Hauntology in Music

What is Hauntology?

The term 'hauntology' was first coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in relation to the ghosts of Marxism that still haunt the politics of the present and revolutionary movements. In music, it is taken to refer to the sense in which current digital technologies can be considered as haunted by their analogue counterparts and media from bygone eras.

Hauntology started off not so much as a musical genre but as a design aesthetic that combined a visual style with a fascination for analogue technology, post-war idealism in conjunction with references to 19th and 20th century horror and science fiction writing and television of the 1960s and 70s. However, in more recent times, it has become more of a defined genre with artists describing themselves or their works as hauntological in nature. Artists who work within the genre tend to be British electronic musicians and artists - there is an American equivalent which is called chillwave or hypnogogic pop.

Many of the themes of hauntological music are concerned with memory, usually in conjunction with media broadcasts. These can include:

• false memories of an imagined past or an alternate future extrapolated from the past
• the breakdown of personal memories as we age
• memories of the past as seen in the present: for example, in an evolving, multi-layered or decaying urban environment or nature reclaiming territory from abandoned buildings or natural processes such as coastal erosion

Further viewing/reading

Here is a short (<5 minutes) BBC Ideas video from 2019 introducing the concept of Hauntology:

Some of the key concepts and source material for the aesthetics of hauntology, along with main artists associated with it, are described in this article:

The following paper looks primarily at the work of the music label Ghost Box but also explores the wider landscape of inspirations behind the aesthetic, including audio, video, and print media: