Archive for the ‘hauntology’ Category
The Glass Harmonica: Liminal Instrumentation, Affective Harmonics and the Dubjective Absence of Hauntology
I was having a coffee in central Brighton yesterday when I stopped mid-conversation to try to hear more of what sounded like tiny bells, high-pitched organ notes or a soft but insistent soprano voice — but not quite any of those things — cutting through the industrial noise of a busy coffee shop. Having worked out that it was music playing, rather than the sound of my soul, I asked at the counter.
The woman operating the froth machine didn’t know what the tune was, saying they just played the CDs given to them by HQ. So I went to the Classical Longplayer in Duke Street, where I always go to ask about music I don’t know much about. I still prefer this method of finding out — drifting towards someone who’ll know — to searching the internet. The owner told me immediately what it was: I’d been hearing the sound of the glass harmonica. But he didn’t have anything to sell me.
Back in the dry indoors, a few minutes of searching hooked me up with loads of weird trilling and head-aching harmony. As you’ll see, the sound is much as you’d expect: it’s the high chime of fingers rubbing glass rims.
William Zeitler’s Hong Kong performance of “Venus” has got the lot: exoticism, Orientalism and even hauntiquarianism in the shape of re-enactment in sound, vision and language (he prefers to call his instrument it by its alternate olden name, the glass armonica).
His version of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” melds weird camp and popular musical historicism. Adorno would have loved this.
“The Glass Harmonica” (1968), an allegorical short feature by Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky, silently ventriloquises the affectivity of the human will amplified through creative interventions (see part one and part two on Youtube). Khrjanovsky refigures the instrument as a glass lyre, virtually dematerialising the glass harmonica as constructed by Benjamin Franklin and replacing it with a portable cipher suitable for an itinerant bard. Its harmonics are reimagined in a score written by Alfred Schnittke, with the unique and unwieldy industrial instrument represented by more accessible and versatile instrumentation, including flute, violin, celesta, organ, piano, tubular bells, tape effects and, way down in the mix, a suspicion of glass harmonica.
Vera Meyer’s folksy renditions of the glass harmonica “pops” keep her feet firmly on the street, from where she presents a pleasing mix of music and historical factoids.
Not affected by the keening of glass vibrations, Meyer tells her ever-changing audience that the weird harmonies of the glass harmonica might cause “convulsions in dogs and cats, marital disputes and wake people from the dead.” The pitch and harmony of Meyer’s performances are significantly different from Zeitler’s: Zeitler makes melifluous sounds, while Meyer produces tones that are hard to endure. I can believe that the dead would wake up if Meyer was playing outside their place.
Some 18th century critics suggested that exposure to the glass harmonica’s harmonics might be injurious to nervous people and could potentially induce morbid feelings and depression. The same could be said of any musical instrument. If you’ve a tendency towards depression or obsessions, you’ll find a focus for those feelings in your environment.
The weird sound of the glass harmonica produces an effect in the listener beyond the movement of air. As a recorded sound, it’s familiar due to its nearness to the noise made by a wet finger on a wine glass. But with such clarity of tone and available combinations of harmonics, it’s the sound of nothing you’ve ever heard before. It’s not the start-up sound of a difference engine. It’s a recalibrated machine from The Past that affects the weirdness of our immediate perception. It is being and becoming and was and is the sound of the thing that it is. Familiar, yet unknown, its sound lies a little further off in experiential space.
Now play the brittle armonica yourself, courtesy of The Franklin Institute Science Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
Posted by Neil
on October 2, 2007 at 7:20 am
Tags: Music, Sound, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — Signposts and Memorial Reportage: Christopher Noulton’s Revisioning of Commercial Art
Following hard on the trail of my previous post about Edward Summerton, on Friday evening I encountered another artist working in the long gouache shadow of Ladybird book images.
Christopher Noulton’s recent paintings begin in the viewer’s mind with the commercial style of 1960s Ladybird book illustrations, although he starts the ball rolling with with careful research and 3D models and works on to produce pictures comprising intertextual images that reappear in multiple canvases. Taken individually and/or collectively, Noulton’s narratives revision the mundaneity of image-nostalgia by making realistic representations of his ideal originals that underscore their great affectivity. He creates dioramic narratives that figure in minute detail the decal-perfect imaginary of a historicist enthusiast.
Noulton figures the comings and goings of an extended ideal community acting out an ideal past of utopian possibilities long after its historical moment has departed. His characters are lit from within by his manipulation of pigment, his understanding of their historical image provenance and by his technically brilliant refiguring of the commercial art techniques used to animate their Ladybird forebears.
But Noulton is not reproducing idealised versions of childhood or attempting to recreate intact moribund representations of ideal rural or suburban locations. He prefers to isolate his characters and images and pull focus. Pulling back, he reveals the precise location of Davey the milkman’s milk float on a Y-juntion, for example. And, focusing further in, he lights on a unhappy-looking child from the 1950s stands uncomfortably outside a 1930s deco detached house. Doing so, Noulton calls to mind and questions the strangeness in conjunctions of images — of childhood, ideal landscapes, utopian architecture, etc. — that are often subject to nostalgia. We should question why TV prgrammes about the 1970s, for example, tend not to feature images/products/landscape interventions from previous eras.
In other paintings, Noulton’s weird landscaping — placing a 1960s Commer milk float in front of a 1930s white deco house or block of flats, or locating the aforementioned deco building on a lonley green heath or moor — queers the pitch of those who may want to bandy accusations that he’s appealing to people’s cultural homesickness. His conscious confusion of image subjects and subject positions — placing familiar types in unusual locations or using The [generic, recent] Past ironically as the context for specific interventions — directs the viewer to the intent and affectivity of his own works and those he’s working from. He paints signposts to and memorials for nostalgia.
Noulton’s previous work has included paintings of his findings during road trips up and down and side to side throughout the British Isles in search of rural ritual happenings, including one of the Whittlesea straw bear. He’s also made a graphical website called Rite Peculiar, which is a fictionalised version of this series of investigative journeys.
For nostalgic context and comparison, if you doubt my antiquarian way of seeing and doing things, you might like to see how others choose to ride The Past without the benefit of hauntology or psychogeography — or, indeed, anything — in which case, go to Yesterday’s World. I’ve a lot more to say about The Past and I’ll do so in future posts.
Honk for hauntiquarianism!
Posted by Neil
on September 30, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Tags: Anthrogenic nature, Art, Ecology, Ladybird books, Proletarian Postmodernism, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — Ladybird of the Devil: Edward Summerton’s Territories of Silent Vision
Last year, Edward Summerton of Dundee university exhibited a series of paintings at the En Tangsogade 4 Udstilling Art Centre in Bovlingbjerg, Denmark, called Bird of the Devil, comprising gouache-altered images from Birds of Prey (1970), a Ladybird book. He’s previously used fairytale images from Ladybird books to represent the heritage-territorialising of the rural and of wider cultural-historical identity.
Summerton conceived of these reconfigured Ladybird avian images, which he’s described as ‘a kind of precious European Disney’, during a trip to the Summer Isles in 2004, which he says he undertook to research the genealogy of his surname. Having made the fabulous connection between his name and that of Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973), he introduces himself even further into the shaky mythology and prurient anti-ruralism of director Robin Hardy’s continuing narrative by prefabricating wildlife images found around the film’s ideal location.
The Bird of the Devil pictures are situated in what Summerton describes as “the strict nature reserve”, which is his visual-textual economy, presumably theoretically touching on Jacques Derrida’s “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve” and practically based on strict nature reserves created and maintained under the UNESCO world heritage scheme, which seek to integrate natural sites and sights, heavy industry and tourism. Both fictive territories are ambiguous enclosures negotiating complex textual ecologies.
In the Bird of the Devil pictures, the geospatial strict nature reserve in question is the contextual ecology of Dumfries and Galloway. The image-culture space Summerton intervenes in is the isolationist, even separationist, ruralism and paganist survivalism of The Wicker Man. Focusing not on Scottishness, nature, locality or nostalgia for childhood — he locates his work interstitially in “the small spare spaces that exist between the housing schemes and the landscape, between our culture and subculture, between reality and fiction” — he pointedly re-represents in gouache the artifice used in delimiting territories.
I disagree with Summerton’s assertion — albeit he jumps several logic steps for humour’s sake — that the nature pictures in Ladybird books are generationally dependent: “one look and you are transported to the halcyon days of childhood, nurturing in many a love of birds and a future life artistically driven and played out to a constant background soundtrack of birdsong”. His dependence is not mine.
The images, their gouache faerealism, seemed ancient to me even as I viewed and them as read to me in the mid to late 1960s and read them myself in the early 70s. I was fascinated and repelled by the brutishness and dissolution of the faery other: especially the paintings of Rumpelstiltskin’s facial rage and Dr Fell’s disapproving kiddie-fiddler stare, which remain with me to this day. As far as I knew, these were pictures of the past from the past. I was sure that my great-great-granddad, who was a cobbler and self-taught scholar in a remote Suffolk village, was the shoemaker in The Elves and The Shoemaker.
The pastness of the Ladybird books was part of their attraction. I knew they were olde because I was comparing Ladybird’s silent mythic dioramas with louder images from other imagistically delimited, enclosed ideal worlds on telly, for example, in the BBC’s supplementary rural territory, Trumptonshire and in the clubhouses of The Banana Splits and The Double Deckers that I watched in colour round Mark Fuller’s house. Maybe the intensity of the Ladybird illustrations seemed louder before colour TV.
It’s the territorial aspect of Summerton’s works — revisiting imaginary sites of past or future experience or imagining sites of textuality-visuality previously encountered or yet unheeded — that speeds their understanding to my brain. The spatiality of the Bird of the Devil pictures intervened on me just as I was researching Ladybird books, having re-bought a couple of titles that still cause me to resonate. Summerton’s altered illustrations stand proud on the surface of my understanding, causing the reflexive mirror to produce an image that is not looking-glass true.
The aural aspect is also becoming as clear to me as the clean gouache swashes of the Ladybird illustrators’ brushes. The presumed silence of illustrations of birds from the past is interrupted as we heed children’s voices doing bird noises over the top of them. Similarly, old war comics take life, too, as the sounds of death are mummed by thousands of intent voices.
The anthropogenic territory of Summerton’s strict nature reserve stills and grows quiet as he allows yet another set of industrial and cultural interventions to start and continue making it different. The sound of his voice, speaking with Christopher Lee’s Summerisle Scots accent, starts up and describes found gouache illustrations; it mendaciously annotates the truth of the coincidental conjunction he’s discovered between different products of a common era. His marketing taunts the collective ecology of the imagined Summer Isles as much as it does the other imaginary British isles. Summerton’s brand of hauntology makes him a tauntiquarian. His performance through pictures is an example of silent ventriloquism, which conjures and heeds the voices furtively.
Summerton is a first class hauntiquary. Unless he’s already aligned himself with my imaginary enemies, the hauntologists! Although I was, at first, a little sad that he choose to taunt my ghost other, rather than ask me how I felt, I’m reassured by his use of humour to pre-empt accusations of his works being explorations of ‘the uncanny’. I always feel rather drained when academics refer to fairytales and other fictive others as uncanny. Dorothy, like all children working with tales of fiction, knew the difference between home and Oz, between play and the thing being played. Playing jet planes, I knew the difference between the fictive air beneath my flying feet or my bike wheels and the tarmac. I like that his strict nature reserve stands for itself as a sort of homely territory for fictions.
As Derrida says at the end of Specters of Marx, scholars of the future should learn to live by learning how to give speech back to the ghosts of ourselves, not wait for immanent this or that to swoop like a bird of the devil out of history-beyond-experience. It’s not a matter of “re-” anything, but of knowing, whether through reflexion, affectivity when you see it. In fiction, scholars and intellectuals of the past must learn this, too. That’s what this mix-up hauntiquarianism thing is all about. That’s why, having always been no one — a hauntiquary lurking without place or identity — I must become everybody.
Happily coincidentally, Ray Bradbury’s recent novella, 50 years in the writing, Somewhere a Band is Playing (2007), is set in the imaginary town of Summerton, Arizona, conjured in a dream by one James Cardiff. I’ve not read this yet, but I’ll let you know when I have.
Honk for myths. With a sheet over your head.
Posted by Neil
on September 28, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Tags: Anthrogenic nature, Art, Ecology, Ladybird books, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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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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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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