The Other Side of Hauntology: Land and the Impotentiality of the Origin

1).

In a recent BBC radio documentary, Jonathan Freedland described the experience of the decade immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall as like a “holiday from history”. That is, of course, for us in the West. The 90s undoubtedly have a far darker significance for the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and Ruanda, where two separate instances of genocide during the decade confirms with Hegel - contra the West’s sabbatical from temporality - that post-Soviet history was to remain a slaughter bench. It was particularly interesting to recall how much of the news media which dominated the period displayed a marked shift from stories about external threats to those of a parochial, even frivolous nature. Clinton’s affairs, the sagas of princess Diana, the OJ Simpson trial; all became emblematic for a time when fears of impending catastrophe seemed to have faded from public consciousness. It was also the era of Brit-pop, which cultural critic Mark Fisher characterised (quite rightly I think) as the last hurrah for a form of white male braggadocio harking back to the most asinine rock of the 1970s. As we know, the spell was violently broken by the jets crashing into the World Trade Center on September 11^th 2001.

The End of History has itself long since come to an end. What I’m going to call the ‘hauntological thesis’ – itself originally germinated in the aftermath of the fall of Soviet Communism – came to prominence as a way of looking at popular culture just at the moment when its core assumptions were beginning to collapse; after 9/11 but before the financial crash of the late 2000s. Two recent additions to the hauntological cannon have got me thinking again about this subject and in particular a recent branch of the field which takes the British countryside and our relationship to the land as its point of departure.

Hauntology - to recap -  is generally understood to involve the present being “haunted” by the ghosts of the past; more specifically the unrealised or erased potential of certain cultural and political movements. The idea of “lost futures” is frequently cited in this context and has had special resonance in the era of neoliberalism, when until recently the idea of an alternative to global capitalist hegemony seemed unthinkable. And it’s on account of this political aspect that hauntology has found an audience among the Left, especially so as it was Jacques Derrida’s mid 90s text Spectres of Marx (1993) which coined the term. It is not without significance, I think, that the original source of this idea was birthed in an atmosphere of defeat for the Left and against the backdrop of all that End of History rhetoric that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's perhaps worth bearing in mind Nietzsche's remarks on ressentiment, especially considering the standard formulation of hauntology as to do with lost "progressive" futures. Every lost future is, after all, an Eden from the perspective of the vanquished.

Mark Fisher

The late Mark Fisher did more than most to popularise the idea of hauntology as a way of interrogating late capitalist culture. In Ghosts of My Life (2014) he offers up a general working definition which construes hauntology as “the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing". I find this a particularly useful starting point since it makes no claim as to the political character of the spectres we are meant to be haunted by. After all, why must the lost futures haunting the present necessarily be progressive? Was not the Europe of the 1920s and 30s haunted more by the spectre of fascism than any other political possibility? And could one not argue that today, as the global political consensus continues to collapse, that it is spectres from both the Right and Left which are stalking us?

Paul Wright’s recent “archival remix” Arcadia (2018) uses old film footage and contemporary music to weave a complex narrative about the history of the British countryside and the communities that have worked and made their lives on the land. It's a quintessentially hauntological work in the way it dramatises time itself as shot through with a strange kind of folk enchantment and spectral possibility. Mixing clips from Cecil Hepworth's 1903 short film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland with footage of unexplained and often bizarre local British festivities amplifies this sense of time being “out of joint” (to appropriate the famous line from Hamlet which Derrida dwelt upon so assiduously in Spectres of Marx). The prologue, which shows a dark static silhouette of a person passing across a field, functions as the opening and interpretive key. A voice tells us "the truth is in the soil".  Similarly, Stephen Prince’s A Year in the Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields (2018) - which brings together several dozen articles from the blog of that name – deals in what the author calls “otherly pastoralism” and like Arcadia, draws on the tradition of folk horror to bring to light the more arcane and weird side of the British countryside and its traditions. Continuing Mark Fisher's cultural explorations, the book also functions as a fine resource on a host of out-there, underground and avant-garde music, TV and films.

2).

Both these projects take the land as an originary and near primordial source for their encounters with British culture. Characteristically, for hauntological works, they instantiate a feeling of melancholia towards elements of the past; a sense of what Fisher describes as a "failed mourning", an inability to rid oneself of the lost objects of Britain's history. For Stephen Prince this takes the form of an antiquarian and mildly scientific exploration of the fringes of esoteric folk culture and its latter-day revivalists. The cultural objects he draws in upon are imbued with that hint of queasiness and dread that sometimes accompanied old children's TV programs or public information broadcasts. Small boys falling into tanks of farm slurry to the sound of grim electronic effects; the psychedelic messages hidden in episodes of the Magic Roundabout; that sort of thing.

The unifying trait drawing together much of the writing featured in the book is the short lived and liminal iteration of modernism that flourished in the UK from the end of the war up to the early 1970s. It's an era which, for better or worse, has come to be associated with the tenure of Tony Ben as the Minister for Technology and later Secretary of State for industry. Jonathan Meades once dedicated an episode of his Even Further Abroad (1997) to this period which saw him travelling the country measuring various brutalist industrial edifices with a mock-up instrument he called a Benometer. Much of the music covered by Prince could be described as being haunted by the spectres of that era, and in particular the form of electronic music that came to be associated with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Modern acts like those on the Ghost Box or Polytechnic Youth labels hark back to the aesthetics of that time, to its sense of educational paternalism and possibility, to its wilful embrace of the avant-garde and rejection of mediocrity. All a far cry from the commercialism and dead-end monotony that characterises much of the BBC’s output and a good deal of electronic music today.  A Year in the Country have themselves put out a series of themed compilations of hauntologically inclined electronic music, featuring the likes of Howlround and Listening Center. The titles include: The Forest / The Wald, The Restless Field, and The Corn Mother. 

The esotericism hinted at by these titles is echoed throughout Paul Wright's superb Arcadia which is broken up into several chapters with titles like Into the Wild, Winter Solstice and Blood in the Soil. As you would expect with a film made up of collaged archive footage, the narrative is imposed and at times quite resolutely didactic; as when images of an Edenic nudist colony are juxtaposed with early footage of what could be the London rush hour circa 1920. The message from the outset - emphasised by the opening chapter title Amnesia - is that something has been lost, forgotten, and we are still living with the consequences. One of the things which makes Arcadia such a treat is the way it weaves together a loose historical narrative about the Industrialisation (and later financialisation) of Britain while at the same time hinting at stranger and more occult goings on beneath the surface; something reaching back into the deep history of the British Isles.

Scenes of local festivities which fill the chapter titled Folk are beguiling equally for their uncanny quality and for the way they depict a world now almost entirely lost. The clip of an "ancient Cornish custom" in St Ives from 1921 could be an outtake from The Wicker Man. And the scenes in Lerwick (Shetlands) of locals dressed as walruses creeping up the beach is remarkably surreal, belying the stereotype of dull, humourless islanders. The pace quickens as we enter the 20th century and the chapter titled The Turning. It's a time of enclosures (ancient and new), of industrialisation, intensive farming and pesticides. In a clip we see 17th century True Leveller Gerard Winstanley's commune routed off the land they have tilled by soldiers of Cromwell's New Model Army. The consequences are made clear in the subsequent chapter, Blood in the Soil. We're on the ground with fox hunters thundering across fields, the land quaking as hooves and dogs tear through hedges and woods. We see accidents on huge industrial farms and we see the country poor, no longer able to support themselves and considered a blight by those seeking to maintain an idyllic image of the countryside.

But we also see the rise of the worker's movement in Britain and the sense of solidarity between workers across town and country. The film's depiction of deindustrialisation and the neoliberal take-over strikes a grim note; "the end of everything", as one unseen voice whispers near the film's conclusion. But it's not all gloom. Wright repeatedly returns to a lovely visual metaphor in the growth of rhizomes and fungi, shown here in old footage, sped up under high magnification; always growing beneath the surface; finding new pathways and forging new networks; awaiting the moment when green shoots will rise up to meet the new dawn. The film ends with scenes of fresh green growth, hard shoots breaking through concrete, the dead rising again (no seriously) and a female voice:  "The past is gone. The future is unwritten". It's an ending full of messianic and salvific promise. The truth is in the land.

3).

While Wright's film stages a constant dialogue between town and country, highlighting the evolving nature of that distinction, Stephen Prince’s A Year in the Country deploys a more straight forward separation. In one of the early chapters the author evokes an important orientating distinction between popular and folk music. The latter, he claims, citing the music journalist Rob Young, is to do with the Volk in the Germanic sense of being to do with the wood, the wild, and resolutely opposed to the settled urban environment in which we find both the populous - the mass of people - and pop music. Pop music in contrast to folk (or volkish music) is entertainment for the masses and concomitant with mass socialisation, cultural homogenisation, consensus and levelling. Furthermore, the importance of the relationship of the volk to the land sets up a normative criterion which valorises organically rooted, historically authentic forms of life and traditions. Prince is at pains however to note that this does not constitute setting up an absolute dichotomy between an evil urban/mass/pop culture and a good country/local/folk culture. In my estimation, reading through the many short essays and reviews in the collection, this distinction is the basic orientation in a way not mirrored in Arcadia. In the film, the dialectic between town and country is depicted almost as a pact of mutual ruin. The alienation of people from the land is echoed by their alienation from each other in atomised urban conurbations.

A comparison might be made between these projects and the work of film maker Patrick Keiller or the writer Iain Sinclair. Both take the lived environment (and by association the land itself) as an object of historically mediated intensities. Both of them deal in what Sinclair has termed "occluded histories", using ideas from psychogeography to unearth lost pathways and forgotten stories in the countryside and urban environment. The difference for me between their work and hauntology is in the genuine sense of loss that pervades many of their reflections on the past. Their work of cultural memory does not admit the sort of potentially redemptive quality that the hauntological thesis maintains. It's not for nothing that Iain Sinclair's recent book is titled The Last London (2017) and laments the city's transformation, wrought under the twin banners of the 2012 Olympics and totalised gentrification, which have left it unnavigable and unwilling to yield up its stories of the past; history teetering on the edge of erasure.

Taking the land itself as a possible redemptive source of “lost futures”, as it seems both Paul Wright and Stephen Prince do in their projects, is a rather different approach compared to Mark Fisher’s pop cultural sifting or the psychogeography of Sinclair and Keiller. And since contemplation of the historical sense of the land is inextricable from that land’s relationship with historical peoples, we must acknowledge that along with restitution of the memory of lost traditions and communities, come more problematic ideas such as nativity, authenticity, and the modern obsession with culture and identity.

The problem of the land - to use an insight of Martin Heidegger's - is the problem of what constitutes a proper dwelling for humanity in the technological age. There is something of the 'Fourfold' in all these hauntological reflections on the land; that obscure Heideggerian notion consisting of the relation between earth, sky, gods and mortals. And just as Heidegger saw that the threat held over our relation to the land consists in our forgetting to preserve the essential relation between things as they appear in the fourfold, so too does Paul Wright's film begin with that shadow of a slumbering figure passing across a field; an image of originary forgetfulness. Nevertheless, Arcadia ends with images of rebirth, literally rising out of the ground. The land as an "origin", as a site of inexhaustible primordial potentiality, is never used up, never truly lost; though it can be forgotten. The origin is not something in the past but something that is always carried with us, as a wellspring of renewal.

 

Image from Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley (1975)

The last article in Stephen Prince's collection draws a pertinent comparison between Ben Wheatley's film A Field in England (2013) and Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's biopic of Gerrard Winstanley (1975), clips of which appear in Arcadia. Beyond the visual similarities of these two films - both set during the period of the English Civil war and bearing that era's distinctive apparel; both shot in black and white - Prince notes the thematic congruence which locates both in the English countryside. Winstanley, with his short-lived commune of True Levellers up on St George's hill at Weybridge (now the site of exclusive estates and a golf club) and the characters in Wheatley's film, who do battle with powerful cosmic forces within the confines of an ordinary English field. Prince takes the comparison further and draws inferences from the signal event of the Miner Strike in the mid-1980s - the battle of Orgreave - dubbed the English Civil War Pt2 by artist Jeremy Deller. Here again, in a field in England, the forces of a progressive, socially minded and communal nation came up against their opposite in the privileged classes of the emerging economy, of financialisation, of Thatcher and Reaganomics. In each case the land plays the role of a site of struggle; whether as the True Levellers "common treasury for all, both rich and poor" or as the locus of eschatological powers in Ben Wheatley's film (a messianic timbre which Arcadia shares). Finally, the land is both the source of the miner’s labour and the site of their defining battle. In each case the ultimate meaning of the land as origin is struggle.

4).

“To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is (...) to be capable of one's own impotentiality, to be in relation to one's own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil”. (Giorgio Agamben (1999) – Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press, Stanford California, pg183)

By taking the land as an ontic category, as a thing that might be contested, or owned, or carved up, we unavoidably run into the problems of nativity and historical peoples; unavoidably evoke parochialism, borders and territories. In doing so we are thrown back onto the plain of the subject of rights and claims for recognition. This has understandably been the strategy of post-colonialism in its approach to the experiences of first-peoples around the world and the defence of their traditions and historical land rights, which were often trampled upon during Europe’s colonial period. However, in non-colonised countries like Britain, that approach risks leading to a racialised discourse of so-called "white culture", and British indigenous identities. It’s difficult to argue that rallying round arcane customs and experiences of country life, in opposition to urban cosmopolitanism, is a good starting point for so-called “progressive futures”; at least insofar as those futures are meant to aim at a degree of political universalism fit for 21^st century Britain. It’s noticeable how so much of the past recalled by writers on hauntology (with some notable exceptions) is of a pale monocultural type, pre mass immigration and exemplifying the kind of exclusory strategies that only during the last few decades (indeed during the neoliberal period) have been eroded.

There are perhaps other ways we might conceive of the idea of the land as an Origin. Withdrawal to the land, to the Origin, is an archetypal form of renewal, not only in a geographical sense, but also through the utilisation of memory. Machiavelli wrote of the historical memory of the founding of every state - its origin in that first breaking of the soil - as an eternal point of renewal that periodically needs to be evoked to shake up institutions and breathe new life into the citizenry. He had in mind Livy's political mythology of the founding of Rome, when Romulus carved out the sacred boundary of his new city (the pomerium) using a plough. Re-founding has forever had connotations of renewal linked to a return to the grounding principles upon which things stand. This idea is more political ontology than history. 

The land is also a site of refuge which gives us the time to remember. Montag's flight out of the city in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 leads to an encounter with memory in a forest, by the light of a camp fire. Former academics, turned into living books after the destruction of their libraries, are ready to re-found civilisation after the coming nuclear apocalypse. "We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run". The retreat to the land is a retreat to memory.

The parable-like ending to Bradbury's book brings together elements of radical eschatological renewal and a concern with technology; with humanity’s fate in the face of the annihilating power of that technology. From this perspective the return in-land, this anabasis, is a reversal of the historical movement which opened human existence into new spaces and new global political constellations over the last half millennium; from the turn to maritime existence during the early modern period, through the nuclear age of aeronautics and space exploration, up to the contemporary colonisation of the digital, virtual realm. "Run to the hills" is in fact a statement of metaphysics. And as metaphysics, it is potentially open to far less “progressive” readings, as it is contested across the political spectrum.

The German jurist Carl Schmitt wrote extensively and attributed great weight to the distinction between terrestrial and maritime cultures, viewing it as politically decisive to the march of technology and key to understanding conflicts such as those between Britain and the European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries and the Cold War. Interestingly in his war-time text Land and Sea: A World Historical meditation (1942), he attributes special significance to the transformation he identifies in England during the 16th and 17th centuries when "the children of the Lion" opted to become "children of the sea". England - Schmitt claims - was unique in achieving a "planetary spatial revolution", in displacing itself away from the land and deciding for a maritime existence. In doing so it opened the way not only for Britain’s global empire, but for the Industrial Revolution itself. In a fashion analogous to Heidegger's critique of technology, Schmitt links together in a fundamental way, the technological fate of a people with the "space" it occupies. "The human receives a particular historical consciousness from his "space" [lebensraum], which is subjected to great historical transformations. The variegated forms of life correspond to equally differentiated spaces".

Battle Of Trafalgar by Louis Philippe Crepin

By the time of Schmitt's post-war Dialogue on New Space (1958) the conflict between the two nuclear powers of Russia and the United States - each standing on one side of the Land/Sea distinction - had grown due to "unencumbered technology" to enclose the fate of the whole planet. And yet despite humanity penetrating the cosmos and harnessing the power of the atom, Schmitt sees only a repetition and intensification of the elementary separation which occurred when England abandoned the land and decided for the sea. He has Mr. Altmann (a character meant to ventriloquise Schmitt's historical sense) state: "For me, the human is a son of the earth, and so he shall remain as long as he remains human". Today's challenge - according to the same character is "The binding of unencumbered technology ... It is from that direction that I hear the call, the challenge of the present".

5).

The global historical movement sketched here by Schmitt is a dark one, pregnant with the revolutionary conservatism that characterises his work. The land is where we find "house and property, marriage, family and hereditary right, all that is built upon the foundations of a terrestrial mode of being...". For the people of a maritime culture we instead find the ship, drifting from place to place upon the shifting and uncertain surface of the sea. Against the repose of the house, the restlessness of an uprooted technological existence, constantly alienating itself from its origin. These are classical conservative statements of a type which radicalise a volkish perspective on terrestrial existence and the signal importance of land for specific historical peoples. What is important for us in all this is how - like the hauntological sources we've been considering - Schmitt frames the land as a primordial Origin out of which and in which resides the fate of humanity as a whole. 

Schmitt's reflections on "the challenge of technology" and the question of taming it within the horizons of a "terrestrial existence" are pertinent for us in the 21st century, when new communications technologies are threatening to collapse human relationships altogether into the virtual world, and rampant capitalism continues to drive the environment toward catastrophe. But we should stop short of endorsing his conservative metaphysical reading of the originary quality of the land, which in Schmitt’s account is shot through with barely veiled Germanic chauvinism and a kulturkritik which pre-figures today’s far-right attacks on both Muslims and non-Europeans as culturally incompatible with Western society.

In Arcadia, clips from the Winstanley film offer up a different notion of the relationship between humans and the land, one that does not tie it to either a historical people or a specific tradition. This is in stark contrast to nationalist (or worse, National Socialist) ideas which connect the land (or soil, boden) to the historical consciousness of particular peoples, construed in either cultural or racial terms. Even after the holocaust, at the time Schmitt was writing his dialogue on New Space, he retained his anti-Semitism and like Heidegger never successfully disentangled his gloomy political ontology from the fate of particular nations and peoples, namely the Germans. His grand theories remained parochial and chauvinistic even when addressing “world historical movements”.

In concluding this brief analysis, we should recognise that the originary quality of the land is not politically specific, not open solely to ideas of progressive political and social renewal. As a metaphysical operator rooted in the deepest experience of our species with its environment, it is open to all, and its ultimate meaning remains contested and perhaps ultimately undecidable.

The antidote to much of the rightwing interpretation (and the risk of nostalgia, parochialism, anachronism) is to recognise the Origin not as locatable to any particular time or place, but as that eternal wellspring of human potentiality which is always carried with us. The Origin is not an ontic but an ontological category and hauntology is the study of that spectre which haunts humanity in its form of Being-Historical. If so, what hauntology calls the spectre is in fact the other side of that original potentiality, the side that doesn’t fall into non-being but remains active beneath the surface, like the rhizomes in Arcadia. Borrowing a term from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we might call this other side the “impotential” of the origin. The impotential is the revenant, the left over that remains after the potency of the origin has passed into historical actuality and been extinguished. It’s that part of every potentiality that withholds itself and never fully passes into the actual, maintaining its being within the realm of the virtual.

Is not every possible future a spectre from the side of its impotentiality; its capacity not-to-be? If so, then the term “lost futures” must be a misnomer. Rather than falling into non-being, the potentiality implicit in any political moment at its point of defeat goes underground, withdrawing into the impotential; into its capacity not-to-be. This capacity is itself a positive value which resides in all political life, awaiting its moment to return. It is from out of this positive quality of the virtual, from the other side of the possible, that the spectre calls to us, haunting the present with its never exhausted, but endlessly deferred promise of other possible worlds and forms-of-life.

Dreams Come Through Wires: The Utopianism of the Modular Synthesizer Revival

The History of Two

Who would argue that in these dark days a dose of utopianism wouldn't go amiss? True it is that the political scene at home and internationally hardly encourages any optimism, but perhaps in these 'times that try men's souls' we might do better when looking for a glimmer of another world to restrict our gaze to those things nearer to hand, in the more obscure niches and preoccupations of life in developed societies. The rarefied world of modular synthesizers may not seem for many a likely place to feel the stirrings of such utopian longing. These antiquated looking objects festooned with knobs and dials, sprouting cables in rainbow shades could be props from a Soviet-era science fiction film, or take pride of place at the heart of an early nuclear power plant. For the uninitiated the era of huge banks of analogue equipment emitting otherworldly bleeps and bloops is forever associated with lab based boffins with a university stipend or the excesses of moneyed progsters like Keith Emerson. Moreover, didn’t it all end more or less before it began with the advent of digital technology, the printed microchip, home computers and software emulations? But you'd be wrong in thinking this. Analogue music technology more generally has slowly been making a comeback since the turn of the millennium and like vinyl never really went away, being beloved by that crowd who hail its signature warmth and thickness.   

However, it isn't merely the hippsterish fetish for a more "authentic" sound that is driving the revival. Today's synthesists are coming from a variety of backgrounds, from avant-garde composition, to modern techno and utilising the technology in ways that were never previously explored. In doing so they're reviving something of a utopian spirit, one that longed not just for new sounds and new ways of making music, but saw in itself a correlate to the massive social upheavals taking place in the 1960s and 70s. 

Modular synthesizers differ from other types of classic analogue synths such as the Arp Odyssey, Korg MS-20 or MiniMoog in that they have an open architecture that allows a custom configuration of different parts or modules to the owners specification. Unlike the instruments listed above modular synths lack a normalised signal path and so the audio and voltage signals need to be patched across the system using cables, thus lending them their characteristic Heath Robinson-like appearance. This of course allows the user to utilise as many or as few parts of their system as they would like. Also, modular synthesizers don't normally have a built in keyboard although they can be integrated with one. Before more portable commercially sold equipment utilising keys was developed all synthesisers were constructed in this way, the most famous being those build by Robert Moog. Moog was also highly successful in producing smaller cheaper instruments that utilised the same technology but in a scaled down more performance friendly package. The MiniMoog (1970) was portable, stable, had a normalised signal path and crucially a built in keyboard. It became the most recognisable and iconic synthesizer ever made. 

MiniMoog

At the same time that Moog was developing his modular systems in the early 1960s, on the other side of the United States Don Buchla had just been hired by the San Francisco Tape Music Center to help them build a new kind of electronic instrument. Buchla, who sadly passed away last year, was both an engineer and a musician and arrived at the center via NASA where he had worked on developing technology designed to withstand cosmic radiation. He was also associated with the Grateful Dead whose own brand of cosmic happenings he lent his engineering skills to in collaboration with Owsley Stanley, who alongside audio engineering was the first person to synthesise mass qualities of LSD. In a not entirely unconnected way Buchla was involved with the Trips festival and was rumoured to sit beneath the stage playing one of his early machines during the Grateful Dead's sets. He was familiar to the avant-garde community around San Francisco and had produced his own series of wigged out tape music compositions. This unique combination of hippy outlook and cutting edge engineering prowess fit well with the counter-cultural mood of the time as well as the aspirations of his colleagues in San Francisco who included noted composer Morton Subotnick. In 2016 Subotnick recalled his instructions to Buchla: "I didn’t want a keyboard ... I didn’t want to reproduce the old way to make music, which was pitch-based orientation. I wanted it to be gesturally-based. I said, ‘This is not a musical instrument. This is, at best, an instrument to make instruments. It’s to paint.’

The metaphor of painting would stick. After producing a series of large, uniquely designed and versatile modular systems during the 60s, in 1973 Buchla produced the Music Easel, a compact modular system utilising the touch sensitive plates he had developed instead of a keyboard. These plates could be calibrated to a traditional chromatic scale or they could be patched in to trigger different parts of the instrument or modify the sequencing function.  In 2013 on the back of a revival of interest in Buchla's instruments, production resumed on the Music Easel with demonstration films on YouTube describing the instrument's sliders as "brushes". 

The differences between these two key designers of modular synthesizers as well as the wider social environment in which they worked are key to our story here. While Moog's instruments appealed to more keyboard-centric musicians looking to add new timbres to traditional forms of composing (exemplified in Wendy Carlos' Switch on Bach) Buchla's instruments were designed with the musician's interface as the starting point for producing a unique performance based experience of composing that incorporated a very 1960s emphasis on play. This was similarly reflected in the type of modules produced by Buchla, many of which had less than intuitive functionality and somewhat whimsical names. Take for example the module simply called Source of Uncertainty. While Moog's original machines were principally studio tools, never intended to be used by themselves, Buchla's instruments were aimed towards live performance and included several innovative methods for programming repetitive elements and sequencing them into rudimentary compositions. And whereas Moog's later compact instruments reflected an economy of ergonomics and intuitive practical interface, Buchla's Music Easel and other smaller systems retained their unique design and somewhat mystical performance aesthetic.  

Buchla's Arbitrary Function Generator

These differences in design and performance possibilities were similarly reflected in the different synthesis techniques each employed and thus the kinds of sounds these instruments could produce. Putting it briefly, Moog's instruments functioned through what is termed subtractive synthesis, which involves a waveform produced by an oscillator (sometimes several) being passed through a low pass resonant filter which removes part of the harmonic content of the signal. Sweeping the filter resonance produces rich shifts in timbre. The resultant signal is then modified by a voltage controlled amplifier (VCF or ADSR) which further shapes the sound and can also be used to modify the way the filter affects the waveform. Owing to Moog being based in New York this type of synthesis has come to be termed East Coast. Since Buchla and his team were then based in California their synthesis technique has of course come to be known as West Coast. A far less bloodstained alternative to the famous hip-hop rivalry but one which fosters no less a degree of loyalty. West Coast synthesis utilises several alternatives to subtractive synthesis, one of the most common being waveshaping which rather than filtering out harmonic content shapes the signal according to mathematical functions. Buchla also developed combinations of VCF's and sequencing functions that allowed his instrument to produce a wide range of naturalistic percussive and organic sounding textures. Morton Subotnick's records Silver Apples of the Moon and Wild Bull are classic demonstrations of the new possibilities inherent in Buchla's systems.

The Revival of Many

In the end however the hardnosed commercial environment of 1970s New York, coupled with Robert Moog's emphasis on more expedient, flexibly employed and reliable machines led to his brand becoming the most successful and iconic of the early synthesiser manufacturers. Although Moog's instruments could never be described as cheap, Buchla's machines and especially his larger modular systems suffered from being produced on a far smaller scale and carried price tags within the range of few individuals. Even the smaller Music Easel was produced on a tiny scale and commanded prices two or three times the cost of a MiniMoog. More-often Buchla's machines were purchased by institutions or added to the collections of wealthy enthusiasts. Don Buchla's counter-cultural and open form of electronic music would for time being remain a niche obsession. 

Doepfer A-100 complete system

That is until the last decade or so, when an explosion of interest in analogue synthesisers has forced manufacturers back to their soldering irons. In the last three years alone recreations of classic instruments like the Korg MS-20 and Arp Odyssey have come onto the market as well as manufacturers like Dave Smith, Roland and Oberheim expanding their analogue range. But it's been in the area of modular synthesisers that the most surprising developments have occurred. What was once the preserve of moneyed enthusiasts and adventurous music colleges has been reborn as a 'craft' industry with dozens of boutique manufacturers producing modules with a bewildering array of functions. One of the principle enabling factors has been the development of the Eurorack format which created a standardised size and voltage requirement for modules. German manufacturer Doepfer became a leader in the revived market producing a wide range of simple, reliable but most of all affordable modules and complete systems, some which emulate iconic components from instruments of old. Doepfer's basic system includes twenty-three separate modules and retails at less than £2000.

The establishing of this basic industry standard has provided something of a level playing field for developers to experiment with new kinds of electronics. One of the effects of this has been to reunify the two schools of synthesis styles within the Eurorack format. Whereas a Buchla or Moog system would be more or less wholly based on either the West or East coast style (not to mention differing volt/octave standards) the open system of Eurorack allows users to combine modules from multiple manufactures, utilising different synthesis techniques to build playful hybrid systems with massive ranges in sounds and modulation possibilities. One company that has taken Buchla's zest for unconventional tactile interfaces onboard is Make Noise Co. who produce an array of beautifully designed devices. Many, like the sequencers Rene and Pressure Points incorporate tactile or other non-keyboard interfaces as well as being marked by mysterious almost hieroglyphic-like symbols. As well as building upon the techniques of the past an increasing number of manufacturers are producing synth modules that go beyond pure synthesis itself. Examples like Mutable Instruments Clouds, and Make Noise’s Phonogene integrate innovative external audio processing techniques to complement traditional oscillator based sound sources. There are even a few shortwave radio modules available that allow the introduction of ghostly static, half heard transmissions and other such audio artefacts into the signal path. On the design front the new wave of devices also shows a multitude of obsessions and styles, including replicating the vintage feel of older systems, tongue in cheek pastiches of clunky cold-war Soviet designs (see XAOC devices) and path finding experiments with user interfaces and panel art.

Three Modules: Make Noise Co Maths, XAOC Devices Moskwa, The Harvestman Hertz Donut

Along with this commercial diversification the modular revival has also produced its own online subculture. The amusingly monikered Muffwiggler.com is at the heart of this international community where enthusiasts can pick up tips, trade equipment and synthesis secrets and generally socialise with other likeminded souls. YouTube hosts hundred of videos of modular synth tutorials, performances and a lot of people just showing off their latest toys; while channels like Sonicstate and Future Music Magazine regularly run features on modular synthesiser technology. A surprising number of these personal videos however feature players performing wild and complex techno work-outs on their systems. This is in striking contrast to the focus on timbre and abstraction that characterised modular synth music in previous decades and shows how the democratisation of the technology has resulted in a broadening of  interest among players of more urban or working class orientated music. The amount of video material available online points to another characteristic of the revival, which is that these systems are not just or even predominantly for making records. In fact the number of records utilising modular synthesisers is relatively small and always has been. Indeed ever since the technology was first available commercially there been a strange incongruence between the financial outlay associated with modular synthesisers and the amount of recorded music produced with them. People who bought them tended not to be studio musicians but electronics enthusiasts who delighted in their open architecture and sound making possibilities, not to mention how cool they made your living room look. In the past this kind of high priced hobbyism was the preserve of the few, but with the prices having come down and the boom in availability and online support the pleasure of cosmic electronic experimentation is possible for more people than ever. This renaissance has recently been recognised with the release of the documentary I Dream of Wires.

This is not to say that there are no records being produced using these instruments. In fact the last couple of years have perhaps finally seen the impact of the revival trickle down into new  recorded music. Alessandro Cortini is one of North America's most proficient Buchla players, as well as being a member of Nine Inch Nails and an all-round synth nut. His series of Buchla based records under his own name and his Sonoio moniker draw out the instrument's capability to produce a deep range of emotive organic textures and rhythms. Cortini has also contributed to Make Noise Records series exploring the range of their flagship Black and Gold modular system. Another Buchla enthusiast Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith mixes her modular systems with acoustic orchestration and innovative voice modulations, producing sparkling pop/avant-garde hybrids. In 2016 on FRKWYS Vol. 13: Sunergy, she teamed up with one of Buchla's most noted early students Suzanne Ciani for an expansive record of new-age and ambient meditations; the inter-generational aspect highlighting the rediscovery not just of the technology but of hitherto underappreciated artists like Ciani.

Elsewhere in the scene, Floating Points, Donnacha Costello and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe each take modular synthesis in new directions. Floating Points into complex jazz and techno territory striving to integrate advances in modular synths with the latest studio technology, while Lowe has produced a body of deep freeform and exploratory meditations, touching both on spiritual themes and ephemeral percussive rhythms. These examples are not without significance as they include records produced by women and people of colour; groups who have traditionally found themselves excluded from the predominantly white and male dominated world of modular synthesisers and music technology more generally. Here at least the utopianism I'm getting at has an immediate and concrete appearance, despite there being a long way to go.

If there's one thing that each of these artists has in common and that perhaps characterises the modular synthesiser revival as a whole, it's a rejection of the conformity and homogeneity of much mainstream electronic music, while similarly shunning the academic roots of modular synth technology. Evidently nostalgia and a certain longing for the supposed authenticity and solidity of analogue equipment plays a part in all this. But if anything it's the hundreds of online videos and the new hybrid forms of music being produced that refutes this reduction of the revival to mere nostalgic re-appropriation and points towards something beyond. To put it more prosaically: if nostalgia is a longing for the past or a return to the origin, then a progressive form can only be thought through a radicalising of that origin for the purpose of going beyond a deadlock in the present. For me this obscure corner of music culture points to a longing for a freer, more open and engaged type of artistic creation beyond the stifling conformity and throwaway quality of music under Last-Days-Capitalism; one that is both available to the widest number of participants and which captures something of the hopes and expectations of the counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s. A world, in short, very different from the one we are currently living through. None-the-less such distractions, such micro-utopias are the morsels that must sustain us through the long night of the present.