A new book from Phil Smith offers a chance to consider Mark Fisher's hauntological legacy and the politics of life lived without a future, among the remains of the past.

Phil Smith, Albion’s Eco-Eerie: TV and Movies of the Haunted Generation, Shrewsbury: Temporal Boundary Press, 2024.

Mark Fisher (1968-2017) founded Zero Books, Repeater Books and the k-punk blog. He was the author of Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life, and taught at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Culture has lost the ability to grasp the presentMark Fisher

If we gift them the past we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently, we can control them better.Eldon Tyrell, Blade Runner.

Perhaps a better hour may at some time strike even for the clever fellows: one in which they may demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things.Adorno

Podcast Discussion Summary »

TLDR: A discussion about the details of Phil’s book quickly turns into a reappraisal of the work of Mark Fisher and his kin (Zero Books, Repeater Books, Nina Power, Nick Land, Simon Reynolds, David Stubbs, et al.) and their ideas about hauntology and the Ghost of Marx.

Films reviewed in the book include: Night of the Demon, The Company of Wolves, Fireball XL5, Quatermass and the Pit, O Lucky Man!, Children of the Stones, Whistle and I'll Come to You, Hellraiser, Hellbound.

It is a bold book that takes the weaving path of blood, trauma and sensuality away from Folk Horror and fashionable 'hauntology' into new, enchanted spaces. Digging up and doubling down on messy ideas and demon lovers that exist not to elevate us to transcendence but to immerse us in the mud of grotty instinct.Stephen Volk, author of The Dark Masters Trilogy and Ghostwatch

It is acceptable these days to describe Blake as a Taoist, a Pagan, a Buddhist or an atheist... anything but a Christian. The Traveller and his guest, Mark Vernon argue that this is a big mistake: "Blake... did not claim to be a mystic, and did not use the word. He claimed to be a visionary, an enthusiast, and a Christian, and defined the terms carefully. I have read, and now am reading in newspapers, statements of literary critics and those who call themselves "atheistic theologians" to the effect that Blake had no god but man. People who are not atheists are usually willing to leave to God such important judgments about others. On this subject, as on other statements about himself, Blake seems clear enough. He said always and passionately that he was a Christian, and I know only One who has a better right to an opinion on that subject." Bo Lindberg

Planned as a long Q&A session between Andy and long-time Traveller podcast co-host, Conor Kostick, that discussion raised so many questions and went on for so long that it seemed best to postpone airing the issues on the podcast. For this episode we excerpted Andy’s intro to the discussion, touching on his own experience listening to and making electronic music.

Starting with Wendy Carlos and Popcorn, (yes, it’s Hot Butter by Popcorn, not Popcorn by Hot Butter… Andy got that wrong throughout) passing through Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound, Andy argues that the technology is generally used lazily and to little effect, compared to the enormity of, eg., the work of Iancu Dumitrescu.

The gist of Andy’s argument is that all the things he found interesting in the distorted timbres and extremities of electronic rock and industrial music are used with overwhelming effect in the music of the Romanian Spectral composer, Iancu Dumitrescu, whose music runs throughout the show, along with samples from David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, the Tim Hodgkinson / Ken Hyder collaboration, KSpace, and Andy Wilson’s own recorded archives.

Along the way, Andy discusses the combined and uneven development of electronic music, with huge increases in the expressive power of the tools available to musicians still lagrely unexplored by most musicians. Yes, Andy is complaining about the music young people make today. Conor thought so, and he might be right.

Andy also tells stories about visiting abandoned quarries on a military base to record foxes with Chris Watson of Cabaret Voltaire, Cod that burp (off the Galapagos Islands, not Japan) at hissing cockroaches, Chris Carter’s Gristleizer, Bourbonese Qualk’s Simon Crab buying Throbbing Gristle’s Korg MS20, comparisons between buying tickets for Oasis and dumping grain in the Pacific, seagull reverb, the Nagra tape recorder, BBC Radiophonics, ‘Dada, Futurism, Industrial Music’, Wendy Carlos, hand-cranked ring modulators, The Aphex Twin and the Supercollider user group, Steve Stapleton bunking off at Faust’s Wumme and Kurt Graupner’s Faust Machines, computerised shamanic improv, John Lennon’s tape experiments, SoundRaider, time division multiplexing, nature recording with David Attenborough, the pleasures of dentistry under general anaesthetics, and more besides.

Criminally, I didn’t get around to talking about how the sound of King Iwah and the Upsetters’ Give Me Power, produced by Lee Perry in 1972, set the scene for everything that followed. I can only apologise and drop this video here.

Traveller Music Tech