Really good to see K-punk making a (slight) return.
I re-read the Wire piece and its not quite as troubling as I thought, as the stuff about the "end of pop" or the protracted middle-aged crisis of pop bit does uncover the key to it-and in some respects he's correct, of course when all the lines of current enquiry are dead ends, you re-trace your steps, re-visit the sites of previous modernistic endeavour to find threads that were left to hang... however the best current (or near history) version of that that I could think of is something like Dancepunk... a fairly undeveloped postpunk strategy which was picked up and run with, for a bit. But almost the ENTIRE POINT of hauntology ought to be the absence of the thing... perhaps you could almost say that this heartbreaking absence is most in effect in the very MOR-indie the barren landscape consists of at the moment, that sense of smothered aesthetic potentiality running as an alternative virtualised history, a constant spectre hanging over all of this stuff. I'm really unsure as to how the kind of British peculiarity-tronica of GhostBox and co amplifies this further. Hauntology as theory of current pop works well, but as a genre, or even as Simon writes an "entity, nebulous and as yet nameless", well, not so well. Post modernity has created (as Simon rightly points out thru "sheer drag caused by the mass of its memory flesh") a hyperstitional narrative of defeat in the face of its own past achievement. I'm not sure how Ghost box and friends have escaped this.
I re-read the Wire piece and its not quite as troubling as I thought, as the stuff about the "end of pop" or the protracted middle-aged crisis of pop bit does uncover the key to it-and in some respects he's correct, of course when all the lines of current enquiry are dead ends, you re-trace your steps, re-visit the sites of previous modernistic endeavour to find threads that were left to hang... however the best current (or near history) version of that that I could think of is something like Dancepunk... a fairly undeveloped postpunk strategy which was picked up and run with, for a bit. But almost the ENTIRE POINT of hauntology ought to be the absence of the thing... perhaps you could almost say that this heartbreaking absence is most in effect in the very MOR-indie the barren landscape consists of at the moment, that sense of smothered aesthetic potentiality running as an alternative virtualised history, a constant spectre hanging over all of this stuff. I'm really unsure as to how the kind of British peculiarity-tronica of GhostBox and co amplifies this further. Hauntology as theory of current pop works well, but as a genre, or even as Simon writes an "entity, nebulous and as yet nameless", well, not so well. Post modernity has created (as Simon rightly points out thru "sheer drag caused by the mass of its memory flesh") a hyperstitional narrative of defeat in the face of its own past achievement. I'm not sure how Ghost box and friends have escaped this.