The original ghost boxes were devices invented by 19th century spiritualists as a means to communicate with the dead, a communication channel between the earthly and spiritual realms.
The Ghost Box record label founded in 2004 by graphic designer Julian House and Jim Jupp opens up a communication with the dead on a non-paranormal level.
Their box was a metaphor for the music and mood of old TV shows. The recording label is described on their website as ” for artists that find inspiration in library music, folklore, vintage electronics and haunted television soundtracks”.
Key artists on the label include Jupp’s Belbury Poly, House’s The Focus Group, The Advisory Circle (Jon Brooks), Roj and Mount Vernon Arts Lab.
Each of the releases functions as an “evocation machine” to recycle memories from a real or imagined past. This eccentric Anglo-Saxon music has been described as “spectral electronica” or “synthetic folk music”.
Nowadays electronic music is part of practically everything you hear and through digital technology the sound is pristine and carefully controlled. Ghost Box refer us back to a pre-digital age when a kind of accidental magic was created by analog innovators. Julian House says he likes to confuse the boundaries between analog and digital music Basic Lo-fi elements are deliberately incorporated together with crude loops and a conspicuous hiss.
The music on vintage TV produced by the BBC’s Radiophonic workshop is a key inspiration. This pioneering sound effects unit worked on Sci-Fi serials like Quatermass and the Pit and created the theme to Dr Who.
House and Jupp didn’t set out with any socio-political agenda but started Ghost Box as a more frivolous and light-hearted project to create a kind of spooky parallel world referencing things that no longer exist or never existed in the first place.
The past informs the present and the artwork for the releases evokes a bygone Britishness of parochial public information broadcasts, Penguin paperbacks or academic text books. In the days before digital culture, the consumer of that period can be imagined as someone living in a drab inner city high-rise block reading H.P Lovecraft or tuning into an Open University broadcast in the small hours.
Critic Simon Reynolds has written that “What is returned to you (assuming, perhaps that you’re British and grew up in the 1960s and 1970s) is a sense of this country as a stranger more fantastical place than you had ever realized”
In a recent Wire podcast, a tenuous hauntological link is made between Ghost Box and the so-called Hypnagogic Pop, a label coined by David Keenan to lump together lo-fi artists like Ariel Pink, Pocahaunted and James Ferraro’s Skaters as well as with Dubstep and Burial in particular.
As you would expect from anything organised by The Wire magazine a lot of the discussion is rambling and pseudo-academic hot air but some interesting ideas are buried in the mix too.
One of the panellists is Mark Fisher who has argued that, in the Ghost Box, music is not so much remembered as re-dreamt. In the Wire salon discussion he speaks of a nostalgia for a time when music was an engine of culture. This is true of the countercultural movement in sixties and , in the late 1970s, Punk briefly seemed to be a catalyst for change.
It is ironic that while sounding off against the sterile and derivative Indie pop/rock of Franz Ferdinand and Oasis, the Wire’s panel suggest that music of the past previously dismissed as bland or pompous is ripe for reinterpretation. Artists like Chris Be Burgh , Genesis and Robbie Robertson are among those cited.
Moderator Tony Herrington refers to the loop of one line of De Burgh’s lady in red that has achieved cult status via You Tube as a prime example of reclaiming the trash culture of the past and reformulating it for present day consumption.
Ghostly Links:
The Belbury Parish Magazine (Jim Jupp Blog)
Café Kaput – Jon Brooks Podcasts
Wire Salon discussion Cafe Oto, London 1st April 2010 : Revenant Forms: The Meaning of Hauntology
