Hauntology in sound terms as stated by Mark Fisher (2014: 120) is “in terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here, the recorded voice, the voice no longer the guarantor of presence.” The is he term Hauntology was coined in the early 1990s by Jacques Derrida in his book Specters of Marx, which was a term used to describe how after the fall of communism and Marxism in many European countries, the affects from it lingered for years and haunted Europe.
Fisher takes the idea of the past haunting the future and starts referring to artists whose work is haunted by the past, whether by the theme, sampling of past records, or reviving an old genre of music. Fisher (2012: 14) labeled artists “Phillip Jeck, Burial, The Ghost Box Label, The Caretaker” as being artists who fall under the hauntology term. All these artists are British too, which seems to be a running theme in musical artists who are associated with the hauntology term.
My piece for this project is titled ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’, the track is a 7-minute-long piece that slowly disintegrates over time. The piece is made up of one sample which was taken from a cover of ‘Stella By Starlight’ by Robert Macdonald. I sampled a different part of this song back in 2021 with my song ‘the dancing pig’. ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’ is a companion piece to ‘the dancing pig’.
Bibliography
Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Hampshire: Zero Books
Fisher, M. (2012). What Is Hauntology? Film Quarterly, 66(1), pp.16–24
www.youtube.com. (n.d.). the dancing pig. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ataLbCnYj7o.