Between Two Blade Runners: Dreampunk's Noir Emotional Ecology

 

The following is an expanded version of a text that was going to be included as part of a zine dedicated to the electronic music subgenre Dreampunk. With that project seemingly having disappeared into the void it's presented here in its extended form. 

It's an irony that screenwriter Hampton Fancher didn't think much of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep when he first read it. Nevertheless, he recognised the story's potential commercial appeal and was attracted to the book's concerns around environmentalism and the implications of mass animal extinction; issues which in the mid-1970s were only just coming to popular consciousness. Another irony was that his original screenplay adaptation of the novel - eventually titled Blade Runner after a short story by William S. Burroughs (glossing the novel by Alan E. Nourse) - envisioned a relatively low budget movie, shot mainly in interiors.

Fancher's genial contribution, however, was in taking the outline of Dick's sci-fi detective story and enveloping it in the universe and sensibility of film noir. That choice, embedded in the film's script through its tortuous gestation and multiple reworkings, would significantly define what I'm calling here Blade Runner's "emotional ecology", which in turn would heavily influence the aesthetic of Dreampunk, as well as setting the template for the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049.

On the surface it's a straightforward plot; part police procedural, part bounty hunter Western, set in an overpopulated, highly polluted Los Angeles of 2019. The destruction of the environment through resource exploitation and war has resulted in a barely habitable planet which all those with the money to do so have escaped to new lives on the Off-World colonies. Much of the labour needed to sustain this Off-World existence is provided by artificial humanoids called Replicants, manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation; a sort of nightmarish Tesla/Amazon hybrid based out of a city sized pyramid mega-structure on the edge of LA. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is the jaded former police officer drafted in to hunt down a group of state-of-the-art Nexus 6 Replicants led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) who have violently broken free of their masters and returned to earth.

Things get more complicated for Deckard after he encounters Rachael (Sean Young) at the Tyrell Corporation; a Replicant that doesn't know she isn't human. Their encounters form the emotional heart of the film, as the traditional noir trope of the femme fatale acts as a stage for an intense meditation on memory and what it means to be human. Just as Rachael cannot reconcile her implanted memories with her status as a Replicant with only a four-year life-span, so Deckard cannot banish his desire for this beautiful but ultimately doomed woman. The long scenes where these tensions play out in Deckard's chaotic apartment, framed by the light flashing in from giant advertising boards and flying 'Spinner' cars outside, are some of most magical in all sci-fi. The lyricism of Ridley Scott's direction and cinematography marries perfectly with the gorgeous blues/electronic score of Vangelis.

None of this would have had half the impact if it weren't for the epoch defining visuals, in particular the very intentional move to make the city environment itself a character in the film. It was Syd Mead, a professional industrial illustrator, who was responsible for much of the city's look. It's yet another irony that the classic elements of a Blade Runner style city; rain, night, smoke, neon signs in Kanji and other East Asian scripts, were born to a considerable degree out of budgetary necessity. Without money to build new sets the street scenes were filmed on the Warner Bros back lot; a basic street front used for decades by the studio, and which without the elements listed above, in the words of Ridley Scott, "looked crap". That rain soaked, neon blurred vista is arguably the film's greatest visual legacy and is replicated in the cover art of countless Dreampunk records from Gates of Siam, Wuso 命, and 2814's Dreampunk classic Birth of a New Day, to name but a few. Unsurprisingly, in a rerun of the protean days of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Blade Runner's modest budget quickly ballooned under pressure from Scott's visionary world building and the art department's seemingly limitless imagination.

Dreampunk derives at least as much of its aesthetic from the visual world of Blade Runner as it does from the actual sound of the films. The myth of the "Blade Runner Sound" is that it's all cavernous pads and filter sweeps played on a Jupiter 8 synthesiser. In reality Vangelis' score was a remarkable amalgam of electronic, acoustic and sampled sound, the cornerstone of which was a sense of lyricism rooted squarely in jazz and blues. One More Kiss (sung by UK pop back-room figure Don Percival) could be a Cole Porter song. All the key themes revolve around simple meandering melodies, repeated against a backdrop of atmospheric electronic sounds, which, like the rain, smoke and neon lights, frame the action in melancholic introspection. Blade Runner Blues, Rachel's Song and Memories of Green all deploy an intense pathos, the sound of an inner world, which is at odds with popular perception of the score as primarily synthetic and futuristic. 

Cover art for records by 2814, D R O I D R O Y, and Gates of Siam

Listen to a Dreampunk record by 2814, D R O I D R O Y, or Remember and you'll immediately be transported into a world of tense atmospheres, half-heard melodies and discordant rhythms, often saturated in the genre's signature style of layered phasing and reverb. These production techniques, which followed the genre as it developed out of Vaporwave, function almost like an auditory shorthand. In Vaporwave they signalled the depressive hedonism of consumer culture, the dissolution of individuality amid a pharmacologically mediated life of endless self-marketing and hyperreal commercial imagery; not to mention a certain amount of ironic distancing too. Dreampunk, like Blade Runner itself, captures something of this contemporary malaise at the crisis point of the Anthropocene. It's notable that Blade Runner's wholesale importing of a pan-Asian culture into its vision of a futuristic Los Angeles is mirrored in Vaporwave's near obsession with Japanese consumer culture of the 1970s and 80s. Dreampunk develops these themes but does so without the irony, substituting it for a heightened sense of urban alienation. It's music which puts a certain 'lack', a certain 'out-of-joint-ness', front and centre, while at the same time striving for beauty and transcendence. On this interpretation it's obvious why Ridley Scott's bleak world holds such appeal as both canvas and inspiration.

It's a cliché that the film's dark introspective mood was the cause of its limited success at the box office on its release in 1982. Famously the studios were not overjoyed at Scott's brooding masterpiece. And what was worse, it didn't even have a happy ending! As is well known they then intervened to cobble together just such an ending for the theatrical release, which involved Deckard and Rachel implausibly driving off into a verdant landscape (actually composed of unused aerial footage of the Montana countryside recorded for The Shining), seemingly unburdened by the film's previous events; least of all Rachel's soon to expire Nexus 6 lifespan. Harrison Ford was press-ganged into recording a series of voiceovers in response to feedback from preview screenings, where the audience reportedly found the film unintelligible. These and the happy ending were subsequently removed for Ridley Scott's Director's and Final cut versions of the film.

Over the subsequent four decades Blade Runner's cult status and its landmark cinematic style would assure that the sequel, when it finally came in 2017, would not deviate significantly from the template. Ryan Gosling's Officer ‘K’ reprises the role of Blade Runner, with the twist that now it's Replicants who hunt down fellow Replicants, and the world of Blade Runner 2049 is even more screwed up than the original's vision of 2019. Hampton Fancher again supplied the screenplay, this time for Denis Villeneuve, fresh from directing another highbrow sci-fi, Arrival (2016). Much of the first film's basic bounty hunt plot structure is retained, as are the themes around identity and the nature of humanity. Officer K comes to believe that he may be the first child born to a Replicant and soon abandons his search and destroy mission against Deckard in favour of a search for his own origins.

Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has suggested that one interpretation of Blade Runner is as a story about the rise of class consciousness. Deckard comes to suspect that he himself is a Replicant and as such without Rights and disposable. Even his dreams may be known to the police; hence the meaning of the paper unicorn left outside his apartment by the sinister officer Gaff. In the sequel these socio-political themes are more overt and present an obvious commentary on the contemporary rise of big tech monopolies and the power they increasingly weald over all aspects of our lives. One scene has Officer K visit a slum area outside the city where a so-called "orphanage" serves as a front for child slave labour dismantling old electronics. K himself lives in a crowded, rundown apartment block where he is stigmatized by his neighbours who carve the word "skinjob" - a slur directed at Replicants - into his door. Although he's nominally a police officer, he is required to pass a "baseline test" in order to get paid. The test seems designed to measure a Replicant's mental stability and potential to rebel. In a radicalised version of what many precarious and gig-economy workers face today, failure to make baseline can lead to "retirement".

Industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who has taken over the remnants of the Tyrell Corporation is a cold-blooded killer who openly claims that "every advance in human civilization has been off the back of a disposable workforce". Oppressive corporate culture, including the Wallace Corporation using drones to massacre slum dwellers, is one of the film's major themes, which, along with the politics of artificial life are issues more prescient now than ever.

No-where is the question over the impact of technology on our private lives more keenly explored than in officer K's relationship with his holographic companion Joi (Ana de Armas). Joi is an AI program created by the Wallace Corporation as a kind of perfect fantasy girlfriend. At every turn she gives K unfailing support, telling him how special he is and pushing him to pursue his quest to discover his true identity. In the film's most uncanny scene she even hires a sex worker whose body she uses as a substrate, giving K the illusion of actual intimacy with the virtual body of Joi. Gosling does a fine job of looking both aroused and mildly horrified as the features of Joi phase in and out of sync with those of the Replicant sex worker Mariette (Mackenzie Davis).

This hint towards the present-day dominance of the virtual over the physical in what should be our most personal moments is powerfully made. After Joi is destroyed by Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), Wallace's psychotic PA/bodyguard, Officer K encounters a giant interactive pink neon advertisement for the AI on the street, carrying the slogan "Everything you want to hear". In a sort of coming to class consciousness, K shakes off his grief and sets out to rescue Deckard from the hands of the Wallace Corporation and aid the burgeoning Replicant resistance movement.

Despite Villeneuve's admirable commitment to the original film's slow pace there are still considerable differences in tone between the two. Like so many big budget films of recent years it suffers from a degree of what I'll call "epicification”, where the lead character's story becomes intertwined with larger and more power forces on a societal or even universal scale. The inclusion of the Replicant rebellion twist seems more of an afterthought, and much of the police procedural angle which guided the structure of Scott's film is absent. What we get, predictably, is more money thrown around and more explosions. The scale is grander but at the cost of diminishing the intimacy and much of the humanity in the film.

Although the grand cityscape vistas are here in spades, this time round the inhabitants appear totally alienated in their vast towers. The Wallace corporation's building looms over the city almost entirely shrouded in darkness, while the scenes in the junkyard slum make clear that there is no space for nostalgia over Kowloon walled city, or other such edgeland alternative communities. The divide here is hard and unequivocal; you are either inside or outside of society. Dreampunk, on the contrary, sits in the ambiguous spaces opened up by the original film's noir turn, eschewing both violence and 'The Epic'. In Scott's vision of 2019 neither people nor places are quite what they seem. The grand building where JF Sebastian lives is a derelict filled with biomechanical products of his genial imagination. Sebastian himself is a young man made old by a degenerative condition. And the Replicant Leon Kowalski is described in the police briefing as simple and violent, yet he cherishes a set of photographs of his fellow Replicant friends.

As beautiful as Roger Deakins' cinematography for Blade Runner 2049 undoubtedly is, there's nothing that quite matches the in-camera drama of Zhora smashing through shop windows in a desperate attempt to evade Deckard's bullets in the original. The score and sound effects (notably foregrounding the gunshots) perfectly signals the fatalism which is one of the film's key themes.Much of the scene's power is gained by the simple choice to run the sequence in slow motion.

The violence of the scene also points to an uncomfortable element of the Blade Runner universe; while no-one is quite what they seem, the burden of this ambiguity falls hardest upon women. Even fully fleshed out characters like Rachel are doomed from the outset, lacking the ontological stability afforded to most of the males. This tendency is heightened in the 2017 film as not a single female character is able to avoid some level of depreciation, whether in the form of being a mute substrate (as Mariette does for K); being violently killed if you're human or Replicant; or being deleted as happens to Joi. It's unclear whether we should read all this as a dead-eyed comment on the treatment of women in the real world, or if Blade Runner just blindly repeats much of Hollywood's historical debasement of female characters. In any case it might be worth noting the undeniable "broishness" of the Dreampunk scene (still sadly not unusual for electronic music) and some of the carryover of images of women from Vaporwave cover art, which frequently depict Asian woman as submissive, exotic and ephemeral; imagery that mirrors the lack of authentic Being in characters like Joi and Rachel. This is the danger of identifying too strongly with the aesthetics of melancholy, where the work of mourning the lost object (always already lost of course) turns into a mortifying gaze, giving life to the fantasy at the expense of a more radical relationship to the real. 

Labels releasing Dreampunk records have consistently drawn on the imagery of Blade Runner and Cyberpunk more generally. From left to right, promotional art from the Dream Catalogue, Pure Life and Vill4in labels.

 Death scenes are pivotal in both films, and are where they lodge their key messages. At the finale of the 1982 film, Roy Batty, having seen his ambitions of a longer life thwarted, and feeling death approach, spares Deckard's life. What follows is Rutger Hauer's immortal (and partly ad-libbed) speech upon the rooftop: "All those moments will be lost, like tears in rain. Time to die". While in the sequel Officer K comes to understand that he's not the first child born to a Replicant, and after saving Deckard resigns himself to his injuries and his fate. In a sequence that can only be viewed as homage to the death scene of the first film, K lies back, feeling the snow fall upon his bare skin; something real, unlike the programmed reactions of Joi as she "experienced" the rain upon the rooftop of their apartment earlier in the film. It would not be saying too much I think to claim that one of Blade Runner's deepest philosophical truths is that an authentic experience of a free human life is intimately tied to the apprehension of death. For a Replicant, then, in accordance with Montaigne's famous statement, learning to die is learning how not to be a slave.

These themes of pathos, loss, radical self-questioning and fatalism in the face of an indifferent universe, are the bedrock of Blade Runner's noir emotional ecology. They are also the themes which come through most strongly in the drifting melancholy of Dreampunk music, and for which the dark, rain soaked city of neon lights forms the perfect backdrop. 

Some recommended Dreampunk records:

2814 - Birth of a New Day (Dream Catalogue, 2015)

wuso 命 - Lonely Streets (Crystaltone, 2016)

Yoshimi - Tokyo Restricted Area (Dream Catalogue, 2016)

Rashida Prime ‎– Damaged Interface (Bludhoney Records, 2016)

Sangam - Void 003 (Vill4in, 2019)

Cryosauna - Fractured City (Hanging Garden, 2019)

輕描淡寫 X Kuroi Ame ‎– 眼泪含泪  (Pure Life, 2020)

The Wushimi Complex - The Anon Database (Dream Catalogue, 2020)

Gates Of Siam - Eve (Waters End, 2020)

D R O I D R O Y -水族館の夜 (No Problema Tapes, 2020)

 

Six recent MusiqueMachine reviews

Christina Kubisch

Christina Kubisch and Annea Lockwood  - The Secret Life of the Inaudible [Gruenrekorder - 2018]

Rafal Kolacki - A'Zan. Hearing Ethiopia [Zoharum - 2017]

Robert Schwarz - Double Negative [Gruenrekorder - 2018]

Scott Sherk - Alentejo [3Leaves - 2017]

Szmt - Parvenu [Gruenrekorder - 2017]

ZU93 - Mirror Emperor [House of Mythology - 2018]

Zu93. David Tibet (of Current 93) with Zu.

The Desire of Luc Ferrari

I’m currently working on couple of projects but owing to the summer break and the toings and froings that this period naturally lends itself to they’ve been slow to develop. One is a two part essay with the broad title In Defence of Political Spirituality. This is firstly a response to a fairly recent text on Michel Foucault’s writings on Iran; a series of writings which I think have great import for our times, and particularly for ongoing events in the Middle East. Secondly this piece will address some aspects of Foucault’s later writings on spirituality and its relationship with other discourses like science, theology, and philosophy. The critique the authors of the above mentioned text make of Foucault hinges on what I argue is a misunderstanding of this admittedly strange idea; it is nevertheless an idea I consider worth defending.

The second project is a reanimation of my occasional musical endeavours in the form of a piece of electronic composition. The inspiration for this was a visit last month to the little Italian border town of Ventimiglia and my love for a certain French composer; Luc Ferrari (1929-2005). Ferrari has always been my favourite of the early electronic music pioneers.  Like Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Henry, Ferrari’s first electronic works were produced under the guidance of Pierre Schaeffer the founder of the style of electronic composition called Musique Concrete, and later the composing and theoretical collective Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Ferrari’s works from this period (roughly 1958-63) exhibit the abstraction and dislocation characteristic of Schaeffer’s school, with the latter’s signature acousmatic approach to sound (the isolation and transformation of recorded sound distinct from its source to create an uncanny effect) central to their style. But it wasn’t until the technology allowed Ferrari to take his recording gear out into the environment that he really found his voice. When he did it sounded very different to that of his contemporaries. Heterozygote of 1963-64 was the turning point. Where the Musique Concrete style would take a recorded sound, say a fragment of conversation, and transform  it through tape manipulations into something a little alien; in Heterozygote Ferrari collages numerous little snippets of incidental sounds, conversations and instrumental sources leaving them untreated. The results of this comparatively long form type of composition were a prototype for what he would later call anecdotal music.

The series of composition which fully realized this new direction (and much more besides) were the Presque Rien’s (Almost nothing) the first of which, Presque Rien #1 le lever du jour au bord de la mer, is one of the classics of tape composition and a precursor for what we now call field or environmental recordings. It consists of a daylong ‘out of the window’ recording Ferrari made whilst staying in a fishing village on the Adriatic. This long recording he edited down to a twenty two minute piece of almost poetic inspiration. The village wakes amid the slow buzz of cicadas, an antiquated van clatters into life and moves off into the distance. There are birds, dogs and other wildlife, people at work, and the occasional unintelligible voice. Being devoid of any conventional musical sounds or even any overt manipulation of the source Presque Rien encourages an entirely different form of listening, one that highlights the narrative quality of everyday sounds, the suggestive poetic juxtaposition of elements within an environment, and places a far greater demand on the listener’s imagination.The link below goes to an almost full version of Presque Rien n.1. For some reason the YouTube add-on to Blogger can't find it to imbed it in the text. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKq-LRYv1Q4

It’s often taken to be the case that this piece was Ferrari’s attempt to realize John Cage’s famous statement that music was all around us if only we had the ears to listen. But I think there’s something more going on, and besides Cage’s use of environmental and concrete sounds never approached the subject matter with the degree of sensuality that Ferrari injects into his work. He wasn’t interested in abstracting the absolute quality of sound from its source, or opening up the composition to total indeterminacy as Cage had done. The anecdotal form which Ferrari termed this style of tape composition takes Schaeffer’s original insights on the uncanny quality of everyday sound and romanticizes it. Ferrari, something of the dandy, stands in stark opposition to Xenakis’s brutal modernism or Pierre Henry’s rendering of ancient religious texts into strange minimal concrete melodramas. Ferrari’s concerns were much more with what Andre Breton called the Marvelous; that strange aspect of an object beyond its everyday qualities suggestive of other more poetic meanings.

Like Max Ernst Ferrari deployed unconventional techniques to his objects of choice, rendering them displaced, in unfamiliar circumstances, open to metaphorical readings. In the fine tradition of surrealism he doesn’t construct narratives but rather rearranges objects from everyday life, highlighting possibility, movement, and emotion. But what make me love him most is that he creates sensual, dare I say sexy tape compositions, brimming with desire. Recall that for the surrealists one important facet of the marvelous is that it’s not so much found as “encountered” by chance. In the sleeve notes to a CD of sonic “souvenirs” he writes “the cycle des souvenirs also means that all the elements are structured in cycles which when superimposed, produce chance encounters. That’s why everything is turning. In this turning of sound and image, memory is written in a distorting mirror, but one where everything is true”.  Like Breton in Nadja he takes on the role of the flaneur stalking the streets with his microphone in search of a soul in limbo. His marvelous object might be something quite small like the cicadas in the Presque Rien’s or it might be something very loud like the fireworks in Promenade Symphonique Dans Un Paysage Musical Ou Un Jour De Fete A El Oued En 1976 (1976-87). But more often than not, like a thread in the labyrinth, it is a feminine quality that draws his attention. It could be the female voices that enter into Presque Rien Avec Filles (1989), the dialogue and building eroticism between the two young women at the centre of the astonishing Danses Organique (1973), or perhaps simply the sound of his wife Brunhild, an ever present companion on Ferrari’s travels. One of my favorite compositions of his from the 1970s is Place Des Abbesses (1977), named after a square halfway up the hill of Monmartre, situated suggestively between the Sacred Heart of God and the Pigalle area of sex shops and license; Breton would no doubt have approved.

Ventimiglia, to draw the discussion full circle, was the subject for the fourth of the Presque Rien series. It involved Ferrari and his wife recording their assent into the medieval part of the town. By this point in his career Ferrari had expanded his ideas on the form of the Presque Rien and now introduced what he called the lie or perversion into the concept. This involved a greater degree of intervention on his part into the raw material of the recording, adding effects or even (as he makes clear on this occasion) entirely foreign sounds into the mix to evoke an element of fantasy and interpretation within the anecdotal form. My composition which will be formed around a thirty minute recording I made whilst descending the medieval town with my partner will also include a considerable amount of fantasy and interpretation. The thing which struck me most when listening to my raw material and Ferrari’s piece was the similarity in the natural sound world considering the twenty-three year gap between the recordings; children playing in the square in front of the church, violin practice wafting out of an open window high above us, a scooter passes by, snippets of TV, radio, conversation, and the bells from the tower of San Michele Arcangelo ringing out at noon.  Here are a few photos of the area which might suggest the sort of sound environment we encountered.

Finally this is in fact the second Ferrari ‘tribute’ piece I have attempted. The first of which I titled Presque Quelque Chose (Un Voyage à la Cathédrale Avec des Oiseaux). This was recorded in Paris in 2006 and documents life around the street where I used to stay in the 15^th arrondissement and a little journey around the Ile De La Cite, including a mass at Notre Dame Cathedral! In hindsight it’s a little rudimentary and the material (crowds, cars etc) a little mundane. Though, I still rather like how I used a flock of pigeons taking flight as a “jump cut” to change locations. If anyone is interested it can be downloaded here. I’m planning for this new piece to be quite different and more complex. After a period of inactivity after his death in 2005 there has recently been several re-releases and new interpretations of his work coming out. Under the guidance of his widow Brunhild, Ferrari’s considerable oeuvre now has a website worthy of it which collects archive material and other resources well worth checking out. www.lucferrari.org.

Chris Petit / Mordant Music – The Museum of Loneliness (Review)

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.