Recently been getting into The Advisory Circle's 'Other Channels' album on Ghost Box Records (like a hybrid of early BOC and early Air) which got me thinking about this whole nostalgia thing, which got me thinking about Look Around You and other Peter Serafinowicz set pieces along with the Scarfolk Council site (very clever and f#ckin hilarious, its where I got my avatar), which brought me back to Boards Of Canada and this very interesting article about the 'hauntology aesthetic effect' and BOC's part in it aptly entitled 'The Past Inside The Present'. http://rougesfoam.blogspot.co.uk/2009/1 ... esent.html
Apologies if this has been posted before - the article is 4 years old - but in the wake of Tomorrow's Harvest I think it throws some intelligent light on the boys' thinking
Interested to hear your thoughts on this and further 'hauntological' examples...
I'd say Broadcast have just as big - if not bigger - an influence on Ghost Box and the hauntology scene yet they don't even get a mention in the article.
Hauntology in general makes something overt which Boards of Canada only implied, also, it focuses on one element of their sound. I guess I'm saying, they did it with more class, you know? But on the other hand, there's some good and bad hauntology stuff.
MrMessiah wrote:Hauntology in general makes something overt which Boards of Canada only implied, also, it focuses on one element of their sound. I guess I'm saying, they did it with more class, you know? But on the other hand, there's some good and bad hauntology stuff.
Yeah I hear what you're saying, I suppose that's the way a lot of art works; someone gets inspired by one aspect of another persons work, something quite incidental perhaps, and expands on it to bring it into sharper focus. I love the whole Ghost Box visual aesthetic as it really does remind me of growing up in the 70s.
Having said that I also feel that BOC have their own particularly effective way of pressing those memory buttons (whether real or imagined memories), and its largely because above all else they compose such incredible music, melodies, chord structures etc. which when combined with the sounds they create (and destroy) leave others standing
MrMessiah wrote:Hauntology in general makes something overt which Boards of Canada only implied, also, it focuses on one element of their sound. I guess I'm saying, they did it with more class, you know? But on the other hand, there's some good and bad hauntology stuff.
I get what you're saying , but I quite like both - the explicit re-creation of particular sounds that Ghost Box do, and the implied nostalgia of BOC and others. The question that really intrigues me is why the taste for nostalgia is there in the first place? Is there something missing from today's world, perhaps an innocence crushed by commercialism and marketing?
That was a good read. Thanks for the introduction to The Advisory Circle, which quickly lead me to Pye Corner Audio. I was unaware of both and I have to say I'm really liking their shit, especially the album Sleep Games.
mc10101 wrote:Recently been getting into The Advisory Circle's 'Other Channels' album on Ghost Box Records (like a hybrid of early BOC and early Air) which got me thinking about this whole nostalgia thing, which got me thinking about Look Around You and other Peter Serafinowicz set pieces along with the Scarfolk Council site (very clever and f#ckin hilarious, its where I got my avatar), which brought me back to Boards Of Canada and this very interesting article about the 'hauntology aesthetic effect' and BOC's part in it aptly entitled 'The Past Inside The Present'. http://rougesfoam.blogspot.co.uk/2009/1 ... esent.html
Apologies if this has been posted before - the article is 4 years old - but in the wake of Tomorrow's Harvest I think it throws some intelligent light on the boys' thinking
Interested to hear your thoughts on this and further 'hauntological' examples...
This is very interesting... It's a long read, so I only got around to reading the part specifically pertaining to BoC for the moment, but I'm eager to learn more about this "hauntology." I was unaware that this was even a classifiable subgenre. Thanks for sharing!
