Chris Petit / Mordant Music – The Museum of Loneliness
Label: Test Centre
Year: 2013
The fledgling field of Hauntology
has by now more or less petered out as a potential source from which to draw
political inspiration. Derrida’s gnomic, literary gymnastics in Specters of Marx generated some interest
at the time, notably the symposium involving Fred Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and
Toni Negri, later published as Ghostly
Demarcations. But it was several years after the fact - this time sponsored
by Wire journalists Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, that it re-emerged as a
predominantly aesthetic concept with which to appraise musical forms. A whole
raft of artists subsequently found themselves being analysed in a most peculiar
fashion. There was talk of ghosts of past political possibilities haunting
present cultural forms, of non-nostalgic appropriation, of ontology as
conjuration, and a profusion of talk on the political value of re-using public
educational broadcasts from the 1970s. Artists as different as Burial, Ariel Pink’s
Haunted Graffiti, and the Ghost Box label were drawn into this admittedly
minority form of writing as conferences were hastily organised and papers
submitted. Predictably, when mediated through the apparatus of high brow music
journalism, and subsequently re-filtered through networks of distributors,
label promotional materials and countless appropriations by artists and
commentators the concept now appears in a somewhat confused and ragged state.
Fortunately this LP, a collaboration
between novelist and film maker Chris Petit and reluctant one time hauntological
renegade Mordant Music has taken the best of what became the normative
description for this music and improvised the rest, producing a dizzying fifty
minute trip of text and textual interpretation that breathes new life into the
genre. Petit’s themes signal his intent: The
Museum of Loneliness acknowledges that the primary modern relation is with the
screen, the digital screen as well as the psychological screen; he intones
early on the second side. The basic framework may seem familiar; the mapping of
cultural memory in the present, the exploding of conventional narrative, the
relativisation of accepted idioms, all that might be subsumed under that loose
signifier “post-modern”. Petit’s aesthetic
however includes a psychogeographer’s concern with place and an almost obsessive
approach to the ephemera of cinema. For the most part though the record
revolves around Petit reading of some of the more Ballardian passages from his
novels Robinson, The Hard Shoulder, and The Passenger. Mordant Music in turn
provides a suitably dystopic and disorientating collage of rhythms, distorted
field recordings and warped electronics.
The opening fourteen minutes of side
one are perhaps the most uncanny. Petit’s narrative drawn from Robinson tells a vaguely noirish story
of moral decay set amid a tattered London Soho. His nasal and slightly sneering
tone is well suited to describe with clinical detachment the sordid games of
Robinson in his underground video suite. Petit the psychogeographer is given
free rein in the climactic fantasy where amid the flood Soho “breaks free from
the rest of the city and the smoke and fire; Robinson the dirty roamer of
Oxford street gone from the rupture”. This section also introduces the first of
the lists that appear on the record. The context is absent, leaving tantalisingly
ambiguous the sources for the images that range from William Blake walking down
Poland Street (shadowed by a dog) to the only person not laughing in an
audience. Is it a series of cuts from Robinson’s
film? a piece of internal cinema? or a synthesis of both, thus deliberately
blurring the borders between the digital and psychological screen. Other lists
appear on the second side including one musing on what a museum of loneliness
might actually be: museum as attitude; the museum of loneliness as a roving
parasite; it is not funded by the CIA; it is most at home in the departure
lounge; the museum of loneliness believes institutional thinking no longer
reads the modern world. The third list which finishes the record harks back to
Petit’s former calling as film editor for Time Out magazine and is made up of
incidents, items and facts from the history of cinema. The music at this point
provides an almost metronomic backdrop to the words which appear as equal parts
liturgy and a series of options from an automated telephone exchange; Morricone’s
music, Jane Birkin looking through a keyhole, Sue Lloyd to Michael Caine “do
you always wear your glasses...
 |
| Chris Petit |
Here and in the other lists I recall
a line from Derrida’s book: “The spectral rumour now resonates, it invades
everything: the spirit of the “sublime” and the spirit of “nostalgia” cross all
borders” (pg169). Amongst the infinite multiplicity of possible narratives Petit
highlights the glaring dead end of hauntology as a form of thought to escape
the “eternal now”. The sheer indeterminacy of cultural memory, how it is
impossible to distinguish a truly political yearning for past possibilities
from a nostalgic appropriation from a mere recalling of minutia from the past, undermines
the claim to privileging some forms of recollection over others. One of
signatures of post-modernity (or hypermodernity as Petit names it at one point)
is the relativity of historical appropriation. Ghost Box records might imagine
an alternative 1970s, while Burial laments the death of rave culture, and The
Caretaker renders ballroom records from the 20s into creeping miasmas of sound.
In each of these cases there is a technique at work much of which can be
located in Pierre Schaeffer’s work on the acousmatic object in the 1950s and
60s. The idea made palpable by the advent of disk cutting lathes and soon after
magnetic audio tape is that small pieces of sound, be they voices, instrumental
sound, or field recordings, could be abstracted from their source and relocated
in dislocated form into new compositions. These days we call it sampling. This
uncanny effect of dislocation is the basic sonic logic at work in Petit and
Mordant Music’s record to which they augment with the literary themes of memory
aphasia.
Similarly with the image comes a necessity
for intervention, for as Petit says during the excursus on the meaning of the
Museum: “with the image bank exploded it behove someone to begin reassembling.”
But without any normative criteria with which to appraise the images and
competing narratives , with the effacing of the subject to whom this task would
fall, the resultant cultural and historical word soup provides little more than
the option of a higher gear for contemporary spectacle. A necessity to act, to
build a narrative without any solid ground to build on; this is perhaps one way
to understand what Derrida means when (quoting Hamlet) he refers to the world
as being out of joint. And so as with Robinson the only thing that
matters becomes the myth one makes for oneself. Petit’s record demonstrates the
still existent aesthetic possibilities behind these ideas, but crucially it is
at its most prescient when taking the post-modern hauntological condition
itself as the material to be worked on; there is simply no escape, nothing
beyond the spectacle.
