Sweet Exorcist: How Dance Music Haunts Our Memory
I normally start off with an industry-related topic, but this week I’ve written something a bit more personal. Bear with me if it’s not what you were expecting.
The first dance record I ever loved was Utah Saints ‘Something Good’. You know the one, the furiously uptempo early 90’s rave tune that sampled Kate Bush.
I say this because a couple of Saturdays ago I went to a reading of MR James ghost stories in the Leper Chapel in Cambridge (a place I’ve walked by a thousand times due to it’s close proximity to the football ground, but never visited until now). Ghost stories are closely associated with Hauntology, the genre of music that started to become popular in the early 00’s thanks to the writing of Simon Reynolds and the late Mark Fisher, and the music of acts like The Caretaker, Demdike Stare and stuff on the Ghost Box label.
These tracks all recalled earlier musical recordings, often using samples from older tracks and using elements of decay and haziness to create a foggy sound with snippets of recognisability in it. Perhaps the best known of these artists is The Caretaker, whos Everywhere At The End of Time project took the listener on a journey over eight LP’s of a slow decline into dementia - by the end of it the listener was hearing noise with only the odd familiar sound, which would have been played much clearer earlier on in the albums timeline. Recently a TikTok ‘challenge’ saw youngsters attempting to listen to as much of it as possible and sharing their reactions. If you’re not familiar with the genre, that’s a good place to start - it’s not on Spotify, but it is on Bandcamp.
Anyway, this had me thinking - we frame hauntology and this music in the mind of elderly people, but where are our memories? Dance music has been around in one form or another since the 1970’s, and many of the dance personalities of our time are now approaching pensionable age - Pete Tong is 63, Underworld’s Karl Hyde is 66 (older than my own father). For people who grew up with dance music from the 90’s onwards our musical memories aren’t those of old ballroom 78s that The Caretaker uses to evoke nostalgia, it’s stuff like Utah Saints, like the Prodigy or Underworld. How do you begin to approach this music deteriorating in your memory?
Music nowadays will never deteriorate like music of old. Theres a chance it might get lost, but generally a digital file, properly stored will survive forever, much longer than a tape or CD. The chances of people in the future finding a privately pressed record from 2023 that hadn’t been heard in 40 or 50 years are vanishingly slim, but there will be hard drives full of music that never sees the light of day - in fact, there’ll be DSPs full of music that has never been heard by anyone other than it’s creator, as I mentioned in a previous letter almost 50% of music on Spotify has zero plays. We will live with the music of our past forever, it should pretty much always be accessible until the end of time. (Is this what The Caretaker meant by ‘Everything At The End of Time’?)
So what does all this mean? Will music always be driven by this sense of nostalgia for records stuck in time, or is it fluid, moving forwards and eventually one day the dance records of our youth will be fleeting memories in our minds? I guess we’re already starting to see some of that nostalgia being marketed again, the Hacienda Classical type events where string orchestras play old dance tunes.
My own memories of Something Good are not of hearing it in the rave - I was nine in 1992 - but of hearing it on the radio, on a cassette on a car journey or on my stereo at home or the bus to school. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it played out in a club, although it’s a piece of club music I never experienced it in that way. My memories of hearing the track are already starting to disappear - I can’t remember which car journeys in particular I would have heard the song, where we were going or who was in the car with me, was it my mum? my dad? my sister? just one of them? all three? What house was I living in when I remember playing it on a stereo in my room? Or was it round a friends house, whose older brother had a huge selection of tape packs? I’m only forty, but if you asked an eighty year old where they first heard This is Romance their memory will be just as hazy.
Maybe for me hauntology is something different - maybe I’m thinking too deeply about it. Perhaps it won’t be the music of my adolescence, but the music of my adulthood that evokes these memories. I look to music with an intentional fog to mask the rigours of daily life, and perhaps I’m preparing already for an existence when memory is a chore. Lots of music I enjoy has that haze to it, the GAS project of Wolfgang Voigt, the Loidis record Huerco S put out a while back, those early Raime EP’s. A recent purchase I briefly mentioned last week was the new Hilary Woods album that has a real haunting feel to it. Worryingly, and based on what I wrote about regarding Spotify not paying as high a royalty rate on white noise and ‘non-music’ releases the other week, some of this stuff comes pretty close to the line of what is and isn’t music - a lot of the ambient and concentration playlists are populated not only by the established artists in that genre, but also by library music from companies that have deals with Spotify to promote their tracks in exchange for a more favorable royalty rate (although this is similar to what they’re offering artists now with their Discovery feature). How do you determine what piece of noise music has been made artistically and what has been made purely to fill a spot on a playlist? Who gets to judge?
Maybe this is what will claim my mind in (hopefully) many years to come. Maybe my ghosts will be the ghosts of static, of noise and of fog, and not of kick drums and Kate Bush samples. After all how can you be haunted without a ghost to haunt you?
I Just Know That Something Good Is Gonna Happen…
On to this weeks music - I’ve shared a few bits from the above essay for a bit of context, but I’ve also found some other nice new releases this week - the new Biosphere album I’ve had for a few days now and I really like it. I’ve seen some reviews expecting a bit more from it, but for me this is exactly what I want. Biosphere’s early albums are absolutely crucial in the foundation of Ambient as a genre, although my personal favourite is his Petrified Forest album from 2017 - it was a fairly regular staple in the DJ sets I played at the time - there’s that darkness again…
There’s a new Time is Away compilation out called Searchlight Moonbeam. If you know their previous one Ballads you’ll know what to expect, a lovingly curated collection of tracks loosely inspired by their NTS Show (one of the best shows on NTS by the way, highly recommended). Every new track is a surprise so I’ve shared a few below. I’m reminded a little of that I Won’t Have To Think About You compilation on A Colorful Storm a few years ago, purely in the depth of it’s tracklist, but this one isn’t anywhere near as poppy or upbeat.
The Cousin track got played on Do You the other morning, and then a friend text me waxing lyrical about it shortly after I’d added it to my playlist. It’s really good, if you’re into that 00’s minimal-esque sound. Speaking of which - it’s not on Spotify (although a bit of Dexter from a Robag Wruhme Kompakt mix is), but Ricardo Villalobos has just reissued Alcachofa on 4LP’s, an absolutely essential record if you don’t already have it.
Also reissued this week is The Koner Experiment by Experimental Audio Research. I guess this kind of fits in with the theme of the main essay, but it’s the result of what would happen if the epicentre of Dub Techno was Coventry instead of Berlin. Features Porter Ricks Thomas Koner, MBV’s Kevin Shields, Kevin Martin and Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom and well, you’re just gonna have to listen to it to hear the results.
One last thing to mention - it’s not on Spotify and there’s a good chance it’s sold out already but this Concentric Circles mixtape on Berceuse Heroique is incredible. Up there with the best from Dark Entries or those old Blackest Ever Black mixtapes and a highest possible recommendation from me.