weird britain in exile

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Weird Britain in Exile: Ghost Box,

Hauntology, and Alternative HeritageJamie Sexton

This article interrogates some of the themes that have been noted in the critical reception

of the musical movement that has been dubbed “hauntology.” In particular, it focuses on aspecifically British strain of hauntology—largely concentrating on the record label Ghost

Box—and explores the network of associations referenced by the artists involved. The

author argues that Ghost Box and related artists reflect on issues such as collecting and

heritage, claiming that they are engaged in a form of alternative heritage. Further, he

argues that they engage with the uncanny nature of media technologies, particularly the

sense in which current digital technologies can be considered as haunted by their analogue

counterparts. Finally, he suggests that critics have tended to steer away from exploring

issues such as nostalgia and pastiche within the work of such artists due to their rather

negative connotations; yet these concepts are crucial to the strategies of many

hauntological artists.

Over the past few years increasing critical attention has been paid to a musical

movement that has become known as hauntology. Much of this debate, stemming

back to around 2006, has occurred on the web via blogs of critics such as Mark Fisher

(aka K-Punk) and Simon Reynolds, though it has also featured in print magazines and

webzines, perhaps most prominently in music magazine The Wire (for which bothFisher and Reynolds occasionally write). In this article I aim to explore some of the

themes that have been discussed in these blogs and zines but which have yet to be

subjected to a more sustained investigation. I will focus on a specific area of output

that has been discussed within writings addressing hauntology—that of the label

Ghost Box (with references to a few similar or like-minded artists), whose aesthetic

identity is very British.1 This contrasts with some American artists who have also been

discussed within writings on hauntology.2

Ghost Box exists as a particularly intermedial enterprise: whilst it is a music label, it

references a number of cultural figures and titles from film, television, and literature,as well as music, thus threading a wealth of intertextual cues into its overall aesthetic.

ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608905

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Further, it also organizes occasional multimedia club nights which contain screenings

of television and film material, plus DJ sets and live music performed against a

backdrop of projected visuals. I wish to explore these intertextual linkages further,

particularly in relation to the following themes: collecting and curating; heritage; and

the relations between analogue and digital technologies. First, though, it is importantto think about the concept of hauntology and provide an overview of what has thus

far been written about it.

Hauntology: A Musical Movement

The word “hauntology” stems from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida,

who used the term to think through Marxism and the specters that continue to haunt

the present (in particular the ghosts of political revolution): this neologism combines

“haunt” and “ology,” whilst also punning on the word “ontology.” Derrida was writingon politics after the so-called end of history theses propounded in the late 1980s by

neoconservative thinkers such as Francis Fukiyama, and his work was an attempt to

speculate on the nature of being, and the possibility of politics, in a world saturated

with the ghosts of the past. Within musical culture, however, the term has been

adopted in a slightly different manner; the more political dimensions of Derrida’s

explorations have largely been downplayed in order to focus on the more ontological

sense of hauntology: that being is itself haunted, constituted from a number of hidden

traces whose presence is felt but often unacknowledged.

Amongst a number of contemporary music artists there is a marked tendency to

reflect on how contemporary music culture is saturated by artifacts from previouseras. Whilst this has been the case for many years, it is undoubtedly a condition

that has increased with the rise of digital technologies and the ability to gain access

to a range of recordings and styles from different periods with relative ease. This

technological dimension is particularly important to musical hauntology: many

artists associated with the movement foreground technologies because of their ability

to resurrect the past and distribute historical traces across networked platforms. The

symbiotic process in which technological progress unleashes an increasing number of

historical audio artifacts contributes to an interest in the notion of the “technological

uncanny” (a concept I will return to), in which technologies can contribute to acondition in which time feels out of joint. One of the most important ways in which

hauntology has come to function as a musical label, then, is in referring to music

which foregrounds its haunted nature. This is a process that can occur in different

ways; so, for example, in music production the foregrounding of recording noises

can sometimes be seen as a hauntological strategy, in that it signals decay and

deterioration and can lend sounds a rather uncanny air; likewise, the use of sampling

can be used to evoke “dead” presences and can be transformed into more eerie sonic

markers when treated with effects such as reverberation. On a more conceptual level,

and this refers in particular to Ghost Box, hauntology is marked by a reflexiveapproach: the foregrounding of technologies and explicit references to media texts

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(and sometimes broader cultural links) from other eras draws attention to the manner

by which many hauntological artists signal that their work is about the past and its

ghostly infiltration of the present.

The past and present commonly intertwine within the sphere of human memory,

so it is no surprise that memory constitutes an important trope within hauntology (the term “memoradelia” has occasionally been employed to refer to the work of some

of these artists). The Ghost Box label, for example, run by Jim Jupp and Julian House,

scatters a number of references through its music and related texts (such as album

design and accompanying text, the Ghost Box website, and interviews) which largely

stem from post-war Britain, particularly the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, it is

horror films and television which permeate the allusions made by the label: British

horror films in particular, as well as horror-related television such as The Stone Tape

(1972) and a number of supernatural programs designed for younger viewers, such as

The Owl Service (1969) or Children of the Stones (1977). Authors associated with thehorror genre are also name-checked by Ghost Box, most prominently Arthur Machen

and Algernon Blackwood. Using a number of horror references feeds in, of course, to

the haunted aspect which has characterized the work of many of these artists. Other

references are also prominent, and these include schools programming and public

information films, as well as the cover designs of Penguin books from the 1960s, which

have acted as an inspiration point for the design of Ghost Box covers.

Figure 1 Cover of Revised Edition of The Focus Group’s Mind How You Go (2010).Reproduced courtesy of Ghost Box. Copyright Ghost Box 2006.

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So, while we have a number of horror (or, more broadly, supernatural and/or

fantastical) texts being used as an integral component of the Ghost Box aesthetic,a number of more prosaic references are also made. These, as Simon Reynolds has

written, relate to an obsession with “the spirit of technocratic utopianism that

flourished in post-war Britain . . . a wistful harking back to the optimistic, forward-

looking, benignly bureaucratic Britain of new towns and garden cities, comprehensive

schools and polytechnics” (Reynolds, “Society” 29). In one sense, the incorporation of

such “technocratic utopianism” within the Ghost Box aesthetic canbe linked to broader

social ideals and a nostalgic longing for a time when public services had not been so

extensively offloaded by the British state and were not subject so much to the whims of

the marketplace. Such references also add another layer of temporal mixing to theGhost Box project: if technological progress today revives the past increasingly, then

a fascination for these tropes is perhaps linked to how they reveal past projections of the

future and progress. The past inside the present and the future inside the past: these

temporal fusions are particularly interesting to hauntologists because they link to the

idea of the technological uncanny. And while the twin major creative spurs within the

Ghost Box aesthetic—supernatural media and technocratic utopianism—may at first

glance appear to be uneasy bedfellows, this mixing of ostensibly incompatible elements

is a frequent Ghost Box strategy which further adds to an uncanny aura.

The main musical acts associated with Ghost Box are The Focus Group, Belbury

Poly, and The Advisory Circle. The Focus Group (the musical act of Ghost Box co-

Figure 2 Cover of Belbury Poly’s The Owl’s Map (2006). Reproduced courtesy of Ghost

Box. Copyright Ghost Box 2006.

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runner Julian House) creates eerie, sample-heavy pieces which draw on a vast range

of library music and soundtrack material, and a variety of other musical samples.

The Focus Group sound is characterized by the use of repetitive loops: whilst

sample sources for these loops vary, they are often characterized by very simple,

melodic fragments, culled from musical styles including folk and jazz. These melodicfragments lend a rather naı̈ve, childlike quality to The Focus Group’s sound pieces, but

this is undercut through combining these fragments with other samples which often

clash with the underlying melodies, and through the extensive use of sound processing

(particularly drenching many sound elements in reverb). The particular ways that the

samples are edited also creates a strange, eerie dimension to The Focus Group’s music:

often the edit joins are not fluid but abrupt, frequently stitched together at unexpected

places, occasionally producing audio jolts. Both Belbury Poly (consisting of the other

Ghost Box co-owner, Jim Jupp) and The Advisory Circle (Jon Brooks) tend to be more

tuneful: their music is marked by whimsical sounds from vintage synthesizers whichare redolent of old library records and the electronic music which sometimes

accompanied schools programming in the 1970s and early 1980s. Belbury Poly

employs a wide range of analogue synthesizers to produce largely pop-driven, melodic

electronic music. Frequently underpinned by repetitive arpeggios, the melodies are

often simple and upbeat; sometimes, as when the melodies are articulated via the

squelches and gurgles of analogue synthesizers, there is a kitschy feel to the music. At

times, however, the music of Belbury Poly veers off into less pleasant directions, either

through the creation of darker and less melodic soundscapes, or through the use of

treated samples to lend a more spooky quality to the music. Likewise, The Advisory

Circle creates both melodic, synth-based pop and darker compositions heavily influenced by Brian Eno-style ambient composition and musique concrète. The

Advisory Circle veers into darker territory with slightly more frequency than Belbury

Poly and can occasionally produce rather terrifying sounds, as with the track “Eyes

Which Are Swelling” in which percussion-heavy bursts are overlaid with spoken

samples and culminate in rather disturbing screams for help. Both of these acts and

others on Ghost Box also should be connected with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop,

the resident musical production unit that created a vast range of radio and television

sound effects and music for the BBC between 1958 and 1998. The Radiophonic

Workshop is important in the sense that it produced concrète-inspired, experimentalelectronic soundscapes, as well as more melodic, synthesizer-based pop, and

unsurprisingly it constitutes a key Ghost Box reference point.

Other acts released by Ghost Box include Rooj, Eric Zann (another, more dissonant,

persona of Jupp), and Mount Vernon Arts Lab, whose Séance at Hobbs Lane was re-

released by Ghost Box in 2007 (it was originally released by Astra in 2001). In addition

to acts who have released long-playing CDs on Ghost Box, there are a number of other

artists who have links with the label or who have been critically discussed as belonging

to a similar aesthetic mindset. These include the group Broadcast, for whom Julian

House has designed record covers (he is member of a design collective called Intro) andwho recorded an album with The Focus Group for Warp Records entitled Broadcast and


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The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (2009); Hinterland, Mordant

Music and Moon Wiring Club, all of whom have contributed to a series of 7” vinyl

releases for Ghost Box; and The Caretaker (Leyland Kirby), who hasn’t actually

collaborated with the label but whose ghostly deformations of existing records (overlaid

with thick layers of interference noise) have led to his records being positioned withinthe British strain of hauntology. In addition, links have been established between Ghost

Box and other cultural operators, including the archivist record label Trunk Records

(run by Johnny Trunk, who has himself contributed to the third 7” series of Ghost Box

releases), Strange Attractor (an organization which publishes a journal, books and

other matter devoted to strange and marginal interests), and English Heretic, an

organization devoted to investigating the occult side of England.

In the remainder of this article I would like to focus on some of the main themes

that run through the work of many of these acts, unpacking some important

relationships between this burgeoning cultural movement and the broader socialfabric within which such creative pursuits are carried out. Before moving on to such

themes, however, I will outline a few ways in which intermedial connections are

particularly important within this movement.

Psychic Heterotopias

As mentioned, Ghost Box has created a very specific aesthetic which references

a number of texts both from the musical world and from other media, and which is

manifested not just in its music but through its design presentation. It is not unusual for

music to draw upon other media in the way that it communicates meanings to listeners;as Nicholas Cook has argued, music is never “alone” and has long been associated with

other media (121–22).Yet the Ghost Box label seems particularly self-conscious in

creating a kind of alternative universe through its use of intertexts. The Ghost Box

website, for example, signals its main threads of inspiration, announcing: “Ghost Box is

a record label for a group of artists who find inspiration in folklore, vintage electronics,

library music, and haunted television soundtracks.” The creation of an imaginary world

out of these sources is evident in the consistency of reference points and designs, even in

its creation of a mock “Ghost Box Periodical,” which is entitled Folklore and

Mathematics and consists of quotes (by Arthur Machen, MB Devot and T.C.Lethbridge), images, a fragment of an old Radio Times listing, and a fake newspaper

report from an imaginary place called Belbury (whose name comes from a C.S. Lewis

1945 science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength) which documents how a new

television mast could be linked to mysterious buzzing sounds experienced by residents.

It is not a surprise that other media texts play a central role in the Ghost Box world

as the label is very concerned with media, both in the sense that particular media

content can impact upon the individual psyche, and also in terms of a fascination with

media recording technologies (I will come back to this point later). I have mentioned

that post-war British cultural artifacts dominate the Ghost Box imaginary, andthis can be linked to how a number of texts impacted upon its affiliates in their

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childhood/youth. More broadly, it can also be linked to how many figures associated

with hauntology in Britain draw upon memory as a creative force, particularly the

strange ways that media fragments can lodge inside the psyche and continue to stay with us in later life.

We can think of this process—the creation of an aesthetic universe out of a carefully

selected array of references—as the formation of a psychic heterotopia. Heterotopia

was the name that Michel Foucault (“Of Other Spaces”) coined to refer to places that

exist within society (unlike utopias) but which are in some senses separate from, and

other to, the broader social space within which they exist. Foucault outlined different

forms and functions for heterotopias, though perhaps most significant in relation to

Ghost Box are his assertions that a heterotopia is “capable of juxtaposing in a single

real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” and that it is

“most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might

Figure 3 Cover of Folklore and Mathematics. Reproduced courtesy of Ghost Box.Copyright Ghost Box 2006.


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be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies.” In terms of the former quote, it

is clear that Ghost Box draws upon elements that may not have previously been

thought of as compatible—namely, public service schools programming and a

tradition of spooky, haunted texts. In terms of the latter quote, while they primarily

tend to draw from a specific period (the 1960s and 1970s), they do mix into thiselements from other eras (such as Machen and Blackwood) and also firmly place these

within a contemporary context, so that time—lost time, past time—is highlighted as

an important component of their aesthetic.

Victor Burgin has already adopted Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia in terms of a

more psychic form of space, which is how Ghost Box’s aesthetic universe seems to exist:

it is a universe that is hinted at through music, text, and visuals, but which doesn’t really

exist “out there” in an objective sense, although actual spaces can be overwritten by the

psychic imaginary, a point to which I shall return. Burgin discusses film as a

“heterogeneous object” which does not only exist at the point of viewing, but is alsoencountered in more fragmented fashion through, for example, clips, reviews,

production photos, memorabilia, etc. It is in the“space formed from all themany places

of transition between cinema and other images in and of everyday life” (Remembered

Film 10) that a “cinematic heterotopia” is formed, according to Burgin:

What we may call the “cinematic heterotopia” is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, themedia and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelairefirst identified as “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.” (10)

Following the lines of this logic, Ghost Box’s carefullydelineated system of references canbe viewed as a heterotopia turned into an aesthetic principle. Yet Burgin’s argument

overlooks two important aspects: first, he treats cinematic fragments as self-contained,

even when they do leak over into other media; and second, he treats cinema as a purely

visual medium. Yet the aesthetic universe of Ghost Box draws on cinematic sights and

sounds, as well as visual and aural references across different media, to create a broader

cultural heterotopia of, and for, the psyche. In this sense, the label’s ethos seems

particularly symptomatic of the current media environment, of an age of convergence

andmedia repurposing, despite itsovertly historical guise. Of course, mediaoverlaps are

not merely a contemporary phenomenon, and Ghost Box’s mingling of cultural

references is to some extent testimony to the longevity of how media content has

migrated across different delivery channels.3 Yet I would argue that the label positions

itself as both contemporary and backward-looking, and in this sense both reflects upon,

andis symptomatic of,relationsbetweenthe past, presentandfuturewithin a digital age.

Collecting and Curating

One of the key themes feeding into this strain of hauntology is the role of the collector.

Ghost Box, for example, is a label that emerged with a very particular aesthetic

identity forged from a mixture of specific references. It was, in a sense, a particular

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aspect of its owners’ collections writ large, a projection of their tastes. Even if the

power of memory exerting its uncanny influence on the present is a core theme of the

Ghost Box aesthetic, it is nevertheless accompanied by the existence of archival

recordings and their role in the formation of a broader “cultural memory.” Many

involved in, or with links to, Ghost Box are also involved in collecting.Collecting has an extraordinarily long and complex history that is beyond the scope

of this article, but it is nevertheless worth noting some important developments to

frame the present discussion historically. Institutional sites at which accumulated items

could be observed—museums, churches—date back to the third century BC, though

their accessibility would have been limited and their purposes were religious. More

secular collecting practices gained pace in the 1500s through theatrical presentations of

objects, which included Guilio Camillo Delmonio’s “memory theatre” and other like-

minded displays, including the “cabinet of curiosities,” in which various disparate

objects were placed on display, usually for educational purposes (though they couldalso serve political and other social functions). These eventually fed into public

museums and galleries, though it is important to note that as official museums

flourished, “collecting had evident tiers of prestige and decorum,” with socially less

respectable collector-organizations emerging around the nineteenth century, such as

wax museums (Staiger). It is this “underside” of collecting which informs the Ghost

Box aesthetic, though its collecting is largely based on recordable media—record

collecting in particular, but also the collection of books, films, and television programs.

One of Ghost Box’s stated inspirations is library music—records made by

musicians for use within films and television programs—a form of music in vogue

amongst a section of record collectors. As the music was originally recorded not as anartistic statement but for purely functional purposes (and therefore was not on

general sale), it has, over the years, become relatively obscure, and this itself has been

a spur to some with collecting tendencies. There is a mentality within areas of

collector culture that craves rarity: the less easy it is to come across something, the

more likely it is that it will be prized by sectors of collectors. To some extent this relates

to the broader mass-consumer market and acts as an alternative to it; thus, as Simon

Reynolds argues, “Rare records, in their very sacredness, have recovered some of the

specialness lost to mass produced, commodified artworks” (“Lost” 295). This idea of

the collector distancing her/himself from mass production is a theme that I will returnto. For now, though, I want to focus on the idea of the collector turned creator, of

which Ghost Box is a representative example.

Collector-inspired creation is not a new phenomenon, but it is a form of activity that

has gained particularly marked attention since the emergence of postmodernism as a

critical concept (albeit a concept that is extremely difficult to pin down), in which the act

of creation as a recombinationof previouslycreated elementswas often stressed. Perhaps

the most salient figure representing this collector/creator hybrid is the DJ. Prior to the

1970s the DJ was not commonly considered a creative figure, but this began to gradually

change with the emergence of remixing and turntablism as accepted forms of artisticpractice. Within the world of DJing rarity is also important, not merely for its avoidance


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of the taint of mass culture, but also as a tool to be used in the forging of a specific

aesthetic identity. If a DJ can locate and employ relatively obscure records then there is

less chance that he or she will be using the same raw materials as other DJs, and less

chance that his or her source materials will be considered “obvious” by other DJs and

listeners. Such rarity gives rise to the phenomenon of “crate digging,” in which DJs andother collectors search far and wide for undiscovered gems.

Ghost Box and related artists could be seen as similar to the DJ in their collector-

creator capacities, and so it is perhaps no surprise that many of these artists do also DJ

from time to time. Yet the aesthetic universe of Ghost Box, unlike a majority of DJs,

is particularly precise and considered, constituting as it does a particular form of

psychic heterotopia. The regularity of particular types of material—horror and other

forms of fantastic media, outdated forms of media hardware, state-assisted education

initiatives, antiquated visions of the future—forming this aesthetic is so insistent that it

must also be considered a form of curating, of highlighting particular cultural artifactsas worthy of preservation, a process of “containing the past to recover and revivify it”

(Bjarkman 235). As such, it is a process that speaks of the position of collecting and

curating (and associated concepts such as archiving) within the digital age.

The visibility of collecting and archiving has increased in the digital era, as has the

ability to come across a range of media materials that may previously have remained

undetected. There have long existed communities of collectors who have accrued a

range of materials that may otherwise have been difficult to access. These can form

alternative and/or unofficial networks that operate outside official channels: circles of

traders who swap videotapedtelevision material, forexample (asstudied by Bjarkman),

or communities trading unofficial bootleg recordings of particular music artists. Theunofficial status of such communities is often marked by differences from official

channels: bartering or exchanging may be involved, for example, instead of fixed price

sales (though the latter does exist as well within such circles); and the artifacts being

traded/collected may be illicit (traders may forge connections via material that has been

banned because of its supposedly anti-social nature—an example being collectors who

exchanged “video nasty” VHS cassettes [Egan]). In a sense, unofficial collecting

networks constitute a private and collective, emergent archive. As opposed to the

official archive, which is designated and managed as such, and which has to be run and

organized according to formal principles, the emergent archive arises from bottom-upprocesses. That is, though not designed as an archive as such, the collection that arises

out of the private collections, and which is accessible via collecting networks, could be

considered as a kind of “accidental archive” (Burgess and Green 87): it expresses a range

of interests and concerns of a specific community, and further nourishes that

community’s interest in particular cultural/historical texts. The distinctions between

the private/unofficial and public/official collections should not be overstated: public

collections often emerge from private hoards, a particularly prominent example being

the British Museum, which was established in 1753 from a private donation (Staiger).

Nevertheless, until a particular private collection becomes embedded within a broaderpublic institution (or, perhaps, a less official but nonetheless rule-bound community),

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it is not necessarily subject to the same kinds of rules regarding, for example, its remit

and how it is publicly exhibited and accessed.

Digital networks have made accidental, emergent archives potentially much larger

and more inclusive. Perhaps the most well-known is YouTube, which, whilst it serves a

variety of uses, does also act as an archive of a range of popular media (particularly older television programs and music videos). As Burgess and Green have argued: “The

collective activities of thousands of users, each with their individual enthusiasms and

eclectic interests, are resulting in what is effectively a living archive of contemporary

culture from a large and diverse range of sources” (88). Lucas Hilderbrand has also

commented on the archival dimension of YouTube, contending that it “introduces a

new model of media access and amateur historiography that, whilst the images are

imperfect and the links are impermanent, nonetheless realizes much of the Internet’s

potential to circulate rare, ephemeral, and elusive texts” (233).

Hilderbrand further argues that YouTube provides “some evidence of what materialfrom television’s past now constitutes our cultural memory” (232), an interesting point,

despite his use of “our,” denoting a shared cultural memory that is a little too neat. For,

even though YouTube is a huge, non-specialist resource, it is arguably used to furnish the

memories of different communities: cultural memories may be a more adequate term.

This is certainly the case if we think of Ghost Box, which is forging a particular form of

cultural memory production, and in this it connects to a number of other communities

on the Web. So, for example, numerous blogging communities are engaged in forms of

archival documentation and their posts constitute part of a burgeoning amateur

collection. Such practices draw attention to the personal and/or historical importance of

the work being displayed and discussed, items that may well have been overlooked inmore official accounts of particular eras. There are a number of blogs which specialize in

library music, and blogs which specialize in horror soundtracks, both of which may be

connected to the Ghost Box project. It is no surprise that Ghost Box itself, then, has

forged links with a number of other like-minded individuals/groups, and it is the shared

values of this community that I now wish to probe.

Heritage

The selection of cultural artifacts referenced by Ghost Box is being marked out asworthy of attention and can also be connected to broader values. As Ghost Box

continually references artists, texts, and other aspects of British culture from the past,

it would seem that it is making a stake for these entities as an important part of British

cultural heritage. The notion of heritage may sound strange in this context because of

its frequent associations with the upper classes, stately homes, and conservativism; but

this is only one facet of heritage, even if it exists as the most dominant facet (at least in

terms of the general profile and perceptions of heritage). There also exist a number of

other approaches to heritage and preservation; more specialist interest groups, for

example, have engaged in the restoration of historical projects, as indicated in thefollowing quote by John Urry:


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. . . there has been a marked broadening of the objects deemed worthy of beingpreserved. This stems from a changed conception of history. There has been adecline in the strength of a given national history . . . Instead a proliferation of alternative or vernacular histories has developed—social, economic, populist,feminist, ethnic, industrial and so on. (118)

In this sense, there exist a number of what could be termed marginal movements

which place an emphasis on different kinds of heritage from those propounded by

organizations such as the National Trust or English Heritage. Ghost Box and its

affiliates can be partly related to this surge of interest in marginal national history, in

preserving a form of alternative heritage.

Alternative heritage as a term here refers not only to the sense in which these cultural

actors are engaged in singling out particular, non-mainstream artifacts as worthy of

interest and preservation, but also to the ways in which such activities are self-

consciously positioned as alternatives to more official, mainstream heritage projects.In this sense, they share concerns with a strain of British filmmaking that has also been

termed “alternative heritage” by Phil Powrie. Powrie claims that films such as Distant

Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1988), The Long Day Closes (Davies, 1992) and Small Faces

(MacKinnon, 1996) can be positioned as alternatives to the more recognized films

designated as heritage films which tend to focus on the upper classes and approach the

past from a generally “bourgeois” position (Higson). Powrie argues that these texts also

approach heritage self-reflexively , claiming that they “push the rites of passage narrative

to its limits, and in so doing, allow us to reconsider the notion of heritage” (317).

However, whilst this notion of alternative heritage links to hauntological concerns,Ghost Box and related operators share a fascination with fantastical texts. In this sense,

they can be linked to David Pirie’s attempt to carve out an alternative tradition of

British filmmaking (outside the canons of realist cinema) through his focus on gothic

horror films in his seminal 1973 publication A Heritage of Horror .

English Heretic is the most conspicuously self-conscious heritage project connected

to hauntology. It is an organization set up to “maintain, nurture and care for the

psychohistorical environment of England” (quote taken from its website), and it sets

itself up as a kind of occult parallel to English Heritage: not only does its actual name

riff on its more official counterpart, its logo offers a variation on English Heritage’sofficial logo, and it also produces “black plaques” as more esoteric alternatives to the

“blue plaques” issued by English Heritage. Whereas English Heritage focuses on

preserving selected historical and archaeological sites and establishing such sites as

tourist attractions, English Heretic places an emphasis on undertaking journeys off

the beaten track, outside of officially sanctioned spaces. In doing so, it draws attention

to the many sites of historical interest which have been overlooked by public bodies

such as English Heritage, particularly emphasizing those sites with occult connections.

Through the creation of an organization that so closely mimics a more official

organization, yet also offers a distinct alternative, English Heretic very much draws

attention to itself as a self-reflexive heritage project, a strategy that signals that it is

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attempting at once to celebrate particular elements from national history and to

distance itself from other bodies more commonly associated with such projects.

Like English Heretic, the organization Strange Attractor is listed on the Ghost Box

links page. Strange Attractor organizes events and publishes a journal, as well as

occasionally releasing books and records. It is also devoted to the more esoteric, occultareas of cultural life; while it is not only concerned with British culture, its activities

nevertheless commonly concentrate on weird and often forgotten fragments from

British history. The idea of preservation does not characterize Strange Attractor to the

same extent as it does English Heretic, but such concerns are apparent in some of the

articles that feature within its journal and also from the actual look of the journal

itself, which, according to Kevin Jackson, “smacks far more of the late nineteenth

century than the early twenty-first” (quote taken from Strange Attractor website).

Furthermore, it has organized events based on themes such as “Forgotten Musical

Technologies,” “Utopia Britannica” (devoted to historical utopian movements withinBritain), and “Megalithomania” (organized around megalithic structures and their

role in history, art, and folklore).

Ghost Box, along with Strange Attractor and English Heretic, and the record label

Trunk Records (which issues a range of British television and soundtrack music, as

well as library music and vintage electronics, amongst other fare) share an interest in

Figure 4 Homepage of English Heretic Website. Reproduced courtesy of EnglishHeretic.


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alternative heritage even though there are marked differences between them. This is

evident in the interests in the occult, in folk traditions (particularly those that are less

well documented), and in the British landscape. The latter concern connects to

psychogeography, a practice brought to attention by the Situationists, which has

flourished within Britain over the past few decades, and of whom Iain Sinclair isperhaps the most noted exemplar. Sinclair is probably best known for his writing

which focuses on particular walks and other journeys across London, in which he

investigates occult traces and other phenomena that he encounters, in the process

constructing a hidden history of the capital. Examples of such work include Lights Out

for the Territory (1998) and London Orbital (2003), the latter book emerging from

a 2002 documentary film of the same name that Sinclair made with Chris Pettit.

Psychogeography usually involves dérive, a mode of aimless drifting through urban

space and an attempt to refuse the dictates of modern planning. In a sense, it is a form

of walking off the beaten track and an attempt—via the combination of objective andsubjective registers—to look beyond appearances. Andrew Burke has recently noted

that, particularly in relation to London, the idea of excavating a “secret history of the

city” and asserting “the value of neglected spaces and disappearing forms of modern

life” (103) has been undertaken by writers such as Sinclair and novelist Shena Mackay,

whose numerous novels include Orchard on Fire (1997) and Heligoland (2004);

filmmakers such as the aforementioned Chris Petit—perhaps most noted for his

psychogeographic, music-driven road movie Radio On (1980)—and Patrick Keiller,

whose static frame explorations of England in film, such as London (1994) and

Robinson in Space (1997), have often been considered similar in tone to the literature

of Sinclair; as well as the music group Saint Etienne, whose pop songs and associatedcover art have often evoked a nostalgic attachment to the spaces and sounds of

London (particularly from, though not limited to, the 1960s).

The interest in land amongst the agents I am discussing is not limited to urban

spaces, however (though urban space does feature); there is also a fascination with

rural spaces. English Heretic, in particular, regularly features information about

geographical investigations undertaken and, on its website, claims that “we aim to

help people decode and realise the alchemical ciphers and conspiratorial interplay of

the buildings and landscapes around them.” The importance of place is also linked to

a number of films and television programs referenced by Ghost Box and its artists.For example, the films The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) and Blood on Satan’s Claw

(Haggard, 1971) have both been cited as influential by Ghost Box (and have also had

their soundtracks released by Trunk Records), and both films centrally feature the

British rural landscape and link this to pagan practices. Witchfinder General (Reeves,

1968) is another film in which rural Britain plays a crucial role, and it has been

employed by English Heretic in its “Sacred Geographies of British Cinema” project,

which investigates sites that have been used within some of the most “powerful and

frightening scenes in British film history.” English Heretic further claims that by

providing guidance on exploring these sites, it “aims to provide a tangible portal tofantastic and uncanny realms.”

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The Wicker Man itself has continued to inspire people—usually referred to as

“Wicker Heads”—visiting the locations where it was filmed (Smith 111–12). The

“media pilgrimage” (Couldry) has become a common part of modern life, as physical

locations become overwritten with meanings and values which emerge from their use

within fictional environments. Yet The Wicker Man, as a cult film (once critically derided but eventually becoming celebrated by a number of fans), and as a film that

features a pagan community, tends to link to a form of alternative heritage. The film

has now, in a sense, become a rather canonical text amongst a range of marginal

communities, yet one which maintains its alternative values. In fact, the release of The

Wicker Man soundtrack on Trunk Records in 1997 has been credited by Julian House of

Ghost Box with sparking his interest in folk music, and it has also been cited as a key

text by musicians connected to the resurgence of interest in folk music (both in Britain

and elsewhere, especially the USA), which has been termed “neofolk” and “freak folk.”

Another Ghost Box release, Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s The Seance at Hobs Lane, isalso inspired by a fictional location featured within Quatermass and the Pit (made for

television in 1953; the film version was released in 1967), and can be considered to be

a kind of ritual sound excursion inspired by a fictional space. (It is also important to

note that Drew Mulholland of Mount Vernon Arts Lab claimed that a visit to the

location where the final scene of The Wicker Man was filmed also inspired some of the

music.) Both actual and fictional locations (and their overlaps), then, importantly feed

into the aesthetic of Ghost Box and some of its associates. Nick Couldry has argued that

“any journey to a distant location or person ‘in’ the media can potentially be a ‘media

pilgrimage’” (77); through the creation of music inspired by a number of fictional

spaces, as well as other design texts produced by the label, Ghost Box and other

hauntological artists are engaged in mediated media pilgrimages, summoning up

forgotten, imaginary, and occult influences. Locations permeate images and titles of

many hauntological artists, including, most prominently, the Belbury Poly’s name,

some of its titles (e.g. “The Moonlawn,” “Wetland,” “Pan’s Garden,” and the album The

Willows, named after an Algernon Blackwood story), its covers (the cover of Farmer’s

Angle features the English countryside, the cover of From An Ancient Star features

a megalith), and the “field guide” to the fictional town Belbury found within the CD of

The Owl’s Map; and The Caretaker’s album Selected Memories From the Haunted

Ballroom, which is inspired by the ballroom scene in The Shining (Kubrick, 1980).

Ghost Box, and many figures it has forged links with, connect to a form of alternative

heritage through the types of culture and art referred to (most of which are relatively

obscure, though some certainly more than others) and through connections to both

psychogeography and folklore. This, as noted, is a quite self-conscious defamiliariza-

tion of more conservative notions of heritage: whereas that form of heritage generally

celebrates the past as a safe haven, Ghost Box emphasizes the more eerie, unsettling

vestiges of cultural history; whereas that mode of heritage vilified post-war Brutalist

architecture, Ghost Box includes it as another inspirational touchstone.


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Uncanniness and Dualisms

The creation of an aesthetic universe in which rural landscapes mix freely with

modernist, post-war urban environments may at first sight seem to be a rather odd

combination. Yet it is in keeping with the label’s tendency to intermix references that

may at first sight appear to be strange bedfellows. The Ghost Box aesthetic involves the

juxtaposition of horror and the seemingly more prosaic realms of informational

programming, as well as of folk traditions and analogue electronics, and, less saliently,

of analogue and digital technologies. In one sense, these juxtapositions are part of a

strategy aimed at creating a sense of uncanniness; in a broader sense, links are being

made between these seemingly dissimilar reference points.

Freud wrote in a widely cited article on the uncanny that “an uncanny experience

occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more

revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted

seem once more to be confirmed.” The uncanny experience relies on somethingstrange occurring amid the familiar; it is when things largely seem normal but

something is not quite right. The “not quite right” effect is produced by the sudden

revival of either repressed or surmounted knowledge as it re-asserts itself; an example

of the former is when a mislaid memory suddenly reappears and produces the

uncanny feeling of dé jà vu; an example of the latter is if we momentarily interpret

inanimate objects as alive, a belief which has to be produced through the reversion to

so-called primitive beliefs about reality.

The employment of less obviously occult-related signifiers within the Ghost

Box aesthetic, then, can be considered in one sense to be a key component in creatingan uncanny environment. The more prosaic signifiers, such as public service

broadcasting and post-war concrete edifices, are themselves possible uncanny triggers,

containing the potential to revivify dormant memories. They are also, through being

juxtaposed with an array of more overtly eldritch references, posited as uncanny:

though they may on the surface represent the everyday, they may nonetheless indicate

unease. Jon Brooks of the Advisory Circle has touched upon the rather spooky nature

of public information films, for example: “There are so many appealing aspects to

Public Information Films. Obviously, there is the overall authoritative aura they

create. There’s a cosy, safe ‘don’t worry, we’ll look out for you’ thing going on in a lotof them, but always a more disturbing undercurrent running in parallel” (Stannard).

This was particularly the case with some of the films made to publicize health and

safety. Certain films, such as Lonely Water (Grant, 1973), became noted for their eerie,

unsettling atmosphere: narrated by Donald Pleasance (as the “spirit of dark and lonely

water”) and featuring foggy, gothic shots of swampy territory, it demonstrated how

public information films could unsettle through smuggling horror-influenced

material into programming aimed at children.

Through the juxtaposition of an array of references, links are posited between

propertiesthat appeardisparateon first glance. Thelabelhascontended, forexample, that

connections can be made between the electronic experimentation of the Radiophonic

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Workshop and folk music, contrary to their apparent differences. House and Jupp have

noted in an interview that David Cain from the Workshop studied medieval music and

also made a “dark folky electronic album called ‘The Seasons,’” while also noting that

a “few of Paddy Kingsland’s [another Workshop member] arrangements even bring to

mind Pentangle,” a British folk rock band active in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Anon.).By being placed within a unified aesthetic framework, these apparently dissimilar

references are uncannily connected, made strange through their interrelationships.

It is, perhaps, the digital/analogue dualism that most interestingly feeds into the

Ghost Box aesthetic and opens up a number of issues. Whilst there is a marked

preference for analogue technologies running through Ghost Box and some of its

hauntological associates, this is not a form of analogue fetishism that automatically

leads to a rejection of the digital. Ghost Box has, for example, released nearly all of its

music in digital format (on CD and digital download); it is only recently that it has

released anything on vinyl.4

Many of the label’s acts also employ digital technologies inthe construction of their music; Jim Jupp’s Belbury Poly, for example, uses a number of

analogue synthesizers to make his music but combines these with digital tools; Julian

House’s the Focus Group uses a number of sampled analogue sounds and digitally

processes them. The analogue/digital dualism has been noted by Ghost Box as an

important part of its aesthetic, a dualism which it once again plays upon and attempts

to blur. House has stated that Ghost Box likes “to confuse the boundaries between

analogue and digital” and links this to a further dualism between virtual and concrete

spaces: “I think it’s to do with the space between what happens in the computer and

what happens outside of it: the recording of space, real reverb/room sound and thevirtual space on the hard drive. They’re like different dimensions” (Anon.).

The distinction between real space and virtual space links to the importance

of recording within the Ghost Box aesthetic, a process that itself intertwines

with haunting and uncanniness. As Barry Curtis has written, “Ghosts, and the ways

in which they trouble categories and shape themselves in confrontations, have

always been implicated in the use of media, from the ectoplasmic traces on

photographic plates to the taps and static that have been the secret sharers of familiar

telecommunications” (122). Ghost Box and associated hauntologists tend to reflect

on this haunted nature of media, in both analogue and digital form. The name GhostBox itself is a reference to television and its own uncanny nature, and this is an issue

that has accompanied the introduction of many new technologies, as has been

illustrated by Jeffrey Sconce, who writes:

Sound and image without material substance, the electronically mediated worlds of telecommunications often evoke the supernatural by creating virtual beings thatappear to have no physical form. By bringing this spectral world into the home, theTV set in particular can take on the appearance of a haunted apparatus. (4)

Ghost Box celebrates haunted media in a double sense: first, most of the cultural work

it references relates to horror and the supernatural; second, it posits media as haunted,


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through the ability to rematerialize convincing illusions of people, objects, etc. that

have occurred elsewhere (an uncanny, phantasmal materialization).

Ghosts in media are often associated with interference: imperfect television

reception through analogue transmission often resulted in “ghosting,” in which a

replica of the television image becomes superimposed in a slightly offset position;whilst in the realm of audio recording, degradation of analogue tape produces an

aging effect. “Noise” produced by the media recording or transmission, then, has

often been associated with hauntings from unwanted visitors. These visitors are often

the results of previous use and can be partly considered as the ghostly presences of

such use. As Hilderbrand has noted in discussing the degradation of analogue video

cassettes, such effects can be considered “indexical evidence of use and duration

through time. Here the technology becomes a text, and such recordings become

historical records of audiences’ interactions with the media objects” (15).

With the introduction of digital media, many of these ghostly elements were thoughtto have been overcome: Anne Friedberg has noted how Phillips advertised its early

compact disc players with the slogan “perfect sound forever,” but it wasn’t long before

people realized that CDs did contain their own particular degradation features, such as

the skips created by damaged surface areas (33). And, with the increasing use of digital

files such as MP3s being used to play music, the effects of compression become another

factor to consider in assessing the overall quality of media sounds and images. With the

omnipresence of digital media, so-called old media nevertheless refuse to die as they are

adopted by niche groups who value their qualities in contrast to digital media. Often

the qualities may be expressed as being somehow more “human” and “warm” than the“cold” and “soulless” nature of digital media, particularly amongst selected champions

of analogue audio media. Not only vinyl records, but even audio cassettes—which had

long been maligned for their sound quality—have become preferred over digital media

formats by a numberof people (Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has claimed that he only

listens to music on audio cassette). In relation to the newer formats, particularly virtual

formats, older media take on more personal qualities, whether through their less mass-

produced nature, their physical nature (the 12” vinyl record and sleeve constituting a

very physical object, or the personal mixtape as expressive of home-made devotion), or

the actual quality of sounds associated with them.The warmth and human associations that various analogue media have accrued

may also relate to their ghostly nature: if digital media are marked by absence of

humanity, for example, then they are perhaps capable not so much of producing

ghosts as they are of producing a form of “soulless” interference. Scottish duo Boards

of Canada—an ambient electronic act sometimes cited as important precursors to

hauntology (Reynolds, “Society”; Harper)—have claimed that the ghostly nature of

analogue is one of the reasons they favor using such equipment for the production of

music. Largely (though not totally) eschewing digital software, Boards of Canada go

to great lengths to create an aged feel to their music through the use (and abuse) of

vintage equipment. Mike Sandison from Boards of Canada thus explains:.

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. . . for us a lot of the time, we’re not trying to capture how perfect somethingmight have been at its inception, but more how it would sound now after years of use. Of course, you can’t instantly make a song into something chronologically aged, so that’s where a lot of our work goes, into finding ways of artificially imprinting an aged, nostalgic feel. (Hutton)

This is achieved through various methods, including recording musical samples on

low-quality tape machines (sometimes re-recording onto tape again), and other forms

of lo-fi experimentation.

Ghost Box’s aesthetic procedures, whilst certainly drawing on the uncanny

dimensions of analogue media, do not discount digital technologies from having

their own ghostly features, and instead foreground the intermixing of analogue and

digital. If we think of analogue and digital in terms of the haunting metaphor, then it is

possible to argue that digital media from their outset were haunted by the specter of

analogue: musical compact discs, laserdiscs, and DVDs, for example, were originally

promoted as offering something superior to analogue sound. Their quality was posited

as superior to their analogue counterparts through the removal of interference, and their

overall identity was therefore informed by analogue (it was only through being

positioned in relation to analogue media that the particular qualities of digital media

were established). A wealth of early advertisements and other discourses promoting

digital mediawere engaged in a strategy that attempted to stress thesuperiorityof digital

and gradually kill off analogue. Yet this did not happen; whilst digital technologies have

largely replaced analogue technologies in a range of media production and playback

consumables, analogue has not completely died (further, digital technologies are used to

share and distribute greater amounts of older material, whether this is newly discoveredor reissued/remastered material). Whilstdigital consumables were promoted and largely

embraced, analogue technologies themselves began to acquire further values and an

overall identity in contradistinction to the new digital order. Thus, “warmth” and

“humanness” were values which beganto become widespread in theidentity of analogue

at the point when digital technologies began to dominate within the consumer market,

values which for some held more sway than the consumer-fuelled idea of interference

and noise (such as tape hiss, noise bars, vinyl pops, etc.). Analogue is now a steady, albeit

minor, presence within the consumer market, kept alive by its defenders, who may also

prefer its surrounding markets and communities as attractive alternatives to the largermass-consumer market. For others, analogue forms of media may be considered

increasingly antiquated, relics of a dying age supported by quaint nostalgists.

Conclusion

Whilst I would argue that Ghost Box is a label/project that speculates on the ways in

which analogue and digital intermix in the current media climate, I would like to

conclude this article by considering two concepts—nostalgia and pastiche—which

have often been linked to musical hauntology but in ways that tend to distance the

artists involved from such concepts. This is perhaps rooted in the ways that this


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movement hasbeen lauded in publications that tend to denigrate pastiche and nostalgia

as suspect practices. Critics and broader publications covering and praising

hauntology—for example, Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher, the Wire, the Guardian,

Fact Magazine— are often left-leaning in terms of their political/cultural perspectives,

and nostalgia in particular has often been regarded as a conservative notion. When theconcept has been broached, it has often been refused or deflected. Thus, Jon Brooks (of

the Advisory Circle) claims that when he first listened to Ghost Box material, what he

heard was not “pastiche or a simplistic nostalgic parody of what had gone before, rather

it was a representation of futures which never materialised” (Stannard). Mark Fisher,

meanwhile, has argued that because many hauntological artists openly address

nostalgia in their work, they do not belong to the “nostalgia mode” that he considers

indicative of postmodernism.

I think Fisher’s contention can be accepted up to a point: certainly, self-conscious

references to the process of nostalgia should not be conflated with nostalgia per se.However, there is for me too neat a distinction being drawn between hauntology and

postmodernist nostalgia here. Fisher uses postmodernism as an example of negative

nostalgia—of a crash-and-grab retro mindset which actually conceals its nostalgic

operations and instead posits a kind of “end of history” timelessness (where all

temporal moments collapse into the present). Yet Fisher has to rely on a very reductive

notion of postmodernism in order to support this distinction, which collapses the

variegated discourses associated with the concept in a manner that is too conveniently

tidy. In actual fact, some notable postmodernist interrogations of art do not quite tally

with his contention that postmodern art conceals its nostalgic operations; RosalindKrauss has argued, for example, that postmodernist art tends to foreground its

antecedents much more saliently than modernist art, which, instead, tended to

downplay its referents in order to promote its own uniqueness (161–63). Further,

Fisher uses a rather suspect example to support his broader point, an example

borrowed from Frederic Jameson’s work on postmodernism. Contrasting hauntology’s

speculations on nostalgia with the “nostalgia mode,” Fisher refers to Jameson’s claims

that Body Heat is a postmodernist text because while the film engages in pastiche—by

setting the film in the modern day but “clearly made according to formal conventions

of 40s noir”—the film “disavows” its temporal disjunctures. In this sense, hauntology escapes the taint of nostalgia because it signposts its intentions, and because those

intentions are declared as being about nostalgia rather than actually indulging in

nostalgia. Pastiche itself, though, according to Dyer, needs to be recognized as such: it

is, unlike related practices such as forgery or plagiarism, “textually marked imitation”

(23). Body Heat (Kasdan, 1981), in this sense, should not be thought of as a film that

disavowed its nostalgic mode; its reception by critics and academics certainly would

attest to its pastiche exercises being a visible aspect of its identity. Dyer claims that

“what neo-noir imitates is not straightforwardly noir but the memory of noir, a

memory that may be inaccurate or selective” (124). This doesn’t actually sound

remarkably different from the strategies of some of the hauntologists.

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Fisher is one of the few critics who have tackled these notions in detail, but

unsurprisingly he distances the hauntologists from them because of their negative

values. However, nostalgia itself—as many critics have argued—is not necessarily

conservative and can actually be mobilized for progressive purposes. Stuart Tannock

has argued that nostalgia “responds to a diversity of personal needs and politicaldesires. Nostalgic narratives may embody any number of different visions, values, and

ideals. And, as a cultural resource or strategy, nostalgia may be put to use in a variety

of ways” (454). He notes, for example, the connection between nostalgia and struggles

for change which were evident in the seventeenth-century Diggers and the Land

Chartists (455). Pastiche, meanwhile, has turned into a suspect concept amongst left-

wing theorists who often consider it a postmodern retreat from politics and a revelling

in consumer culture. This, once again, is a rather limited conception of pastiche (one

very much associated with Jameson’s analysis). Even when Simon Reynolds mentions

pastiche in relation to hauntology, he goes on to distinguish it from the kind of pastiche perceived as symptomatic of a more straightforward “retro-culture,” in that

hauntology “doesn’t leach off the past but allows the past to leak into it, to pass

through in an almost mediumistic way” (Reynolds, “Society” 32).

Yet Ghost Box and other hauntologists are undoubtedly involved in strategies of

nostalgia and pastiche, and in this sense their output is surely a lot closer to a retro

aesthetic—what many critics have dubbed an uninspired retreading of the past—than

it has been credited with. I would contend, however, that critics have been led to

overlook this point by the overall framework within which the music has been

packaged and positioned, in addition to the values attached to the recurrent references

cited. Ghost Box, for example, offers a form of heritage and nostalgia that is very much associated with alternative values (particularly paganism, psychogeography and

public education) and packages its releases carefully in order to construct “psychic

heterotopias.” And if not all of the music that Ghost Box releases can be termed

pastiche, some of it—selected output from the Advisory Circle and Belbury Poly in

particular—certainly can. Yet this is a mode of pastiche that can be largely

differentiated from other forms through its ransacking of generally obscure sources. It

is, therefore, not so much the absence of pastiche and nostalgia that typifies the label

and its general critical acclaim, but rather the displacing of these concepts through

strategies of selectivity and framing . The selection of particular types of music (a largeamount of it not widely known), and the framing of the music through design and

discourse, creates links to texts and values generally favored within the critical

communities embracing hauntology as a movement. Thus, similar to the way in

which Ghost Box can be seen as engaging in alternative forms of heritage, it can also be

considered to be practicing alternative forms of nostalgia and pastiche.

Notes

[1] Whilst some related organizations referred to here may be marked as English, I will myself

more broadly refer to this movement as British. Even if a sense of Englishness is thought topervade much of the cultural formation I investigate, there are important non-English aspects


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which feed into it. Both co-founders of Ghost Box, for example, come from South Wales, asdoes one of their literary touchstones, Arthur Machen. The Scottish region in which Hardy’sThe Wicker Man was filmed, is also an important reference point for many within this culture.

[2] As such, I will not analyze a number of American artists who have also been associated withthis movement/concept, such as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti or James Ferraro (see Keenan).

Keenan’s overview of this movement does not mention “hauntology”; he works with theconceptual phrase “hypnagogic pop,” but the work of a number of the artists he discusses hasbeen discussed within the hauntological framework elsewhere, particularly that of Ariel Pink.

[3] It is likely that Jupp, House, and other figures associated with hauntology would haveexperienced the work of writers such as Machen and Blackwood through radio plays, aninspiration that was recently paid homage to in a series of supernatural radio dramas (by established writers such as Nigel Kneale and Sir Andrew Caldecott, and also contemporary writers) accompanied by new soundtracks (by artists such as Belbury Poly, Mordant Music, andMoon Wiring Club). This series was entitled Weird Tales for Winter and was broadcast by Resonance104.4 FM between 25 January and 2 February 2010. A second season of Weird Tales for Winter was broadcast between 29 January and 5 February 2011 (also on Resonance 104.4 FM).

[4] The first Ghost Box vinyl release was an extended re-release of the Advisory Circle’s Mind How

You Go on 12” vinyl in 2010 and, later in the same year, two 7” singles which are part of a“Study Series” were released. More vinyl has been released since, yet Ghost Box has still releasedmore material in digital form than on vinyl.

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Bjarkman, Kim. “To Have and to Hold: The Video Collector’s Relationship with an EtherealMedium.” Television & New Media 5.3 (2004): 217–46. Print.

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. London: Polity,2009. Print.

Burgin, Victor. The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion, 2004. Print.Burke, Andrew. “Music, Memory and Modern Life: Saint Etienne’s London.” Screen 51.2 (2010):

103– 17. Print.Cook, Nicholas. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.Couldry, Nick. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London & New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.Curtis, Barry. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion, 2008. Print.Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New

International . London & New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.Dyer, Richard. Pastiche. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.Egan, Kate. Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of Video Nasties. Manchester:

Manchester UP, 2007. Print.English Heretic Official Website. http://www.english-heretic.org.uk . Web. 14 Apr. 2011.Fisher, Mark. “Phonograph Blues.” October 2006. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/

008535.html. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” 1967. http://foucault.info/documents/

heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. Web. 14 Apr. 2011. First published as “DesEspace Autres.” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité. Oct. 1984.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/,amtower/uncanny.html. Web. 14Apr. 2011. First published as “Das Unheimliche.” Imago 5 (1919).

Friedberg, Anne. “DVD and CD.” The New Media Book . Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 30– 39.Print.

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Harper, Adam. “Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present.” Rouge’s Foam, Oct. 2009. http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.

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http://www.ghostbox.co.uk/reviews/fact01.htmhttp://www.ghostbox.co.uk/reviews/fact01.htmhttp://www.english-heretic.org.uk/http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.htmlhttp://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.htmlhttp://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.htmlhttp://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.htmlhttp://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.htmlhttp://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.htmlhttp://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.htmlhttp://www.ghostbox.co.uk/http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.htmlhttp://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.htmlhttp://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.htmlhttp://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.htmlhttp://www.ghostbox.co.uk/http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.htmlhttp://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.htmlhttp://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.htmlhttp://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.htmlhttp://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.htmlhttp://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.htmlhttp://www.english-heretic.org.uk/http://www.ghostbox.co.uk/reviews/fact01.htmhttp://www.ghostbox.co.uk/reviews/fact01.htm


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Higson, Andrew. “The Heritage Film and British Cinema.” Dissolving Views: Key Writings on BritishCinema. Ed. Andrew Higson. London & New York: Cassell, 1996. 232–48. Print.

Hilderbrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright . Durham, NC & London: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

Hutton, Erin. “Boards of Canada.” Electronic Musician, 1 Dec. http://emusician.com/remixmag/

artists_interviews/musicians/remix_emotional_abuse/index.html. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.Keenan, David. “Childhood’s End.” The Wire 306 (2009): 26–31. Print.Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA

& London: MIT Press, 1986. Print.Pirie, David. A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946 – 1972. London: Gordon Fraser,

1973. Print.Powrie, Phil. “On the Threshold Between Past and Present: ‘Alternative Heritage’.” British Cinema:

Past and Present . Ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson. Abingdon & New York: Routledge,2000. 316–26. Print.

Reynolds, Simon. “Lost in Music: Obsessive Record Collecting.” This is Pop: In Search of the Elusiveat Experience Music Project . Ed. Eric Weisband. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. 289–307.Print.

Reynolds, Simon. “Society of the Spectral.” The Wire 273 (2006): 26–33. Print.Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke

UP, 2000. Print.Smith, Justin. Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema. London & New York:

I.B. Tauris, 2010. Print.Staiger, Janet. “Cabinets of Transgression: Collecting and Arranging Hollywood Images.”

Participations 1.3 (2005). http://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_staiger_article.htm#_ednref13. Web. 14 Apr. 2011.

Stannard, Joe. “Interview with Jon Brooks.” The Quietus, April 2010. http://thequietus.com/articles/04153-the-advisory-circle-mind-how-you-go-ghost-box . Web. 14 Apr. 2011.

Strange Attractor Official Website. http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk . Web. Apr. 14 2011.Tannock, Stuart. “Nostalgia Critique.” Cultural Studies 9.3 (1995): 453–64. Print.Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. (2nd ed.). London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002. Print.

Discography

The Advisory Circle. Mind How you Go, Ghost Box, 2005.———. Other Channels. Ghost Box, 2008.———. Mind How you Go (Revised Edition), Ghost Box, 2010.Mount Vernon Arts Lab. The Seance at Hobs Lane, Ghost Box, 2007.Belbury Poly. The Farmer’s Angle, Ghost Box, 2004.———. The Willows, Ghost Box, 2004.———. The Owl’s Map, Ghost Box, 2006.———. From an Ancient Star , Ghost Box, 2009.———. The Farmer’s Angle (Revised Edition), Ghost Box, 2010.Broadcast and The Focus Group. Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, Warp, 2009.The Caretaker. Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, VVM, 1999.The Focus Group. Sketches and Spells, Ghost Box, 2004.———. Hey Let Loose Your Love, Ghost Box, 2005.———. We Are All Pan’s People, Ghost Box, 2007.

Videography

Blood on Satan’s Claw . Haggard, 1971. Film.Body Heat . Kasdan, 1981. Film.

Distant Voices, Still Lives. Davies, 1988. Film.London. Keiller, 1994. Film.


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http://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_emotional_abuse/index.htmlhttp://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_emotional_abuse/index.htmlhttp://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_staiger_article.htm#_ednref13http://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_staiger_article.htm#_ednref13http://thequietus.com/articles/04153-the-advisory-circle-mind-how-you-go-ghost-boxhttp://thequietus.com/articles/04153-the-advisory-circle-mind-how-you-go-ghost-boxhttp://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/http://thequietus.com/articles/04153-the-advisory-circle-mind-how-you-go-ghost-boxhttp://thequietus.com/articles/04153-the-advisory-circle-mind-how-you-go-ghost-boxhttp://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_staiger_article.htm#_ednref13http://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_staiger_article.htm#_ednref13http://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_emotional_abuse/index.htmlhttp://emusician.com/remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_emotional_abuse/index.html


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London Orbital . Petit and Sinclair, 2002. Film.Lonely Water . Grant, 1973. Film.The Long Day Closes. Davies, 1992. Film.Quatermass and the Pit . Ward Baker, 1967. Film.Radio On. Petit, 1980. Film.

Robinson in Space. Keiller, 1997. Film.The Shining . Kubrick, 1980. Film.Small Faces. MacKinnon, 1996. Film.The Wicker Man. Hardy, 1973. Film.Witchfinder General . Reeves, 1968. Film.

Notes on Contributor

Dr Jamie Sexton is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria

University, UK. His publications include an edited work, Music, Sound and

Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual (2007), and Cult Cinema: An Introduction(co-authored with Ernest Mathijs, 2011).

24 J. Sexton

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weird britain in exile

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