Hauntology
ISSUE #342
Hauntology is, as far as I’m concerned, Halloween’s most essential genre. Embodied by Burial, Boards of Canada, The Caretaker, and more, its defining sound is that of decay—vinyl noise, tape hiss, reverb, echo—and it captures the ghostly nature of nostalgia. A haunting, at its essence, is the presence of an absence.
A few years into the twenty-first century, it was clear electronic music was no longer "futuristic". Even with the latest software, any song in 2022 could have been made in the 90s. The "future," then, became a cycle of regurgitation. You long for a past you never experienced. You learn of possibilities dead long before you were born.
The genre—extended and deepened by the popularity of Backrooms—stems from the philosophical undercurrent of today: we’re haunted by past promises of failed futures. We never did reach utopia. Life has not improved. Time is out of joint.
“A spectre is haunting Europe,” is what opens The Communist Manifesto, and it refers to the hushed promise of a forbidden future—unspoken, lingering, hanging in every room. That ideology haunts Backrooms and its portrait of decayed prosperity, which melts into everything from therapists' couches to CRT scan lines. Aesthetically, this has me seeing Backrooms as a Marxist film.
Hauntology itself is a subliminally Marxist genre. The director of Backrooms, Kane Parsons, was far from even being alive in the 90s, yet he tapped into the spooky comfort of a ghostly past—just as The Shining had with my generation. Kubrick and Parsons both access the sweet degradation of modern culture the same way The Caretaker, one of hauntology’s greatest musicians, does with his material audio historicity.
Technology collapses time and space. Filming, viewing, watching, scrolling—all are encounters with broken time. The absence of presence; the presence of absence. Ghosts thrive in the digital world. Halloween has only grown because it acknowledges deterioration. The holiday honors the way we're stained by time.
The disappearance of any better future has meant the loss of our social imagination. As the haunted, we’ve been denied a route to salvation. At least, in media, we commune with what we lost to time.
Start digging around in Halloween music and before long you’ll turn a weird corner: there’s a lot of surf guitar. That strange kitsch has fueled everything from Friday the 13th to Rocky Horror. This band, Messer Chups, has distilled it to its purest form.
It’s the night the rave came home—two years after the terrifying events of Electroween, the terror in leather tights has reëmerged. No black-lit living room, no unfinished basement, no warehouse-district dance party will ever be safe. Cyberpunk as hell, clawing up from its filthy grave, this industrial-dance sound was never going to stay dead for long.
In all 7½ years of Earwyrms, Halloween has yet to descend upon a Friday… until this year, baby! Oh, we’d gotten close to completing the bloody ritual in past years, but all it took was one meddling leapfrog from 2019’s Thursday to that Saturday in 2020 to completely waste a decade.
We’ve yet to perfect a word for death by thirst. “Dehydration?” Inelegant—a prefix sewn ad-hoc to an embalmed corpse. Yet rarely has the word been so necessary as today!
Chances are, you’re going to a Halloween party this year. Maybe you’re even throwing one. In either case, should you find yourself with the AUX, I bestow to you this gift—a six-and-a-half-hour mix of the best electro-goth and industrial dance music the 80s had to offer.
Two years after our first maddening descent into dungeon synth—the haunted, medieval, dark ambient subgenre born from side projects of Nordic black metal stars—and we’ve already seen a swell of scholarly literature on the genre from dark-corner music nerds and fantasy-flecked weirdos (both me) alike.
Hear me out—Radiohead is a Halloween band. I think this is important. This is important because, for one of the biggest rock bands in the world, I think there’s still a lot of “I don’t get Radiohead” out there. I was on that side of the fence for like 15 years.
This weekend, I urge you to press pause on the spooky movies for only a moment to go see Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon at your favorite theater—I want to get this baby over the $100 million mark on its opening weekend. Wouldn’t that be great? We could all save cinema, together.
If you happen to be celebrating today’s holiday appropriately—that is, strolling amongst graves, raking in the leaves, or running in jeans—I made a little neo-classical mood music for your Friday the 13th adventure. There’s a little bit of pumpkin synth, a little dark ambient, and a whole lot of attitude for your hallowed eve.
Welcome, ghouls, to another season of creeps. Grab your theremin and your howling cat, because we’re taking this train all the way to hell (the fun one, not the torture one).
Happy Halloweekend! Here's a playlist for all that—the ghost hunting, the night walking, exploring the liminal planes. Coffee in costume after midnight. A dog's bark from a dark hillside.
Allay your fears with Nightwyrms, our collection of coldwave and minimal synth. When the icy wind blows, it's best to embrace it—roll down those chilled windows and fill your lungs with the night.
It’s fitting for a holiday that celebrates death to reflect so aptly the nature of life—that there is far too much to do before we’re gone, and we will always dream it differently. But we feel our imagination as much as we see it, and thoughts change our cells as much as chemicals—
Last Wednesday night, desperate for consolation from lives shackled with chaos, I went with Elsie to go see Candlelight—a small concert series of classical music held in hidden, non-traditional venues around the city, each lit solely by hundreds of scattered candles.
I’ll meet you at the wrought iron gate—get there as close to sundown as you can because it only opens once a year. Wait for the moon to crest the roof, then dip down through the hedges to the yard.
For all my terror, I find delight in apprehending the grotesque. It’s the illness we ignore that tends to kill us, after all. So let us stare our specters in the eye—we’ll be dancing step-in-step with them for the next few weeks.
Happy Halloween, enjoy the final round of shadow songs. If you still don’t know what you're wearing this Thursday, I’ve made a list of costumes you may be able to pull off.
"Cryptid," as you may know, is a term for a creature that exists in folklore and legend but whose existence is not scientifically proven or accepted. Some things that are cryptids: Bigfoot, Nessie, the Jersey Devil.
Halloween is all sublimation: we give our base instincts permission to emerge, we indulge in our ancient taste for spirits and specters, we put our real fears aside as we focus on the imaginary—the things that could never actually hurt us, but help us let off some screams.
It's Friday the 13th, and it's the weekend of the Harvest Moon. Those two things haven't aligned since the start of the millennium, and they won't align again until 2049. It's the night to believe in magic once again.
This week's playlist isn't really a playlist, it's more of an album showcase. It's my favorite Halloween album ever made. It's called Dead Man's Bones, by a band called Dead Man's Bones.
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The desire to party had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.
Hauntology is, as far as I’m concerned, Halloween’s most essential genre. Embodied by Burial, Boards of Canada, The Caretaker, and more, its defining sound is that of decay—vinyl noise, tape hiss, reverb, echo—and it captures the ghostly nature of nostalgia. A haunting, at its essence, is the presence of an absence.