Sleeve notes for In A Moment... (Ghost Box compilation, 2015)
Tell me what you see vanishing and I
Will tell you who you are
W.S. Merwin, "For Now"
It’s a moment that a music journalist dreads – when an acquaintance or recently acquired friend shyly pipes up, “Actually, I’ve been making some music myself... would really like to know what you think of it....”
When it happens, it always feels like no good can come of this. It’s almost guaranteed that you’ll have to work up some sort of considered-seeming reaction that, despite your best efforts, will be transparently polite, the strain of finding something nice to say awfully evident. And then the burgeoning friendship takes a big hit, because as much as people say they want your honest critical reaction...
Ten years ago or so, I got that familiar slightly sick feeling when Julian House – who I’d been chatting with via email for a while - offered to send me some music. I dutifully listened, with zero expectations beyond the necessity of an awkward exchange in the near-future. Little did I know that the recordings Julian sent – early sound-sketches by himself, as The Focus Group – followed shortly by the first EP from his accomplice Jim Jupp, as Belbury Poly – would end up being my favorite music of the past decade. Or that their label – Ghost Box – would soon assume a talismanic significance in my mental landscape.
I suspect Julian got more than he’d bargained for as well...
There are those who like to imagine that the reason I love Ghost Box is because the music – in tandem with Julian’s design (”packaging that’s wrapped inside the music”, to quote his own words about library records) and the scaffolding of concepts and allusions surrounding the project, makes for a superb screen upon which to project theories. Certainly Ghost Box lends itself to that kind of speculative thinking, as the output of dozens of blogs and the profusion of magazine thinkpieces over the last decade testifies. But the truth is simply that the music Julian & Jim have put out is what I listen to incessantly: for pleasure, for comfort, for strange delight. Hardly any of the records I raved about or end-of-year-listed in 2005 are things I still play. But I have never stopped listening to Hey Let Loose Your Love or The Willows.
I used the word “comfort” above. One of the things some people don’t seem to get about Ghost Box - and perhaps they’re thrown off by the name - is that this isn’t meant to be some hair-raising, soul-harrowing trip into necromantic darkness. It's much gentler than that, a twisting or tinting of the everyday. Softly spooky, sweetly creepy, Ghost Box enfolds the listener in a cosy unease. It’s umheimlich you can live with, live inside. No, we are not dealing with Gothshit or pierced-dick second-wave industrial shlock here. Yes, humour is involved: in the artwork, the song titles, the fabric of the sound itself, with its queer mix of solemn and jaunty. A humour of a particular poker-face kind that reminds me of old dear comrades from long-ago campaigns of mischief and obfuscation. That’s a personal resonance, but it illustrates a wider public fact: the existence of an Anglo-Surrealist continuum that crops up repeatedly across the generations, based each time around slightly different constellations of esoteric erudition and arcane research.
This is possibly the point at which to point out that Ghost Box aren’t alone. Before the label started, back in the Nineties, there were precursors: Boards of Canada, Position Normal, Mount Vernon Arts Lab, Broadcast, Add N to (X), Pram, Plone, Stereolab. (A few of these are friends of Julian and Jim, and/or record cover design clients of Julian’s). When Ghost Box launched in 2005, it entered an emerging cultural field that had already started to bestow totemic stature on entities like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and bygone regions of sound like library music and DIY concrete /electronic (maverick composers like F.C. Judd, Basil Kirchin, Tristam Cary, Daphne Oram, Ron Geesin, and Desmond Leslie). Ghost Box found itself in alignment with other operators who’d found their own way to similar sets of preoccupations: Mordant Music, Moon Wiring Club, James Kirby a/k/a The Caretaker, English Heretic, Trunk Records, Cate Brooks of King of Woolworths and later the Café Kaput label. Within a few years Ghost Box were joined by new fellow travelers such as Pye Corner Audio, Burial, Woebot, Robin the Fog, Sarah Angliss, the West Country wyrdtronica / pastoral-industrial crew (Farmer Glitch, Kemper Norton, IX Tab), West Norwood Cassette Library, Demdike Stare, Ekoplekz, and A Year In The Country. There were even remote cousins overseas, from Andrew Pekler in Germany to Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, William Basinski, James Ferraro, and Oneohtrix Point Never in the United States.
Even just focusing consideration to the U.K., the field is really quite crowded now, and I haven’t mentioned certain blatantly indebted post-GB operatives, or all of the contributors to Ghost Box’s Studies Series and Other Voices split 7-inch singles. Nor the seepage into other art forms *, notably the film Berberian Sound Studio. Wikipedia may not accept it **, but have no doubt: this is a definite “thing” we’re talking about, an objectively existing zone.
Ghost Box have remained central in whatever you want to call this “this” ***, and indeed - to my ears and eyes - they‘ve operated at a slight elevation to most everybody else in the parish, their output characterized by consistency in both the “quality standards” and “thematic coherence” senses. Their achievement partly entails a synthesis of existing tendencies, partly a broadening out into a richer frame of reference and resonance, but most of all, the sheer consummate-ness of how they’ve gone about things.
From the start, the label’s releases were designed – literally – to form a set, a format modelled on university course books or the classic grid cover template of Penguin / Pelican / Peregrine paperbacks. The look of the releases made you want to own them all. But more than a mere design fetish, the packaging is the outward display of a continuity of sound and sensibility. When other artists – like Cate Brooks as The Advisory Circle, or Pye Corner Audio – have contributed to the label, they have sounded more Ghost Box-y compared to their regular output. And no slight intended to them or their other releases, they’ve done their best work for Ghost Box. Something about the ideas-frame, the sense of occasion in joining that “set”, perhaps even the name “Ghost Box” – like all great group or label names, it’s a miniature poem, a condensed manifesto – seemed to make these talents raise their game.
This isn’t the time and place – nor is there the space – to explore thoroughly the huge inventory of themes and obsessions that make up the Ghost(Box)world: tales of cosmic horror and pastoral uncanny by gentlemen occultists like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen; the U.K.’s status as the country with the highest number of ghost sightings in the world and as the culture that invented the ghost story; eccentric scholars of history and the occult like T.C. Lethbridge, M.B. Devot, and Ronald Hutton; British horror movies of the Hammer and Tigon school, especially those with a bucolic-pagan tinge like The Wicker Man; the inappropriately disturbing - by today’s sanitised standards - children’s television series of the 1970s involving the supernatural or apocalyptic, along with the era’s excessively terrifying Public Information Films; Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms animations like Bagpuss and The Clangers; the planning-for-tomorrow spirit of post-WW2 Britain that encompassed Brutalist architecture, the Open University, the polytechnics.... Treatises have been written on all of this (I’ve penned a few myself) and right now there are people beavering away at PhD’s making all the right connections.
But here might be the time and the place to talk about... time and place, the two over-arching concepts that unify and permeate Ghost Box’s output. Perhaps they are really just different sides of the same coin: Great Britain during the period book-ended by the creation of the Welfare State and by Thatcher’s electoral landslide, which inaugurated the post-socialist era in which we grimly find ourselves still. Deeply imprinted memories of this bygone Britain are the source of the music’s allure and its poignant charge. Taylor Parkes captures this when he writes that “anyone born between the early 60s and the early 70s is at risk from the past in some ways. Being the generation who were raised in one kind of Britain (a cosy-but-progressive social democracy, where the arts were valued and thought was encouraged) and then came of age in another, there's a sort of dissonance and suppressed fury there which makes our nostalgia deeper and more painful than it should be. That sense of an inheritance having been snatched away, of being a motherless child..... I always thought of the Ghost Box stuff, for instance, as a howl of separation anxiety.”
Ghost Box struck a particularly plangent chord with me, not just because of the middle age I’d decisively arrived at circa 2005, but because I was an expatriate who had been living in America for a decade by that point. That made me an exile in space and time. Hearing records like Sketches and Spells and Hey Let Loose Your Love, Farmer’s Angle and The Willows... later The Advisory Circle’s Mind How You Go and Other Channels... I felt a sense of recognition and connection – self-recognition and self-reconnection – that’s probably similar to say, how a migrant Jamaican feels listening to reggae: an organic bond to music that sound-tracked everyday life going back as far as you can remember. Ghost Box is “roots ‘n culture” for me and for my kind.
The label’s releases have filled me with mournful wonder at the thought of the country I’d grown up in during the Sixties and Seventies, a country that has subsequently been very deliberately eroded away. A time/place where/when a young mind could access all kinds of cultural riches and frissons through the local library (and the inter-library loan system), through a public broadcasting culture that was dedicated to challenging viewers and listeners with unsettling children’s programs like The Changes, The Children of The Stones, and The Clifton House Mystery, peculiar plays like Stargazy on Zummerdown, radiophonic dramas and soundscapes like Inferno Revisited and Inventions for Radio.
Which is not to say that Ghost Box only works for a particular generation of Britons, by working on the elegiac centers of the brain, trigging the memory-embedded cues of incidental music and bygone TV scores. I’ve been surprised – reassured too - by the appeal of the label to much younger and wholly non-British fans and critics, like Stylus and Pitchfork writer Mike Powell, who memorably described The Focus Group sound as resembling “a museum come to life”.
Still Ghost Box does seem to have a particularly potent effect on those entering that phase of life when memories flash into your consciousness unbidden, at once astonishingly vivid yet mundane and unremarkable, as if they are files that the brain is submitting for deletion. An involuntary condition that Nina Power crystallizes with this rueful admission: "the thing I find strangest and most unsettling about getting older is the sheer weight of memory - unwanted, everyday, melancholic, heavy, strange, like limescale on a filament."
So does that mean this music is purely a delicious wallow in nostalgia? I don’t think so (Ghost Box’s contingent of younger fans surely proves that). At the same time, nostalgia itself is a complicated business, not something that can be instantly dismissed or scorned, rather an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. I believe a distinction can be made between “good retro” and “bad retro” that’s as crucial as the difference between good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. In what must have been the first published piece on Ghost Box outside the blog circuit, Matthew Ingram, reviewing Hey Let Loose Your Love for The Wire, characterised the music as “an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically-motivated exploration of the power not just of one's childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. Memory in the work of The Focus Group... is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics."
Any person’s make-up is necessarily 99 percent composed of the past. As a matter of policy - reflecting a “be here now” stance or philosophical orientation towards The Future - you might shun nostalgia and resist revisiting the past as much as you’re able to. But sooner or later, the past will visit you. Ultimately there is no escaping its visitations, its revenant apparitions. This is the Ghost Box sensation: an alloy of intimacy and otherness, like a part of yourself you’d lost or forgotten, returned whether you want it or not.
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote. “It's not even past.” Ghost Box have expressed their appreciation of Boards of Canada’s version of that idea: a compulsion to uncover “the past inside the present.” Jim Jupp speaks in interviews sometimes of Ghost Box’s world as “a kind of an ‘all at once’ place where all of the popular culture from 1958 to 1978 is somehow happening at the same time.” Even more mystically, Jim has talked about the concept of “eternalism”, suggesting that Ghost Box emanates from - or at least proposes the existence of - “a world where time has no existence at all and contemporary sounds and references seem no more or less important than ones from the past or future.... Everything that has happened and will happen and all parallel world outcomes are superimposed in one block time.” This idea – that all moments in time are taking place at once – isn’t as loopy as it sounds, or at least it has been seriously entertained by philosophers like J.W. Dunne, whose dream-research-influenced theories were popularized by J.B. Priestley amongst others in the mid-20th Century. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time also inspired the 1970s ATV children’s drama Timeslip.
The forward-moving, one-directional flow of Time might indeed be an illusion. But that’s not much help to me, trapped inside that illusion as I am, with no access to a “time bubble” like the one that allows the Timeslip kids to travel back and forth across the decades. I admire and envy the mystics and the supernaturalists; I would like to believe in magic more than I actually do. Music is the closest I get to religion; it’s the Force I can’t explain. So I return to the point I began with: all these philosophical fancies and theoretical adventures that Ghost Box sets in motion would not count for anything if the music didn’t (in)substantiate them.
It’s the sheer musicality of Ghost Box that gets short shrifted in all the high-powered intellectual debates. The shocking from-another-time beauty of “Sundial” and “Osprey” by The Advisory Circle. The macabre whimsy of Belbury Poly tunes like “The Willows” and “Insect Prospectus”, banging nightclub tracks in that parallel world where Dr. Phibes and Jerry Cornelius really existed. The eldritch sound-contraptions collated on The Transactional Dharma of Roj. The gorgeous electronic rhapsody that is “Almost There” by John Foxx and The Belbury Circle, one of the best things that Foxx & Brooks have ever done, which is really saying something if you think about it. Above all, The Focus Group’s miniatures like “Modern Harp,” “Frumious Numinous” and “The Leaving” - to my mind some of the most quietly radical, gently deranging music of the 21st Century, cascades-in-reverse whose oneiric flutter never fails to lift me away.
In these and other moments, Ghost Box has abolished time for me, unlocked memory, transported me elsewhere and elsewhen.
2025 Footnotes
* the seepage into other art forms
Rather thin evidence presented here - surprisingly it slipped my mind about Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which might be visual art's haunty masterpiece.
There is also the phenomenon of re-enactment art, in particular the huge public artwork orchestrated by Jeremy Deller, 2016's We're Here Because We're Here, that has an explicitly ghostly aspect: the apparition of First World War soldiers in public places like railway stations and shopping malls, each volunteer-actor having been assigned the identity of an actual combatant who died during the Somme. When a passer-by approached them to ask what's going on, the spectral soldier did not speak but shows them a card with the name of the slain man. However, at intervals, the troops do break into a chanted song: "We're Here Because We're Here". I can't recall if this was a bitter, fatalistic-at-the-futility ditty chanted by actual soldiers during the not-so-Great War.
I'm sure there are further latter day film examples that could be included (Strickland's In Fabric, notably) and the subject of haunty TV comedy is not fully dealt with in this liner note but gets more of a reckoning here.
** "Wikipedia may not accept"
Below are the full, carefully preserved deliberations on whether or not to allow hauntology-the-music-genre to have an entry.
- The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was delete. Consensus is to delete -- PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 14:19, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
- Hauntology (musical genre) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
- (Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)
Neologism made up by one reviewer. Ridernyc (talk) 04:50, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
- Delete hoax Shii (tock) 16:22, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
- Note: This debate has been included in the list of Music-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:08, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
- Delete - Hauntology is not commonly considered a musical genre. Therefor hauntology (musical genre) should be deleted and not (!) redirected. gidonb (talk) 21:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
- Merge and redirect to Ghost Box Records. Almost the whole thing could be comfortably placed in the "Aesthetics" section with little modification. — Gwalla | Talk 21:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
- Why would we take unsourced information from here to expand the unsourced information there? Ridernyc (talk) 23:14, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
- Comment From what I could find, the very existence of hauntology as a musical style is rejected by the relevant musical community. This community claims that what is described as hauntology is an effect at most. Between the strong "hoax" and light "unsourced", I think the term "fringe POV" covers hauntology (musical genre) best. In either case, the combination of hauntology with the words musical genre and the contents of this article are misleading and should be deleted. gidonb (talk) 00:38, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
- Delete Totally subjective and undefinable and unsourced term for another music sub genre. Guyonthesubway (talk) 19:09, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
- Delete. It definitely seems to lack notability. I looked at the fifth reference, and IT SOURCES WIKIPEDIA! Ha, what a joke for that to be cited on wikipedia. Backtable Speak to meconcerning my deeds. 00:49, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
- Delete The sources citated actually indicate pretty clearly that it is not a musical genre and that it is a neologism.--SabreBD (talk) 10:28, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
- The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
- "Hoax", "fringe POV" - haha! The whole cabal discussion has a ludicrous yet faintly sinister air about it, it's like some phantasm from Foucault's brain.
- However I believe that there is nowadays a subsection on hauntology as music genre within the Wiki entry on hauntology
- *** whatever you want to call this “this”
- Note how deftly and considerately I avoid using the H-word throughout this sleeve note!
- Bonus Beats
- Some clever and beautiful things other people have written about Ghost Box - including clever things somehow written about Ghost Box before Ghost Box even existed.
- "Songs are like lopsided Victorian automata, instruments mismatch in incongruent tempos... and sequences frequently crumble into soft-edged bliss before one's ears. It is almost as if the very action of their exposure is the agent of their collapse. Stranger still, though plainly audible, occasionally the music seems to disappear from earshot, becoming proverbially invisible, sinking into the netherworld of the unconscious. Recurrent themes serve as mnemonics luring the listener’s attention to the surface. Pieced together from the mustiest samples - children’s exercise records, vintage BBC drama, clunky Brit jazz and (most pertinently) library records, this is an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically motivated exploration of the power of not just one's childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. In the work of The Focus Group and House's partners Belbury Poly and Eric Zann... memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics"
- - Matthew Ingram, on Hey Let Loose Your Love for The Wire, 2005
- "Ghostbox artists deal in a very British style of sound manipulation; perhaps it could be called music-hall concrète.... Sketches and Spells by The Focus Group reveals them as non-idiomatic cratediggers searching for the bits other than the beats, for the reflective moments that the headz miss. This is music by and for shoppers who come home with dirt ingrained deep into their fingerprints from flipping through stacks of old books and records at jumble sales and charity shops. It is as refreshing as the cup of hot tea served by the church bric-a-brac stall where you’ve failed to find anything interesting among the Sven Hassel novels and stained flannel shirts. Sketches and Spells is as warm and strange as a clockwork sunrise accompanied by a dawn chorus of steam driven birds. Super-dry jazz hi-hat work mixes with offhand synth-bass and slivered chirrups of sound sliced thin enough to be just impossible to place. There’s a lot of percussion but it’s the click-clack sticks, spacious triangles and tentative, carefully considered woodblocks of primary school rather than the dense free-for-all of the hippie jam (you can almost smell the wood-shavings covering childish vomit.)"
- - Patrick McNally, Stylus, 2005
- "The affect produced by Ghost Box's releases (sound AND images, the latter absolutely integral) are the direct inverse of irritating PoMo citation-blitz. The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten , the poorly remembered and the confabulated.... Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s. Not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box's hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing; lost programs, uncommissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up"
- - Mark Fisher, K-Punk, 2005
- "The artists on Ghost Box treat their historical fetishes-- British occult texts, science and informational films, the loose hokum of 60s counterculture, and the straight fits of academia and bureaucracy--as clues and suggestions. A typical Ghost Box record might sound like it was recorded 30 years ago, but like it was being mixed as you listen; a sound so minced, collaged, and disjointed that it takes on crude animation--a museum come to life. They're historically obsessed, but completely nonlinear-- laser guns smuggled into a Civil War reenactment..... I keep coming around to comparing the music to early hip-hop. In 2008, sampling is de rigeur. It's lip gloss. But I listen to Ghost Box back-to-back with, say, Stetsasonic because both linger in the post-traumatic shock of The Sample--in the shock of the sampler's ability to distort history, the ability to disembody, the ability to completely destroy the traditional image of time and space in music making. Grooves in Ghost Box's music, then, are constantly disrupted, disjointed. All players spectral."
- - Mike Powell, Pitchfork, 2008
- "Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss.... There is .... Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle... The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realize that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot."
- - J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories", 1939.
- "Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane, "of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with 'COFFEE ROOM' painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood." That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects."
- - G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, 1906
- “... Something that has obsessed me personally for a long time, is the idea of eternalism and non-existence of time. It’s the notion that everything that has happened and will happen and all parallel world outcomes are superimposed in one block time”
- - J.B. Priestley, Man and Time, 1964
- "And then, what about that curious feeling which almost everyone has now and then experienced - that sudden fleeting, disturbing conviction that something which is happening at that moment has happened before? What about those occasions when, receiving an unexpected letter from a friend who writes rarely, one recollects having dreamed of him during the previous night? What about all those dreams which, after having been completely forgotten, are suddenly, for no apparent reason, recalled later in the day? What is the association which results them?.... Was it possible that these phenomena were not abnormal, but normal? That dreams - dreams in general, all dreams, everybody's dreams - were composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions?"
- - J,W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time, 1927
- "Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration.... If you mistake the hybrid thing of which I am speaking for real time, you will come inevitably to the conclusion that everything in the universe is transient and rushing to destruction. In real time the exact contrary is the case. Everything which has established its existence remains in existence. A rose which has bloomed once blooms for ever." - J.W. Dunne, The New Immortality, 1938
