Hauntological

With the appearance of hauntological history, everything long silenced, repressed, excluded, disavowed, negated by history, is blasted to the surface of events.

We are living in what might be called a truly hauntological moment, a period of disjunction, of melancholy and precariousness, in which the recent past seems suddenly distant and we are obsessed with the idea of our lost future.

Boards of Canada also pioneered the hauntological approach to creating old-timey and elegiac atmospheres through the use of sound treatments suggestive of decay and wear-and-tear.

In that spirit, some young musicians now are creating music that has been described as “hypnagogic” or “hauntological.” The melodies and rhythms are reminiscent of catchy pop songs of previous decades, but recorded in a way that simulates the effects of age — fuzzy and staticky — as if worn out or heard at a great distance through a grimy haze.

Vaporwave and its more developed form, Simpsonwave, are of course concerned with an entirely different set of tropes–but they are no less hauntological for it. Both are recognizably hauntological by virtue of the techniques they employ—VHS crackle, Windows start-up sounds, etc.