for example, and of course Public Information Films. Open University broadcasts held the same fascination; these broadcasts weren't targeted at an eight-year-old child, but I was drawn towards them nonetheless. I was also drawn to logos, branding and so forth. I remember being particularly entranced by certain record labels' logos Polydor, Decca and Pye were my favourites. I loved the way they looked on the records and would quite often sit at the turntable and watch them go round, as the record played. There was something very elegant about them. Again, these things were presented as 'functional', in their own way. So, the fascination was always there. It's just stayed with me.'

Those objects and s.p.a.ces are also functional. Is Brooks particularly fascinated by culture that operates in this ostensibly functional way?

'I am absolutely fascinated by that aspect. At the risk of being slightly tangential, taking the concept of Muzak as an example, I very much enjoyed reading Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music. This is a great example of bringing the background to the foreground, in the form of strictly 'functional' music. It goes a step further in this respect than even Library music does. I have always been fascinated by the cultural aspect of this how we can have small speakers installed in ceilings in shops and the music just filters through and no-one is really supposed to notice; they called it 'non-entertainment music' at the time. Muzak gained a really bad reputation in the 1970s, but if you go back and listen to some of the music that was produced for the system, you'll find some very tight, compact arrangements hidden in there. Composers that are highly regarded by record collectors now, for example Sven Libaek and Syd Dale, did a lot of work for Muzak. In much the same way, I apply this fascination to domestic design or motorway service stations. Dieter Rams was interested in creating something that just worked, with elegance and simplicity. I love the fact that he wasn't searching for fame with his designs, but now we can celebrate those designs publicly and hand him the spotlight, as it were, in much the same way as we have discovered composers like Sven Libaek.'

Someone Else's Memories: Asher.

Philip Jeck, Black To Comm, G.E.S.

Position Normal, Mordant Music.

In 2009, an artist known as Asher released an alb.u.m called Miniatures on the Sourdine label. The only information on the sleeve was the following terse statement: 'recorded in Somerville, MA, winter 2007'. Rumours and mysteries proliferate in a data vacuum, and Miniatures puts the listener into a state of suspension and suspicion: what exactly are we listening to? Who made it? What does 'making' it mean in this context? And what sense of 'recorded' is being used?

Let's consider the audio facts, such as they are. Even here there is veiling all the tracks are covered in a fog of crackle. What we hear is mostly piano, although occasionally strings can also be detected. The piano is contemplative, reflective, exquisitely sad: the lugubrious tempo seems to literalise the notion of longing. The haze of the crackle and the quietness of the playing mean that you have to 'lean in' to hear the music played on ipod headphones, it practically disappears into the background noise of the street.

How were the tracks made? At least two theories circulated online. One, the closest there seems to be to any official story, maintains that the tracks on Miniatures were all short sections recorded by Asher from the radio and then digitally looped. (If so, he should buy himself a radio with better reception.) The other theory is that the piano pieces were played by Asher on poor quality tape, then subjected to further processes of digital distortion to give the impression that they are found sound objects. The tracks' unresolved status is not some dry conceptual riddle detracting from the experience of listening to them; instead, the enigma actually heightens the music's fragile, fragmentary beauty, its uncanny intimacy.

Miniatures was one of a number of records from the 00s whose sound centred on crackle. Why should crackle resonate now? The first thing we can say is that crackle exposes a temporal pathology: it makes 'out of joint' time audible. Crackle both invokes the past and marks out our distance from it, destroying the illusion that we are co-present with what we are hearing by reminding us we are listening to a recording. Crackle now calls up a whole disappeared regime of materiality a tactile materiality, lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have retreated from sensory apprehension. Artists like Tricky, Basic Channel and Pole started to foreground vinyl crackle at the very moment when records were becoming superseded. Back then, it was the CD that was making vinyl obsolete. Now, the MP3 can neither be seen nor touched, still less manipulated by the hand in the way that the vinyl record could be.

The digital seems to promise nothing less than an escape from materiality itself, and the story of Willam Basinski's 2002 alb.u.m Disintegration Loops a recording of tapes that destroyed themselves in the very process of their transfer to digital is a parable (almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of a.n.a.logue to the infinite replicability of digital. What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very possibility of loss. Digital archiving means that the fugitive evanescence that long ago used to characterise, for instance, the watching of television programmes seen once, and then only remembered has disappeared. Indeed, it turns out that experiences which we thought were forever lost can thanks to the likes of YouTube not only be recovered, but endlessly repeated.

Crackle, then, connotes the return of a certain sense of loss. At the same time, it is also the sign of a found (audio) object, the indication that we are in a scavenger's s.p.a.ce. That is why crackle is a stock-in-trade of someone like turntable artist Philip Jeck. Jeck's first record had appeared in 1999, but his work gained a new currency because of its convergence with what Burial and The Caretaker were doing. Jeck had been inspired by hearing mixers like Walter Gibbons, Larry Levan and Grandmaster Flash in the 80s, but his montages reconceive DJing as the art of producing sonic phantasmagoria. Using Dansette turntables, FX units and records found in charity shops, Jeck defamiliarises the vinyl source material to the point of near-abstraction. Occasionally, recognizable fragments (60s rock, Mantovani-like lite cla.s.sical kitsch) thrillingly bob up out of the whooshing delirium-stream.

Jeck began the extraordinary 2008 version of Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the t.i.tanic (which he performed in collaboration with Italian ensemble Alter Ego and Bryars himself) with nearly 14 minutes of crackle. In this audio-fog, threatening objects loom, barely perceived. As we listen, we come to distrust our own hearing, begin to lose confidence in our ability to distinguish what is actually there from audio hallucinations. Ominous strings and a solitary bell produce an atmosphere of quiet foreboding, and the ensemble at first indistinct shadows in a Turner-esque squall only gradually emerge from the cloud of crepitation. Here, as in Asher's Miniatures, crackle suggests radio static. The sinking of the t.i.tanic in fact prompted the first use of wireless in sea rescue. As Bryars points out in his sleevenotes, Marconi had conceived of telegraphy as a spectral science. He 'became convinced that sounds once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter until we no longer perceive them. Marconi's hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment, extraordinarily powerful and selective filters I suppose, to pick up and hear these past sounds. Ultimately, he hoped to be able hear Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount.'

Jeck has referred to the sonic sources he uses as 'fragments of memory, triggering a.s.sociations' but it is crucial that the memories are not necessarily his; the effect is sometimes like sifting through a box of slides, photographs and postcards from anonymous people, long gone. This same feeling of coming upon other people's orphaned memories could be heard in the 2009 alb.u.m Circulations by G.E.S. (Gesellschaft zur Emanzipation des Samples/ Society For The Emanc.i.p.ation Of Sampling). There is some mystery about who is behind G.E.S., but the project appears to be a front for genre-hopping dilettante Jan Jelinek, best known for his Loop-finding Jazz Records, which constructed a version of minimal Techno out of minuscule jazz samples; Jelinek has also produced microhouse under the name Farben and Ambient as Gramm. G.E.S.'s idea was to take micro-samples, loop and collage them, play them in public s.p.a.ces, and record the results. Would the ordinary laws of copyright apply if music was sampled in these conditions? The tracks are like unsigned audio-postcards, recorded sometimes in named places (Mount Zermatt and Hong Kong are mentioned in the track t.i.tles), sometimes in places we can only guess at, using the voices and background noises to orientate ourselves. 'Birds Of Heraklion' begins with distorted electronic pulses before being swept up by a backwards rush of very cinematic strings that sound like they might have come from a black and white film extolling the benefits of train travel. 'Orinoco, Bullerb, (Crossfade)' is initially built from the violent juxtaposition of crazed bird noises with what could be a sample from some forgotten film noir or a highly strung melodrama, but it ends with echoes, and strange, abstract whistles. 'Im Schilf' puts one in mind of the kind of alien piping noises you would hear in an Oliver Postgate animation or an early Cabaret Voltaire tape experiment, while 'Farnballett' and 'Farnballett (In Dub)' recall a Binatone tennis game having a HAL-like nervous breakdown. The random sounds, the pa.s.sing conversations, make you feel like you are witnessing stray frames from a film no whole version of which exists anywhere. This sense that action is continuing beyond what we are hearing, together with the record's travelogue-cosmopolitanism, remind me of nothing so much as the cold, dislocated beauty of Antonioni's The Pa.s.senger. The closing track, 'Schlaf (Nach Einfhrung Der Psychoa.n.a.lyse)' which sounds like windchimes on some dust-blown alien planet is like a memory of a Cold War science fiction that never quite happened. What stops this being a dry exercise or a disparate melange is the inescapable sense of anonymous sadness which pervades the whole record.

This same sense of depersonalised tragedy hung over Alphabet 1968, the 2010 alb.u.m by Black to Comm, aka Marc Richter, the man behind the 'death Ambient' genre and the Hamburg-based Dekorder label. Richter mischievously described Alphabet 1968 on which the only human voices are on field recordings at the edge of audibility as an alb.u.m of songs. What if we were to take Richter's provocation seriously what would a song without a singer be like? What would it be like, that is to say, if objects themselves could sing? It's a question that connects fairy tales with cybernetics, and listening to Alphabet 1968, I'm fittingly reminded of a filmic s.p.a.ce in which magic and mechanism meet: J F Sebastian's apartment in Blade Runner. The tracks on the alb.u.m are crafted with the same minute attention to detail that the genetic designer and toymaker Sebastian brought to his plaintive automata, with their bizarre mixture of the clockwork and the computerised, the antique and the ultramodern, the playful and the sinister. Richter's pieces have been built from similarly heterogeneous materials record crackle, shortwave radio, glockenspiels, all manner of samples, mostly of acoustic instruments. Except on 'Void' a steampunk John Carpenter-like track with susurrating voices conspiring in the background the music does not feel very electronic. As with Sebastian's talking machines, you get the impression that Richter has used the latest technology in order to create the illusion of archaism. This is a record in which you feel that you can smell the dust coming off the retrieved objects. But so intricately are these sonic palimpsests layered that it's impossible to determine what Richter and his collaborators have played and what has been conjured from the archives. The sounds are treated, reversed and slowed down in a way that makes their original sources mysterious. There is a sense of subtle but constant movement, of sound shadows flitting in and out of earshot.

Richter so successfully effaces himself as author that it is as if he has snuck into a room and recorded objects as they played (to) themselves. On the opening track, 'Jonathan', crackle, a field recording of drizzle and cut-aways to white noise set the scene for a pensive piano. Children's voices can be heard in the distance, and it is like we are being ushered out of the human world into the mysterious world of objects-amongst-themselves, a world just adjacent to ours, yet utterly foreign to it. It is as if Richter has attuned himself to the subterranean raptures and sadnesses of objects in unoccupied rooms, and it is these 'songs' that he hears. It's not for nothing that the theme of objects coming to life was taken up so often in cinema animation (for, as its name suggests, what is animation if not a version of this process?), and most of the tracks on Alphabet 1968 could be tunes for cartoon sequences the 'song' an object sings as it stirs itself into motion, or declines back into inertia.

In fact, the impression of things winding down is persistent on Alphabet 1968. Richter has made an enchanted sound-world, but one from which entropy has not been excluded. It feels as if the magic is always about to wear off, that the enchanted objects will slip back into the inanimate again at any moment an effect which only heightens the tracks' poignancy. The labouring, looped double ba.s.s on 'Rauschen' has all the mechanomelan-choly of a phonograph winding down or perhaps of one of Sebastian's automata running out of power. On 'Trapez', reverbed wind chimes create a gentle Narnian snowfall. As so often on this alb.u.m, the track recalls a running-down music box one parallel might be Colleen's 2006 alb.u.m Botes Musique, except that, where Colleen restricted herself to actually using music boxes, Richter loops and sequences his sonic material so that it simulates clockwork. But it's an uncanny clockwork, running to a crooked time. On 'Amateur' with its hints of artificial respiration, as if the walls themselves are breathing the piano loop seems bent out of shape.

Entropy is everywhere in the work of Position Normal, an act whom Simon Reynolds once called 'the G.o.dfathers of hauntology', but it is a very English kind of entropy. In Position Normal's music, it is like London has finally succ.u.mbed to the entropy that always threatens to engulf the city in Michael Moorc.o.c.k's Jerry Cornelius mythos. Except there's something attractive about the deep daydreamy la.s.situde that reigns here: entropy isn't a threat so much as a lysergic promise, a chance to uncoil, unwind, unspool. Gradually, you are made to forget all of your urgencies as your brain is lulled and lured into the sunny Sunday afternoon when all Position Normal tunes seem to take place. The allure of this indolent London was touched upon by a certain trajectory in 60s' rock: the sunny daze of The Kinks' 'Sunny Afternoon', The Small Faces 'Lazy Sunday Afternoon', The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' and 'I'm Only Sleeping'. Yet this particular strand of Anglo-languor didn't originate here, in the acid and weed reveries of rockers in repose. You can look even further back for antecedents, to moments in Great Expectations the airless, inertial stasis of Satis House or to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (especially well captured in the hookah-hazes and fugues of Jonathan Miller's 1968 BBC television version).

Position Normal's London is a city far distant from the corporate gloss of busy/ business London as it is from the tourist London of pageantry. The tour guide for this anachronistic city would be the James Mason in The London That n.o.body Knows, the 1969 film directed by Norman Cohen and based on the book by Geoffrey Fletcher. It's a palimpsest city, a s.p.a.ce where many times are layered. Sometimes, when you walk down an unfamiliar street, you might stumble into aspects of it. Street markets that you'd imagined had closed long ago, shops that (so you think) couldn't possibly survive into the 21st century, ripe old voices fit only for the Victorian music hall...

Position Normal's tracks are Dadaist dub-doodles, disarming in their seeming slightness. They feel like skits or sketches; unwilling to be seen taking themselves too seriously, but at the same time entirely lacking in knowing smirks. There's a daydreamy quality to the way the music is constructed: ideas waft in but trail off inconclusively while still half-baked. It can be frustrating, at least initially, yet the effect is accretive and seductive. A Position Normal alb.u.m comes off like an anglo-Fantasia scavenged out of charity shops, all the detritus of the English 20th century made to sing. For the most part, you are left to guess the sources of all the funny voices. Who are they, this cheery gang children's radio presenters, comedians, character actors, light entertainers, newsreel announcers, jazz trumpeters (mutes always at the ready), ragpickers, costermongers, chancers, idlers, thespians gone to seed, frothy coffee cafe proprietors...? And where have they come from scratchy old sh.e.l.lac, unmarked tapes, soundtrack LPs? The tracks bleed into one another, and so do the alb.u.ms, like failing memories.

It turns out that decaying memory is at the heart of Position Normal's music. In an interview with Joakim Norling for Friendly Noise magazine, Position Normal's Chris Bailiff has said that the roots of the PN sound lay in his father's Alzheimer's disease. 'My dad went into hospital and had to sell the family home, I had to move out and whilst doing this I found so many old records of his and records that he bought for me. Nursery rhymes, doc.u.mentaries and jazz. I didn't want to throw anything away so took them with me. I started to listen to all of them and recorded on to tape my favourite sounds and made incredibly varied mix tapes. I then edited them down and down until there were what I suppose are called samples.' It's as if Bailiff was simultaneously attempting to simulate Alzheimer's and counteract it.

Position Normal can be fitted into the venerable English tradition of Nonsense. (Another Small Faces parallel: Stanley Unwin provided some of his trademark gobbledygook for Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, the alb.u.m which included 'Lazy Sunday Afternoon'.) This same sense of lyrical dementia is at work on Mordant Music's 2006 masterpiece Dead Air. Mordant explicitly affirm decay and deliquescence as productive processes, and on Dead Air it is as if the mould growing on the archives is the creative force behind the sound. The alb.u.m sounds like an electro/Rave version of The Disintegration Loops, except what was disintegrating here was a moment in British broadcasting history. The loose concept behind the alb.u.m was a dead television studio, and what's crucial to its unnerving allure is the presence of former Thames TV continuity announcer Phillip Elsmore. There's a lunatic calm about the way that Elsmore reading Baron Mordant's Nonsense (best heard in its own right on his collaboration with Ekoplekz, eMMplekz). Listening to Dead Air is like stumbling into an abandoned museum 200 years into the future where old Rave tracks play on an endless loop, degrading, becoming more contaminated with each repet.i.tion; or like being stranded in deep s.p.a.ce, picking up fading radio signals from a far distant earth to which you will never return; or like memory itself re-imagined as an oneiric television studio, where fondly recalled continuity announcers, drifting in and out of audibility, narrate your nightmares in rea.s.suring tones.

'Old Sunlight From Other Times and Other.

Lives': John Foxx's Tiny Colour Movies.

k-punk post, June 19, 2006.

He was in the market crowds, wearing a shabby brown suit. Trying to find me through all the years. My ghost coming home. How do you get home through all the years? No pa.s.sport, no photo possible. No resemblance to anyone living or dead. Tenderly peering into windows John Foxx's Tiny Colour Movies is a welcome addition to this decade's rich cache of hauntological releases.

Foxx's music has always had an intimate relationship with film. Like sound recording, photography with its capturing of lost moments, its presentation of absences has an inherently hauntological dimension. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Foxx's entire musical career has been about relating the hauntology of the visual with the hauntology of sound, transposing the eerie calmness and stillness of photography and painting onto the pa.s.sional agitation of rock.

In the case of Tiny Colour Movies, the relationship between the visual and the sonic is an explicit motivating factor. The inspiration for the alb.u.m was the film collection of Arnold Weizcs-Bryant. Weizcs-Bryant collects only films that are short no movie in his collection is longer than eight minutes long and that have been 'made outside commercial consideration for the sheer pleasure of film. This category can include found film, the home movie, the repurposed movie fragment.' The alb.u.m emerged when, a few weeks after he attended a showing of some of Weizcs-Bryant films in Baltimore, Foxx found himself unable to forget 'the beauty and strangeness' of Weizcs-Bryant's movies 'juxtapositions of underwater automobiles, the highways of Los Angeles, movies made from smoke and light, discarded surveillance footage from 1964 New York hotel rooms' so he decided 'to give in to it to see what would happen if [he] made a small collection of musical pieces using the memory of those Tiny Colour Movies.'

The result is Foxx's most (un)timely LP since 1980's Metamatic. Tiny Colour Movies fits right into the out of joint time of hauntology. Belbury Poly's Jim Jupp cites Metamatic as a major touchstone, and time has bent so that the influence and the influenced now share an uncanny contemporaneity. Certainly, many of the tracks on Tiny Colour Movies synthetic but oneiric, psychedelic but artificial resemble Ghost Box releases. This is an electronic sound removed from the hustle and bustle of the present. An obvious comparison for a track like the majestically mournful 'Skysc.r.a.per' would be Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, but, in the main, the synthetic textures are relieved from the pressure of signifying the Future. Instead, they evoke a timeless Now where the urgencies of the present have been suspended. Some of the best tracks especially the closing quartet of 'Shadow City', 'Interlude', 'Thought Experiment' and 'Hand Held Skies' are slivers of sheer atmosphere, delicate and slight. They are gateways to what Heronbone used to call 'slowtime', a time of meditative detachment from the commotions of the current.

I constantly feel a distant kind of longing. The longest song, the song of longing. I walk the same streets like a fading ghost. Flickering grey suit. The same avenues, squares, parks, colonnades, like a ghost. Over the years I find places I can go through, some process of recognition. Remnants of other almost forgotten places. Always returning.

Tiny Colour Movies is a distillation of an aesthetic Foxx has dedicatedly explored since Ultravox's Systems of Romance. Although Foxx is most a.s.sociated with a future-shocked amnesiac catatonia ('I used to remember/ now it's all gone/ world war something/ we were somebody's sons'), there has always been another trance-mode more beatific and gently blissful, but no less impersonal or machinic operative in Foxx's sound, even on the McLuhanite Metamatic.

Psychedelia had explicitly emerged as a reference point on Systems of Romance (1978) particularly on tracks such as 'When You Walk Through Me' and 'Maximum Acceleration', with their imagery of liquifying cities and melting time ('locations change/ the angles change/ even the streets get re-arranged'). There might have been the occasional nod to the psychedelia of the past 'When You Walk Through Me' stole the drum pattern from 'Tomorrow Never Knows' for instance but Systems of Romance was remarkable for its attempt to repeat psychedelia 'inbecoming' rather than through plodding re-iteration. Foxx's psychedelia was sober, clean-shaven, dressed in smartly anonymous Magritte suits; its locale, elegantly overgrown cities from the dreams of Wells, Delvaux and Ernst.

The reference to Delvaux and Ernst is not idle, since Foxx's songs, like Ballard's stories and novels, often seemed to take place inside Surrealist paintings. This is not only a matter of imagery, but also of mood and tone (or, catatone); there is a certain languor, a radically depersonalised serenity on loan from dreams here. 'If anything,' Ballard wrote in his 1966 essay on Surrealism, 'Coming of the Unconscious', 'surrealist painting has one dominant characteristic: a gla.s.sy isolation, as if all the objects in its landscapes had been drained of their emotional a.s.sociations, the accretions of sentiment and common usage.' It's not surprising that Surrealism should so often turn up as a reference in psychedelia's 'derangement of the senses'.

The derangement in Foxx's psychedelia has always been a gentle affair, disquieting in its very quietude. That is perhaps because the machinery of perceptual re-engineering seemed to be painting, photography and fiction more than drugs per se. One suspects that the psychotropic agent most active on/in Foxx's sensibility is light. As he explained in an interview from 1983: 'some people at certain times seem to have a light inside them, it's just a feeling you get about someone, it's kind of radiance and it's something that's always intrigued me it's something I've covered before in songs like 'Slow Motion' and 'When You Walk Through Me'. I like that feeling of calm...It's like William Burroughs summed it up perfectly "I had a feeling of stillness and wonder."'

There is a clear Gnostic dimension to this. For the Gnostics, the World was both heavy and dark, and you got a glimpse of the Outside through glimmers and shimmers (two recurrent words in Foxx's vocabulary). Around the time of Systems of Romance, Foxx's cover art shifted from harsh Warhol/Heartfield cut/paste towards gentle detournements of Renaissance paintings. What Foxx appeared to discover in Da Vinci and Botticelli is a Catholicism divested not only of pagan carnality but of the suffering figure of Christ, and returned to an impersonal Gnostic encounter with radiance and luminescence.

What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and s.e.xy, the angelic is deemed to be embarra.s.sing and sentimental. (Wim Wenders' excruciatingly cloying and portentous Wings of Desire is perhaps the most spectacular failed contemporary attempt to render the angelic.) Yet, as Rudolf Otto establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons. After all, what could be more shattering, una.s.similable and incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? Otto, a conservative Christian, argued that all religious experience has its roots in what is initially misrecognised as 'daemonic dread'; he saw encounters with ghosts, similarly, as a perverted version of what the Christian person would experience religiously. But Otto's account is an attempt to fit the abstract and traumatic encounter with 'angels' and 'demons' into a settled field of meaning.

Otto's word for religious experience is the numinous. But perhaps we can rescue the numinous from the religious. Otto delineates many variants of the numinous; the most familiar to us now would be 'spasms and convulsions' leading to 'the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy'. But far more uncanny in the ultra-agitated, present is that mode of the numinous which 'come(s) sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.' Foxx's instrumental music on Tiny Colour Movies and on the three Cathedral Oceans CDs, and with Harold Budd on the Transluscence and Drift Music LPs has been eerily successful in rendering this alien tranquillity. On Transluscence in particular, where Budd's limpid piano chords hang like dust subtly diffusing in sunlight, you can feel your nervous system slowing to a reptile placidity. This is not an inner but Outer calm; not a discovery of a cheap New Age 'real' self, but a positive alienation, in which the cold pastoral freezing into a tableau is experienced as a release from ident.i.ty.

Dun Scotus' concept of the haecceity the 'here and now' seems particularly apposite here. Deleuze and Guattari seize upon this in A Thousand Plateaus as a depersonalised mode of individuation in which everything the breath of the wind, the quality of the light plays a part. A certain use of film think, particularly, of the aching stillness in Kubrick and Tarkovsky seems especially set up to attune us to haecceity; as does the polaroid, a capturing of a haecceity which is itself a haecceity.

The impersonal melancholy that Tiny Colour Movies produces is similar to the oddly wrenching affect you get from a website like Found Photos. It is precisely the decontextualised quality of these images, the fact that there is a discrepancy between the importance that the people in the photographs place upon what is happening and its complete irrelevance to us, which produces a charge that can be quietly overwhelming. Foxx wrote about this effect in his deeply moving short story, 'The Quiet Man'. The figure is alone in a depopulated London, watching home movies made by people he never knew. 'He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.'

'Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives', Foxx observes in his evocative sleevenotes for Tiny Colour Movies. To leaf through other people's family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your own life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispa.s.sionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the beautifully, painfully dilated moment in Tarkovsky's Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an AlienG.o.d. Otto claims that the sense of the numinous is a.s.sociated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness, experienced with a 'piercing acuteness [and] accompanied by the most uncompromising judgment of self-depreciation'. But, contrary to today's ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to 'sell ourselves'), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us.

He stood in the soft beams of sunshine diffused by the curtains, caught for a moment in the stillness of the room, watching the dust swirling slowly golden through patches of light that fell across the carpets and furniture, feeling a strange closeness to the vanished woman. Being here and touching her possessions in the dusty intimacy of these rooms was like walking through her life, everything of her was here but for the physical presence, and in some ways that was the least important part of her for him.

Longing and aching are words that recur throughout Foxx's work. 'Blurred Girl' from Metamatic its lovers 'standing close, never quite touching' would almost be the perfect Lacanian love song, in which the desired object is always approached, never attained, and what is enjoyed is suspension, deferral and circulation around the object, rather than possession of it 'are we running still? or are we standing still?' On Tiny Colour Machines, as on Cathedral Oceans and the alb.u.ms with Budd, where there are no words, this feeling of enjoyable melancholy is rendered by the minimally disturbed stillness and barely perturbed poise of the sounds themselves.

I can detect tiny edges of time leaking through. I feel nothing is completely separate. At some point everything leaks into everything else. The trick is in finding the places. They are slowly moving. Drifting. You can only do this accidentally. If you set out to do it deliberately you will always fail.

It is only when you remember, only then will you realise that you caught a glimpse. While you were talking to someone, or thinking of something else. When your attention was diverted. Just a hint, a glimmer, a shade.

Much later, you will remember. Without really knowing why. Vague peripheral sensations gather. Some fraction of a long rhythm is beginning to be recognised. The hidden frequencies and tides of the city. Geometry of coincidence.

Listening to Tiny Colour Movies, as with all of Foxx's best records, one has a sense of returning to a dream-place. Foxx's shifting or shadow city, with its Ernst-like 'green arcades' and De Chirico colonnades, is urban s.p.a.ce as seen from the unconscious on a derive; an intensive s.p.a.ce in which elements of London, Rome, Florence and other, more secret places are given an oneiric consistency.

I lost myself in that city more than 20 years ago.

Sleeping in cheap boarding houses. A ghost with leaves in his pocket and no address. The good face half blind. A nebula of songs and memories slipping in and out of focus. Someone told me he was there but it didn't register at the time. The voice came unfocussed from all around. Still and quiet like the shadows of an ocean in the moving trees.

Indented text from John Foxx's 'Quiet Man' and 'Shifting City' texts and the Cathedral Oceans booklet.

Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx.

k-punk post, September 23, 2006.

MF: Which films were most influential on you early on?

JF: Oh, very cheap science fiction films mostly. There was one particularly memorable movie called Robot Monster, so bad it was surreal, it had the quality of a dream, an exceptional movie.

I now think it's one of the best films I've ever seen, partly because it had no regard for plot or anything else recognizable as conventional cinema of the time. This of course made it an event of inestimable importance to me, because, as a child I took it all literally swallowed it whole, like Alice's potion.

And like that potion, it allowed entry to an unexpected universe. One which had unfathomable logic and laws which were endlessly flexible. A deeply exhilarating experience. I still dream sequences from it, or rather I seem to have permanently incorporated sections of it into my dream grammar.

Growing up with movies as a child and being subjected to them before I could understand the adult preoccupations and motivations involved in the plots, pitched me into conscripting these films as a personal grammar. I had no choice, so I ended up with this Lynchian reservoir of sequences that carried every dread and joy and everything in between.

These events are still imbued with unfathomable, inexplicable, tantalizing mystery, because I couldn't really understand them at all. It was hallucinogenic and vivid, and provided me with an image bank and a gorgeous range of emotional tones I still haven't managed to exhaust.

Much later, when I got to 'Cinema' or the official critical view of it the more intellectual, often French aspect. I didn't recognise it at all.

Later, I ended up enjoying this sort of perspective a little, but in a rather disengaged, sceptical way. To me, it seems a method of criticism which is often marvelously baroque and can be engaging, but has little to do with my own experience of Cinema.

I can only deal with it as a marvelous fictional construct, like medieval religion or quantum physics a consensual social hallucination developed by a priesthood. In the end it's as tangential as my own individual one.

But that very crude, improvisational, amateurish side of cinema or filmmaking, I continue to find deeply fascinating. Take for example Ed Wood's films. He made them simply because he was in a place where it could be done.