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I have some violin work on another Miasmah release coming up soon, though.
MY email works fine. Cough cough ahem. -
I'll send 'em when I can. :)
Meantime, if you check Elegi's myspace, you can hear a track off the new album with me (sometimes pitch-shifted or otherwise manipulated, sometimes organic) called "Skrugard." The whole album's devoted to the first --often doomed-- seafaring arctic explorers. -
Y'know the track you've got up on The Parlour Trick came to mind a couple of pages back when I was talking about summoning a where more than a when. It's certainly a haunting piece -- though I don't think I'd call it hauntology as definitions seem to be hedging around here -- it has more... reality to it than the imagined never-weres I see in a lot of what's being classified Hauntology.
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Wow, thanks, Ariana. The piece is based on a vivid nightmare I had years ago, about waiting on a train platform in the middle of some vast Besinski-reminiscent landscape (one of those super rare dreams where you can smell things and sense temperature). No track, nothing and no one else in sight except that distant, approaching train. The train was somehow the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine. I'm STILL relieved I woke up before it arrived.
Anyway, it was a really memorable, tangible place! I'm glad some of that reality translates into the piece. We used a lot of weird vintage or otherwise unidentifiable samples in it, and ambient room noise, so it definitely has a ghostly quality, but yeah, not sure it's "Hauntological" or whatever. -
Anyway, it was a really memorable, tangible place!
That's a difference, I think. Hauntology seems to often summon wandering down back alleys that look really familiar, but the last time you were there you were drunk off your ass, and you'll never find that one door again, because it's dead and gone and quite possibly wasn't there to begin with. You've caught your dream train and forced it to circle the vinyl forever so we can all hear it. Burial almost all sounds like it wants you to chase it down, a will'o'wisp in a long fallow field, a voice that's always three rooms away; Mystery Train sounds like it's coming closer, and you can't stop it. Neither is inherently better -- I really like Burial, a lot -- but they're very different, to me. -
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CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeJun 11th 2008
Dearie, are you sure your email is not still fuxx0red? I sent rough mixes aeons ago. Don't have them on the laptop. Will send again sometime soon.
You might have sent them while my mail was fucked. Damnit -
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can art really be harmed by labels? I'm a writer, and I've never felt the urge to self-describe as an "artist" or call my stuff "art," so maybe there's something here I just don't understand. if somebody somewhere attaches a label to art, or attempts to categorize it, does it really stifle/narrow/restrict the artist or the art itself so it becomes less than it otherwise would have been? because if so, it seems to me that the only way to prevent that is to stay in your garret and never show your stuff to anybody and also never communicate with another human being about art, ever.
my impression is, rather, that the people we've talked about in this thread will go on doing what they want to do and the word "hauntology" will be stretched to fit accordingly, or ditched as necessary, and that railing against the label is pointless. -
So first off apologies, as I simply skimmed over what I missed from the last week.
So I've given a few of the bands a bit of a listen. First off I must say I love Burial and if I take anything away from this thread its them.
I still don't think Hauntology is anything new in music. Maybe a musician saying their music is all about it might be but the general concept is not. Creating a mythos by invoking memories in the listener or paying tribute to an existing mythos is something every musician aspires to do in their music (or at least I sure as hell do). Perhaps my view may be slightly biased since I listen to a lot of soundtracks and love atmospheric pieces.
John Cage hands down qualifies for this genre, but not on the electric side. The neat thing about John Cage is he was doing atmospheric landscapes of sound maybe as early as the 30's (I'd have to check, the guy was born in 1912). He used precise timing combined with breaking objects, pianos with bits of metal in the strings, running water, and radios (being turned on and off) among other things.
Oh and seriously, Chris Watson... no. See I checked out problem 5 or 6 artists from various websites that were supposed to qualify as Hauntology. Half of them could probably qualify as one of those "sounds of the savannah" cd's as they had no actual melodic progressions but samples of nature. The other half seemed to consist of lots of reverb and muffled drums, and while I find those things very cool, I also like a bit more variation track to track.
See my problem with most sub-genres is they kill room for creativity and make giant egos. I don't know about the rest of the world but we actually had a little bit of a rave scene in the mid-west (I live in Oklahoma) of the US until around 2001 or 2002. The downfall in my opinion was that they had a sub-genre name for every beat variation on a 4/4 measure. If you limit a music to lots of reverb and muffled drums, you're limiting it too much.
The idea behind Hauntology is neat but its what musicians should already be doing. Music is supposed to evoke previous emotions in ourselves and elaborate on them making new neurological connections in our brains and hearts.
The hauntology radio station was... well I heard Cheryl Crow (or maybe it was an advertisement for Cheryl Crow and a track with a female singer and acoustic guitar playing something rather radio typical).
Anyway, that's my two cents. I'm wary posting this much of my opinion on the net because I'm used to being attacked by adults disguised as fourth graders flinging monkey's flinging poo flinging stereotypes. Or something of that caliber. -
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CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeJun 13th 2008
We'll try to keep Threemonkeys out of the thread...! -
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HAUNT0RMUNKEYS POO IS HAUNTED
It's my opinion that creative work can be hampered by overzealous labeling and analyzing. But I don't think anyone here is "railing" against anything, Roque.
There's this quote I almost remember, and always think of when chatting with folks about pigeonholing and the human compulsion to classify/categorize the piss out of life... I think it might be from the Industrial Handbook, either Monte Cazzazza or Genesis P-orridge in an interview about their contribution to industrial music and the scene. I'm paraphrasing from murky memory, but basically they said something like "well, obviously, since you're interviewing us about this and analyzing it down to the minutiae, its spirit is not alive anymore and we should all move on to other things." It struck me as simultaneously a snobbily knee-jerk reaction, and completely valid.
See my problem with most sub-genres is they kill room for creativity and make giant egos.
Exactly.
And sometimes I think the best compliment I can give or get as an artist is "this is just unclassifiable." -
it all depends on your definition of "railing," I guess. words are like labels, to me-- quibbling over them just distracts from the important part of the conversation.
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It's my opinion that creative work can be hampered by overzealous labeling and analyzing.
Y'know, I'd usually agree with you, but it occurs to me that the application of a Hauntology lable may be _part_ of the creative work, in some of the above cases. Intentionally or not, the music that's being called Hauntological is getting the same treatment the Old Witchlady House on the hill would get -- people are listening to it in the dead of night, through headphones, listening for every creak and crackle for something more than might strictly be there. Video, packaging, and distribution can inform the listening experience in their own way -- I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time slapping on a label has done the same -- but it's interesting to see how calling it "Hauntology" has changed the way I listen to the things.
If enough people call a physical place "Haunted" the whispers start to spread -- pretty soon everyone knows someone that saw or heard a ghost. People start jumping at shadows and holding their breaths waiting for something to walk past the edge of their vision. The same seems to be true of Hauntology as a type of music -- after a hundred background-at-midnight listenings of Burial (it's good work music) I've started hearing places I know the artist has never been, and analysis of the word in this thread seems to have infected things that didn't even start under the label-umbrella with ghosts of their own. -
Ariana-- interesting point; reminds me a little of some of the thoughts in "The Forbidden," the Clive Barker story that inspired the movie "Candyman." I guess, to carry it a step further, we could surmise that if hauntology didn't exist under that name it would have to be invented under some other name-- people need to be haunted, and they need haunted media as a safe way to do it. used to be novels and penny dreadfuls, then horror movies, now music and art. and it's not that there never was haunted music or art (Danse Macabre and Munch's "The Vampyre" immediately spring to mind) but that we're only now starting to recognize them as haunted.
I realize I have a tendency to conflate haunting with horror... maybe I'm off-base in that, maybe not, I dunno... -
it all depends on your definition of "railing," I guess. words are like labels, to me-- quibbling over them just distracts from the important part of the conversation.
For some reason I was under the impression that this entire line of discussion sprung from questions concerning semantics and connotation. I beg your pardon. :P -
exactly, and pardon granted. ;)
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Pfft.