Archive for the ‘hauntiquarianism’ Category
Hauntiquarianism Vs. Regionalism
I’m off to see if I can burst an imaginary territory. I’ll be walking backwards along an invisible heritage road known as the Icknield Way, from Thetford to Luton, mincing up and out over the invented range of hills and mounts called, by picturesque regionalists, the East Anglian Heights.
I found this map on the website of the Icknield Way Association.
Back some time next week.
Posted by Neil
on September 22, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Tags: East Anglian Heights, Regionalism, hauntiquarianism
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Rockhaunter — Dubjective Hauntology in Sound and Vision
I’d wasted more than half my life listening out for the ultimate monster earthquake history-killing punk-blues teenage feedback riff-fuck. And I’d wasted more than the other half trying to make music from unitary sounds I’d collected in my conscious fear of their presence. At some point in the past decade I stopped collecting songs and listening out for patterns and started describing the imaginary music that had left its constantly replaying imprint on me. All of a sudden, over a period of three or four years, I became dizzy with the truth: the finest tunes exist in the imagination.
I and I (and, indeed, I) am thee Rockhaunter. Keen hauntiquaries, or hauntiquarians, we poke into and recreate antiquarian sounds in our imaginings and in uttering thoughts about them. I’m no specialist, so I can’t get with “hauntology” — although I grok it and groove on its skittering blueprint surface. Also, I don’t simply regard the sublime and then cast theory with genuflections: I swim and cavort in it. I don’t consider the shadow tracks of unknown sounds as the memories of things that have never been present: in my dubjective sensing, these are unheeded frequencies. I don’t categorise the Unexplained or the Reimagined as monolithic footnotes to ‘the weird’ or ‘the uncanny’: I let the voices talk through my ventriloquising.
Is hauntology in music and visual culture a reinvention of historicism with weird contingencies replacing science? Why do hauntologists seek place-specificity? What makes hauntology different from psychogeography, deep topography or general critical theory? How is hauntology different from other re-educationalist projects in popular culture (like psychogeography and record collecting) that tackle both nostalgia and entrenched academicism head on with purposeful revisionism?
My hauntiquarian nose smells an attempt by radical minds to create an imaginary national epic of collective possibilities. I wonder what such an epic would sound like.
Watch me now. I’m thee Rockhaunter. The ghostly harmony killer. Versioning the people. With a sheet over my head.
Coming soon:— Rockhaunter, No. 1, Halloween Hauntology Special
Posted by Neil
on September 21, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Tags: Film, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Spatiality, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
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Reissuing Rockhunter Nos. 15 and 17
It is written. The last of the lost issues have been typed up. Finally. And here they are. For your brief amusement.
Rockhunter, Issue 15, October 2004 and Rockhunter, Issue 17, February 2005 were both distributed in the Heart and Hand pub and in Borderline Records, Brighton.
That only leaves the first four issues to sort out. But I’ve decided to leave them for the time being. The originals were actually fairly weighty tomes, tipping the scales at about 40 pages per issue on average. That’s too much typing when there’s other things to be done and better things to see than a screen.
All the best
Neil
Posted by Neil
on September 20, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Tags: Proletarian Postmodernism, Sound, The Troggs, hauntiquarianism
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Reissue of Rockhunter, Issue 14, August 2004
And here it is: Rockhunter, Issue 14, August 2004.
Includes: “Troggonometry: Thee Mighty Caesars and Spacemen 3 — Two Sides of the Same Revision”, in which we see generic monoliths exploding before our very eyes. Very slowly. And with no point being reached. But still…
Also includes: Jim Smith’s Recipe Page. Favourite Food Hints And Tips From The Winking Uncle Of Brighton Rock ‘n’ Roll!!
Rockhunter, Issue 14, August 2004 was previously issued in paper form only during August 2004. Copies were scattered around the Heart and Hand public house and Borderline records in Brighton’s fashionable North Laine area. Move there now! Make it more exciting for the locals!!
There you go.
Posted by Neil
on September 19, 2007 at 11:00 am
Tags: Billy Childish, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Spacemen 3, The Troggs, hauntiquarianism, post-punk
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Rockhaunter — Hauntiquarianism, Dubjectivity & Fictive Counter-Intelligence
Tomorrow’s the start of Rockhaunter. Your No. 1 Guide to Hauntiquarianism, Sound and Vision.
I’ve suppressed Rockhunter. I did so on the last day of August — symbolically, the end of summer, which has become a time of musical replay for those intending to become culturally colder in the sunshine. I decided not to become evidence for a cultural-historical trend. It became clear that, without my saying otherwise, the fictivities, soundings, silent screaming and auto-arguments in Rockhunter could be taken for a drift towards the sort of repetition that elides simultaneity and absence. That is not so. I’ve pressed the constant play button on my cassette player; I made the CD replay over and over again; and iTunes is only going through all my fave tracks again because I issued it instructions to do so.
In case there’s any residual doubt, I am doing this on purpose.
On reading various blogs and things, mainly ones dealing with hauntology — the past/present — in popular sound and vision, and noting some convergency or cultural consensus in the fields, streams and spaceways, I have become more and more convinced of the power of divergency, immanent or otherwise. There’s also a growing tendency to regard hidden histories and forgotten acts as prototypes, powerful potential emetics that, if injected into culture, would blast it to pieces. There’s a sense in which regarding old radicalisms might help societies choose, in retrospect, which divergent path their cultures preferred!
Hidden histories and forgotten acts are currently doing their work, both now and then; they are neither revivable ganglia nor spent shells. Like travel writing generally — especially psychogeography — time travel writing tells us nothing, except whether the writer approves of how things turned out. Adducing historical acts and activisms is a notary’s game. It’s not for we poets.
In case you were wondering, I am happy to create false music, unnatural fictions and to field dubjective responses, and to make it funny.
To be a hauntiquary — a divergent amateur civilian — in an age of academic professionalism and convergency is as exciting as it is valueless, and perhaps even worthless. Rest assured I won’t shirk or dodge the task at hand. Hauntiquarian sounds won’t make themselves.
I’m starting again. It begins again tomorrow, from Issue 1, as Rockhaunter. Your No. 1 Guide to Hauntiquarianism, Sound and Vision.
Posted by Neil
on September 5, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Tags: Music, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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