di Joseph Stannard (The Wire #311, january 2010, p.43)
Read AlsoOver the past decade, the revenant, or returning spirit, has been revealed as one of the dominant forces in modern music, to the point where even the US noise underground is yielding to its supernatural will. The most visible example of this tendency is the aesthetic known as hauntology, identified by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds in the mid-2000s, chiefly in response to the music of UK label Ghost Box. Rather than trickling out of vogue as even its staunchest advocates might have anticipated, the concept has proven unexpectedly adaptable. Ghost Box themselves have evolved well beyond the purely parochial – Belbury Poly’s From An Ancient Star incorporated shades of disco and dub, while the Warp-released collaboration between The Focus Group and Broadcast, Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, was vastly more impressive than its modest billing as a stopgap EP might have suggested.
Continuing the Broadcast connection, the debut transmission from their ex-keyboard player Roj witnessed the unforeseen astral projection of The Velvet Underground’s first drummer and drone magus Angus MacLise into sleepy Belbury, while just outside the village, Seeland, comprised of one ex-Broadcast (Tim Felton) and one ex-Plone (Billy Bainbridge), released an album which effectively married antique futurist textures to attractive pop songcraft.
[…] Further afield, The Wire’s David Keenan identified an equivalent strain in the US underground, dubbed Hypnagogic pop, and exemplified by James Ferraro, Pocahaunted, Emeralds and Daniel Lopatin of Infinity Window and Oneohtrix Point Never. There are artists who have turned away from the bleak grind of Noise to embrace the fuzzily remembered forms of their childhoods, including soft rock and New Age. Now sadly defunct, Pocahaunted scrawled connections between free-folk, LA-period Fleetwood Mac and dub with joyous abandon.
[…] This clearly isn’t the industry-approved language of revival we’re talking here. Through all of these variations, the revenant must undergo a transformation, however subtle, which invites a new perspective. This is the case not only with electronic and sample based music, but also contemporary folk rock endeavours such as Josephine Foster’s collection of musical settings for Emily Dichinson poems, Graphic As A Star. Here, the musician may act as a medium, but Dickinson’s voice is unavoidably modified by the unique configuration of Foster’s body and mind.
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