Weird Britain in Exile

Popular Music and Society
iFirst, 2012, 124
Weird Britain in Exile: Ghost Box,

Hauntology, and Alternative Heritage
Downloaded by [Northumbria University], [Jamie Sexton] at 06:34 02 May 2012
Jamie Sexton
This article interrogates some of the themes that have been noted in the critical reception
of the musical movement that has been dubbed hauntology. In particular, it focuses on a
specifically British strain of hauntologylargely concentrating on the record label Ghost
Boxand explores the network of associations referenced by the artists involved. The
author argues that Ghost Box and related artists reflect on issues such as collecting and
heritage, claiming that they are engaged in a form of alternative heritage. Further, he
argues that they engage with the uncanny nature of media technologies, particularly the
sense in which current digital technologies can be considered as haunted by their analogue
counterparts. Finally, he suggests that critics have tended to steer away from exploring
issues such as nostalgia and pastiche within the work of such artists due to their rather
negative connotations; yet these concepts are crucial to the strategies of many
hauntological artists.
Over the past few years increasing critical attention has been paid to a musical
movement that has become known as hauntology. Much of this debate, stemming
back to around 2006, has occurred on the web via blogs of critics such as Mark Fisher
(aka K-Punk) and Simon Reynolds, though it has also featured in print magazines and
webzines, perhaps most prominently in music magazine The Wire (for which both
Fisher and Reynolds occasionally write). In this article I aim to explore some of the
themes that have been discussed in these blogs and zines but which have yet to be
subjected to a more sustained investigation. I will focus on a specific area of output
that has been discussed within writings addressing hauntologythat of the label
Ghost Box (with references to a few similar or like-minded artists), whose aesthetic
identity is very British.1 This contrasts with some American artists who have also been
discussed within writings on hauntology.2
Ghost Box exists as a particularly intermedial enterprise: whilst it is a music label, it
references a number of cultural figures and titles from film, television, and literature,
as well as music, thus threading a wealth of intertextual cues into its overall aesthetic.
ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608905
J. Sexton
Further, it also organizes occasional multimedia club nights which contain screenings
of television and film material, plus DJ sets and live music performed against a
backdrop of projected visuals. I wish to explore these intertextual linkages further,
particularly in relation to the following themes: collecting and curating; heritage; and
the relations between analogue and digital technologies. First, though, it is important
to think about the concept of hauntology and provide an overview of what has thus
far been written about it.
Hauntology: A Musical Movement

The word hauntology stems from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida,
who used the term to think through Marxism and the specters that continue to haunt
the present (in particular the ghosts of political revolution): this neologism combines
haunt and ology, whilst also punning on the word ontology. Derrida was writing
on politics after the so-called end of history theses propounded in the late 1980s by
neoconservative thinkers such as Francis Fukiyama, and his work was an attempt to
speculate on the nature of being, and the possibility of politics, in a world saturated
with the ghosts of the past. Within musical culture, however, the term has been
adopted in a slightly different manner; the more political dimensions of Derridas
explorations have largely been downplayed in order to focus on the more ontological
sense of hauntology: that being is itself haunted, constituted from a number of hidden
traces whose presence is felt but often unacknowledged.
Amongst a number of contemporary music artists there is a marked tendency to
reflect on how contemporary music culture is saturated by artifacts from previous
eras. Whilst this has been the case for many years, it is undoubtedly a condition
that has increased with the rise of digital technologies and the ability to gain access
to a range of recordings and styles from different periods with relative ease. This
technological dimension is particularly important to musical hauntology: many
artists associated with the movement foreground technologies because of their ability
to resurrect the past and distribute historical traces across networked platforms. The
symbiotic process in which technological progress unleashes an increasing number of
historical audio artifacts contributes to an interest in the notion of the technological
uncanny (a concept I will return to), in which technologies can contribute to a
condition in which time feels out of joint. One of the most important ways in which
hauntology has come to function as a musical label, then, is in referring to music
which foregrounds its haunted nature. This is a process that can occur in different
ways; so, for example, in music production the foregrounding of recording noises
can sometimes be seen as a hauntological strategy, in that it signals decay and
deterioration and can lend sounds a rather uncanny air; likewise, the use of sampling
can be used to evoke dead presences and can be transformed into more eerie sonic
markers when treated with effects such as reverberation. On a more conceptual level,
and this refers in particular to Ghost Box, hauntology is marked by a reflexive
approach: the foregrounding of technologies and explicit references to media texts
(and sometimes broader cultural links) from other eras draws attention to the manner
by which many hauntological artists signal that their work is about the past and its
ghostly infiltration of the present.
The past and present commonly intertwine within the sphere of human memory,
so it is no surprise that memory constitutes an important trope within hauntology
(the term memoradelia has occasionally been employed to refer to the work of some
of these artists). The Ghost Box label, for example, run by Jim Jupp and Julian House,
scatters a number of references through its music and related texts (such as album
design and accompanying text, the Ghost Box website, and interviews) which largely
stem from post-war Britain, particularly the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, it is
horror films and television which permeate the allusions made by the label: British
horror films in particular, as well as horror-related television such as The Stone Tape
(1972) and a number of supernatural programs designed for younger viewers, such as
The Owl Service (1969) or Children of the Stones (1977). Authors associated with the
horror genre are also name-checked by Ghost Box, most prominently Arthur Machen
and Algernon Blackwood. Using a number of horror references feeds in, of course, to
the haunted aspect which has characterized the work of many of these artists. Other
references are also prominent, and these include schools programming and public
information films, as well as the cover designs of Penguin books from the 1960s, which
have acted as an inspiration point for the design of Ghost Box covers.
Figure 1 Cover of Revised Edition of The Focus Groups Mind How You Go (2010).
Reproduced courtesy of Ghost Box. Copyright Ghost Box 2006.
J. Sexton
Figure 2 Cover of Belbury Polys The Owls Map (2006). Reproduced courtesy of Ghost
Box. Copyright Ghost Box 2006.
So, while we have a number of horror (or, more broadly, supernatural and/or
fantastical) texts being used as an integral component of the Ghost Box aesthetic,
a number of more prosaic references are also made. These, as Simon Reynolds has
written, relate to an obsession with the spirit of technocratic utopianism that
flourished in post-war Britain . . . a wistful harking back to the optimistic, forwardlooking, benignly bureaucratic Britain of new towns and garden cities, comprehensive
schools and polytechnics (Reynolds, Society 29). In one sense, the incorporation of
such technocratic utopianism within the Ghost Box aesthetic can be linked to broader
social ideals and a nostalgic longing for a time when public services had not been so
extensively offloaded by the British state and were not subject so much to the whims of
the marketplace. Such references also add another layer of temporal mixing to the
Ghost Box project: if technological progress today revives the past increasingly, then
a fascination for these tropes is perhaps linked to how they reveal past projections of the
future and progress. The past inside the present and the future inside the past: these
temporal fusions are particularly interesting to hauntologists because they link to the
idea of the technological uncanny. And while the twin major creative spurs within the
Ghost Box aestheticsupernatural media and technocratic utopianismmay at first
glance appear to be uneasy bedfellows, this mixing of ostensibly incompatible elements
is a frequent Ghost Box strategy which further adds to an uncanny aura.
The main musical acts associated with Ghost Box are The Focus Group, Belbury
Poly, and The Advisory Circle. The Focus Group (the musical act of Ghost Box co-
runner Julian House) creates eerie, sample-heavy pieces which draw on a vast range
of library music and soundtrack material, and a variety of other musical samples.
The Focus Group sound is characterized by the use of repetitive loops: whilst
sample sources for these loops vary, they are often characterized by very simple,
melodic fragments, culled from musical styles including folk and jazz. These melodic
fragments lend a rather nave, childlike quality to The Focus Groups sound pieces, but
this is undercut through combining these fragments with other samples which often
clash with the underlying melodies, and through the extensive use of sound processing
(particularly drenching many sound elements in reverb). The particular ways that the
samples are edited also creates a strange, eerie dimension to The Focus Groups music:
often the edit joins are not fluid but abrupt, frequently stitched together at unexpected
places, occasionally producing audio jolts. Both Belbury Poly (consisting of the other
Ghost Box co-owner, Jim Jupp) and The Advisory Circle (Jon Brooks) tend to be more
tuneful: their music is marked by whimsical sounds from vintage synthesizers which
are redolent of old library records and the electronic music which sometimes
accompanied schools programming in the 1970s and early 1980s. Belbury Poly
employs a wide range of analogue synthesizers to produce largely pop-driven, melodic
electronic music. Frequently underpinned by repetitive arpeggios, the melodies are
often simple and upbeat; sometimes, as when the melodies are articulated via the
squelches and gurgles of analogue synthesizers, there is a kitschy feel to the music. At
times, however, the music of Belbury Poly veers off into less pleasant directions, either
through the creation of darker and less melodic soundscapes, or through the use of
treated samples to lend a more spooky quality to the music. Likewise, The Advisory
Circle creates both melodic, synth-based pop and darker compositions heavily
influenced by Brian Eno-style ambient composition and musique concre`te. The
Advisory Circle veers into darker territory with slightly more frequency than Belbury
Poly and can occasionally produce rather terrifying sounds, as with the track Eyes
Which Are Swelling in which percussion-heavy bursts are overlaid with spoken
samples and culminate in rather disturbing screams for help. Both of these acts and
others on Ghost Box also should be connected with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop,
the resident musical production unit that created a vast range of radio and television
sound effects and music for the BBC between 1958 and 1998. The Radiophonic
Workshop is important in the sense that it produced concre`te-inspired, experimental
electronic soundscapes, as well as more melodic, synthesizer-based pop, and
unsurprisingly it constitutes a key Ghost Box reference point.
Other acts released by Ghost Box include Rooj, Eric Zann (another, more dissonant,
persona of Jupp), and Mount Vernon Arts Lab, whose Seance at Hobbs Lane was rereleased by Ghost Box in 2007 (it was originally released by Astra in 2001). In addition
to acts who have released long-playing CDs on Ghost Box, there are a number of other
artists who have links with the label or who have been critically discussed as belonging
to a similar aesthetic mindset. These include the group Broadcast, for whom Julian
House has designed record covers (he is member of a design collective called Intro) and
who recorded an album with The Focus Group for Warp Records entitled Broadcast and
J. Sexton
The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (2009); Hinterland, Mordant
Music and Moon Wiring Club, all of whom have contributed to a series of 7 vinyl
releases for Ghost Box; and The Caretaker (Leyland Kirby), who hasnt actually
collaborated with the label but whose ghostly deformations of existing records (overlaid
with thick layers of interference noise) have led to his records being positioned within
the British strain of hauntology. In addition, links have been established between Ghost
Box and other cultural operators, including the archivist record label Trunk Records
(run by Johnny Trunk, who has himself contributed to the third 7 series of Ghost Box
releases), Strange Attractor (an organization which publishes a journal, books and
other matter devoted to strange and marginal interests), and English Heretic, an
organization devoted to investigating the occult side of England.
In the remainder of this article I would like to focus on some of the main themes
that run through the work of many of these acts, unpacking some important
relationships between this burgeoning cultural movement and the broader social
fabric within which such creative pursuits are carried out. Before moving on to such
themes, however, I will outline a few ways in which intermedial connections are
particularly important within this movement.
Psychic Heterotopias
As mentioned, Ghost Box has created a very specific aesthetic which references
a number of texts both from the musical world and from other media, and which is
manifested not just in its music but through its design presentation. It is not unusual for
music to draw upon other media in the way that it communicates meanings to listeners;
as Nicholas Cook has argued, music is never alone and has long been associated with
other media (121 22).Yet the Ghost Box label seems particularly self-conscious in
creating a kind of alternative universe through its use of intertexts. The Ghost Box
website, for example, signals its main threads of inspiration, announcing: Ghost Box is
a record label for a group of artists who find inspiration in folklore, vintage electronics,
library music, and haunted television soundtracks. The creation of an imaginary world
out of these sources is evident in the consistency of reference points and designs, even in
its creation of a mock Ghost Box Periodical, which is entitled Folklore and
Mathematics and consists of quotes (by Arthur Machen, MB Devot and T.C.
Lethbridge), images, a fragment of an old Radio Times listing, and a fake newspaper
report from an imaginary place called Belbury (whose name comes from a C.S. Lewis
1945 science fiction novel, That Hideous Strength) which documents how a new
television mast could be linked to mysterious buzzing sounds experienced by residents.
It is not a surprise that other media texts play a central role in the Ghost Box world
as the label is very concerned with media, both in the sense that particular media
content can impact upon the individual psyche, and also in terms of a fascination with
media recording technologies (I will come back to this point later). I have mentioned
that post-war British cultural artifacts dominate the Ghost Box imaginary, and
this can be linked to how a number of texts impacted upon its affiliates in their
Figure 3 Cover of Folklore and Mathematics. Reproduced courtesy of Ghost Box.

Copyright Ghost Box 2006.
childhood/youth. More broadly, it can also be linked to how many figures associated
with hauntology in Britain draw upon memory as a creative force, particularly the
strange ways that media fragments can lodge inside the psyche and continue to stay
with us in later life.
We can think of this processthe creation of an aesthetic universe out of a carefully
selected array of referencesas the formation of a psychic heterotopia. Heterotopia
was the name that Michel Foucault (Of Other Spaces) coined to refer to places that
exist within society (unlike utopias) but which are in some senses separate from, and
other to, the broader social space within which they exist. Foucault outlined different
forms and functions for heterotopias, though perhaps most significant in relation to
Ghost Box are his assertions that a heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single
real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible and that it is
most often linked to slices in timewhich is to say that they open onto what might
J. Sexton
be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. In terms of the former quote, it
is clear that Ghost Box draws upon elements that may not have previously been
thought of as compatiblenamely, public service schools programming and a
tradition of spooky, haunted texts. In terms of the latter quote, while they primarily
tend to draw from a specific period (the 1960s and 1970s), they do mix into this
elements from other eras (such as Machen and Blackwood) and also firmly place these
within a contemporary context, so that timelost time, past timeis highlighted as
an important component of their aesthetic.
Victor Burgin has already adopted Foucaults concept of the heterotopia in terms of a
more psychic form of space, which is how Ghost Boxs aesthetic universe seems to exist:
it is a universe that is hinted at through music, text, and visuals, but which doesnt really
exist out there in an objective sense, although actual spaces can be overwritten by the
psychic imaginary, a point to which I shall return. Burgin discusses film as a
heterogeneous object which does not only exist at the point of viewing, but is also
encountered in more fragmented fashion through, for example, clips, reviews,
production photos, memorabilia, etc. It is in the space formed from all the many places
of transition between cinema and other images in and of everyday life (Remembered
Film 10) that a cinematic heterotopia is formed, according to Burgin:
What we may call the cinematic heterotopia is constituted across the variously
virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the
media and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire
first identified as a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness. (10)
Following the lines of this logic, Ghost Boxs carefully delineated system of references can
be viewed as a heterotopia turned into an aesthetic principle. Yet Burgins argument
overlooks two important aspects: first, he treats cinematic fragments as self-contained,
even when they do leak over into other media; and second, he treats cinema as a purely
visual medium. Yet the aesthetic universe of Ghost Box draws on cinematic sights and
sounds, as well as visual and aural references across different media, to create a broader
cultural heterotopia of, and for, the psyche. In this sense, the labels ethos seems
particularly symptomatic of the current media environment, of an age of convergence
and media repurposing, despite its overtly historical guise. Of course, media overlaps are
not merely a contemporary phenomenon, and Ghost Boxs mingling of cultural
references is to some extent testimony to the longevity of how media content has
migrated across different delivery channels.3 Yet I would argue that the label positions
itself as both contemporary and backward-looking, and in this sense both reflects upon,
and is symptomatic of, relations between the past, present and future within a digital age.
Collecting and Curating

One of the key themes feeding into this strain of hauntology is the role of the collector.
Ghost Box, for example, is a label that emerged with a very particular aesthetic
identity forged from a mixture of specific references. It was, in a sense, a particular
aspect of its owners collections writ large, a projection of their tastes. Even if the
power of memory exerting its uncanny influence on the present is a core theme of the
Ghost Box aesthetic, it is nevertheless accompanied by the existence of archival
recordings and their role in the formation of a broader cultural memory. Many
involved in, or with links to, Ghost Box are also involved in collecting.
Collecting has an extraordinarily long and complex history that is beyond the scope
of this article, but it is nevertheless worth noting some important developments to
frame the present discussion historically. Institutional sites at which accumulated items
could be observedmuseums, churchesdate back to the third century BC, though
their accessibility would have been limited and their purposes were religious. More
secular collecting practices gained pace in the 1500s through theatrical presentations of
objects, which included Guilio Camillo Delmonios memory theatre and other likeminded displays, including the cabinet of curiosities, in which various disparate
objects were placed on display, usually for educational purposes (though they could
also serve political and other social functions). These eventually fed into public
museums and galleries, though it is important to note that as official museums
flourished, collecting had evident tiers of prestige and decorum, with socially less
respectable collector-organizations emerging around the nineteenth century, such as
wax museums (Staiger). It is this underside of collecting which informs the Ghost
Box aesthetic, though its collecting is largely based on recordable mediarecord
collecting in particular, but also the collection of books, films, and television programs.
One of Ghost Boxs stated inspirations is library musicrecords made by
musicians for use within films and television programsa form of music in vogue
amongst a section of record collectors. As the music was originally recorded not as an
artistic statement but for purely functional purposes (and therefore was not on
general sale), it has, over the years, become relatively obscure, and this itself has been
a spur to some with collecting tendencies. There is a mentality within areas of
collector culture that craves rarity: the less easy it is to come across something, the
more likely it is that it will be prized by sectors of collectors. To some extent this relates
to the broader mass-consumer market and acts as an alternative to it; thus, as Simon
Reynolds argues, Rare records, in their very sacredness, have recovered some of the
specialness lost to mass produced, commodified artworks (Lost 295). This idea of
the collector distancing her/himself from mass production is a theme that I will return
to. For now, though, I want to focus on the idea of the collector turned creator, of
which Ghost Box is a representative example.
Collector-inspired creation is not a new phenomenon, but it is a form of activity that
has gained particularly marked attention since the emergence of postmodernism as a
critical concept (albeit a concept that is extremely difficult to pin down), in which the act
of creation as a recombination of previously created elements was often stressed. Perhaps
the most salient figure representing this collector/creator hybrid is the DJ. Prior to the
1970s the DJ was not commonly considered a creative figure, but this began to gradually
change with the emergence of remixing and turntablism as accepted forms of artistic
practice. Within the world of DJing rarity is also important, not merely for its avoidance
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J. Sexton
of the taint of mass culture, but also as a tool to be used in the forging of a specific
aesthetic identity. If a DJ can locate and employ relatively obscure records then there is
less chance that he or she will be using the same raw materials as other DJs, and less
chance that his or her source materials will be considered obvious by other DJs and
listeners. Such rarity gives rise to the phenomenon of crate digging, in which DJs and
other collectors search far and wide for undiscovered gems.
Ghost Box and related artists could be seen as similar to the DJ in their collectorcreator capacities, and so it is perhaps no surprise that many of these artists do also DJ
from time to time. Yet the aesthetic universe of Ghost Box, unlike a majority of DJs,
is particularly precise and considered, constituting as it does a particular form of
psychic heterotopia. The regularity of particular types of materialhorror and other
forms of fantastic media, outdated forms of media hardware, state-assisted education
initiatives, antiquated visions of the futureforming this aesthetic is so insistent that it
must also be considered a form of curating, of highlighting particular cultural artifacts
as worthy of preservation, a process of containing the past to recover and revivify it
(Bjarkman 235). As such, it is a process that speaks of the position of collecting and
curating (and associated concepts such as archiving) within the digital age.
The visibility of collecting and archiving has increased in the digital era, as has the
ability to come across a range of media materials that may previously have remained
undetected. There have long existed communities of collectors who have accrued a
range of materials that may otherwise have been difficult to access. These can form
alternative and/or unofficial networks that operate outside official channels: circles of
traders who swap videotaped television material, for example (as studied by Bjarkman),
or communities trading unofficial bootleg recordings of particular music artists. The
unofficial status of such communities is often marked by differences from official
channels: bartering or exchanging may be involved, for example, instead of fixed price
sales (though the latter does exist as well within such circles); and the artifacts being
traded/collected may be illicit (traders may forge connections via material that has been
banned because of its supposedly anti-social naturean example being collectors who
exchanged video nasty VHS cassettes [Egan]). In a sense, unofficial collecting
networks constitute a private and collective, emergent archive. As opposed to the
official archive, which is designated and managed as such, and which has to be run and
organized according to formal principles, the emergent archive arises from bottom-up
processes. That is, though not designed as an archive as such, the collection that arises
out of the private collections, and which is accessible via collecting networks, could be
considered as a kind of accidental archive (Burgess and Green 87): it expresses a range
of interests and concerns of a specific community, and further nourishes that
communitys interest in particular cultural/historical texts. The distinctions between
the private/unofficial and public/official collections should not be overstated: public
collections often emerge from private hoards, a particularly prominent example being
the British Museum, which was established in 1753 from a private donation (Staiger).
Nevertheless, until a particular private collection becomes embedded within a broader
public institution (or, perhaps, a less official but nonetheless rule-bound community),
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it is not necessarily subject to the same kinds of rules regarding, for example, its remit
and how it is publicly exhibited and accessed.
Digital networks have made accidental, emergent archives potentially much larger
and more inclusive. Perhaps the most well-known is YouTube, which, whilst it serves a
variety of uses, does also act as an archive of a range of popular media (particularly
older television programs and music videos). As Burgess and Green have argued: The
collective activities of thousands of users, each with their individual enthusiasms and
eclectic interests, are resulting in what is effectively a living archive of contemporary
culture from a large and diverse range of sources (88). Lucas Hilderbrand has also
commented on the archival dimension of YouTube, contending that it introduces a
new model of media access and amateur historiography that, whilst the images are
imperfect and the links are impermanent, nonetheless realizes much of the Internets
potential to circulate rare, ephemeral, and elusive texts (233).
Hilderbrand further argues that YouTube provides some evidence of what material
from televisions past now constitutes our cultural memory (232), an interesting point,
despite his use of our, denoting a shared cultural memory that is a little too neat. For,
even though YouTube is a huge, non-specialist resource, it is arguably used to furnish the
memories of different communities: cultural memories may be a more adequate term.
This is certainly the case if we think of Ghost Box, which is forging a particular form of
cultural memory production, and in this it connects to a number of other communities
on the Web. So, for example, numerous blogging communities are engaged in forms of
archival documentation and their posts constitute part of a burgeoning amateur
collection. Such practices draw attention to the personal and/or historical importance of
the work being displayed and discussed, items that may well have been overlooked in
more official accounts of particular eras. There are a number of blogs which specialize in
library music, and blogs which specialize in horror soundtracks, both of which may be
connected to the Ghost Box project. It is no surprise that Ghost Box itself, then, has
forged links with a number of other like-minded individuals/groups, and it is the shared
values of this community that I now wish to probe.
Heritage
The selection of cultural artifacts referenced by Ghost Box is being marked out as
worthy of attention and can also be connected to broader values. As Ghost Box
continually references artists, texts, and other aspects of British culture from the past,
it would seem that it is making a stake for these entities as an important part of British
cultural heritage. The notion of heritage may sound strange in this context because of
its frequent associations with the upper classes, stately homes, and conservativism; but
this is only one facet of heritage, even if it exists as the most dominant facet (at least in
terms of the general profile and perceptions of heritage). There also exist a number of
other approaches to heritage and preservation; more specialist interest groups, for
example, have engaged in the restoration of historical projects, as indicated in the
following quote by John Urry:
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. . . there has been a marked broadening of the objects deemed worthy of being
preserved. This stems from a changed conception of history. There has been a
decline in the strength of a given national history . . . Instead a proliferation of
alternative or vernacular histories has developedsocial, economic, populist,
feminist, ethnic, industrial and so on. (118)
In this sense, there exist a number of what could be termed marginal movements
which place an emphasis on different kinds of heritage from those propounded by
organizations such as the National Trust or English Heritage. Ghost Box and its
affiliates can be partly related to this surge of interest in marginal national history, in
preserving a form of alternative heritage.
Alternative heritage as a term here refers not only to the sense in which these cultural
actors are engaged in singling out particular, non-mainstream artifacts as worthy of
interest and preservation, but also to the ways in which such activities are selfconsciously positioned as alternatives to more official, mainstream heritage projects.
In this sense, they share concerns with a strain of British filmmaking that has also been
termed alternative heritage by Phil Powrie. Powrie claims that films such as Distant
Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1988), The Long Day Closes (Davies, 1992) and Small Faces
(MacKinnon, 1996) can be positioned as alternatives to the more recognized films
designated as heritage films which tend to focus on the upper classes and approach the
past from a generally bourgeois position (Higson). Powrie argues that these texts also
approach heritage self-reflexively, claiming that they push the rites of passage narrative
to its limits, and in so doing, allow us to reconsider the notion of heritage (317).
However, whilst this notion of alternative heritage links to hauntological concerns,
Ghost Box and related operators share a fascination with fantastical texts. In this sense,
they can be linked to David Piries attempt to carve out an alternative tradition of
British filmmaking (outside the canons of realist cinema) through his focus on gothic
horror films in his seminal 1973 publication A Heritage of Horror.
English Heretic is the most conspicuously self-conscious heritage project connected
to hauntology. It is an organization set up to maintain, nurture and care for the
psychohistorical environment of England (quote taken from its website), and it sets
itself up as a kind of occult parallel to English Heritage: not only does its actual name
riff on its more official counterpart, its logo offers a variation on English Heritages
official logo, and it also produces black plaques as more esoteric alternatives to the
blue plaques issued by English Heritage. Whereas English Heritage focuses on
preserving selected historical and archaeological sites and establishing such sites as
tourist attractions, English Heretic places an emphasis on undertaking journeys off
the beaten track, outside of officially sanctioned spaces. In doing so, it draws attention
to the many sites of historical interest which have been overlooked by public bodies
such as English Heritage, particularly emphasizing those sites with occult connections.
Through the creation of an organization that so closely mimics a more official
organization, yet also offers a distinct alternative, English Heretic very much draws
attention to itself as a self-reflexive heritage project, a strategy that signals that it is
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attempting at once to celebrate particular elements from national history and to

distance itself from other bodies more commonly associated with such projects.
Like English Heretic, the organization Strange Attractor is listed on the Ghost Box
links page. Strange Attractor organizes events and publishes a journal, as well as
occasionally releasing books and records. It is also devoted to the more esoteric, occult
areas of cultural life; while it is not only concerned with British culture, its activities
nevertheless commonly concentrate on weird and often forgotten fragments from
British history. The idea of preservation does not characterize Strange Attractor to the
same extent as it does English Heretic, but such concerns are apparent in some of the
articles that feature within its journal and also from the actual look of the journal
itself, which, according to Kevin Jackson, smacks far more of the late nineteenth
century than the early twenty-first (quote taken from Strange Attractor website).
Furthermore, it has organized events based on themes such as Forgotten Musical
Technologies, Utopia Britannica (devoted to historical utopian movements within
Britain), and Megalithomania (organized around megalithic structures and their
role in history, art, and folklore).
Ghost Box, along with Strange Attractor and English Heretic, and the record label
Trunk Records (which issues a range of British television and soundtrack music, as
well as library music and vintage electronics, amongst other fare) share an interest in
Figure 4
Heretic.
Homepage of English Heretic Website. Reproduced courtesy of English
14
J. Sexton
alternative heritage even though there are marked differences between them. This is
evident in the interests in the occult, in folk traditions (particularly those that are less
well documented), and in the British landscape. The latter concern connects to
psychogeography, a practice brought to attention by the Situationists, which has
flourished within Britain over the past few decades, and of whom Iain Sinclair is
perhaps the most noted exemplar. Sinclair is probably best known for his writing
which focuses on particular walks and other journeys across London, in which he
investigates occult traces and other phenomena that he encounters, in the process
constructing a hidden history of the capital. Examples of such work include Lights Out
for the Territory (1998) and London Orbital (2003), the latter book emerging from
a 2002 documentary film of the same name that Sinclair made with Chris Pettit.
Psychogeography usually involves derive, a mode of aimless drifting through urban
space and an attempt to refuse the dictates of modern planning. In a sense, it is a form
of walking off the beaten track and an attemptvia the combination of objective and
subjective registersto look beyond appearances. Andrew Burke has recently noted
that, particularly in relation to London, the idea of excavating a secret history of the
city and asserting the value of neglected spaces and disappearing forms of modern
life (103) has been undertaken by writers such as Sinclair and novelist Shena Mackay,
whose numerous novels include Orchard on Fire (1997) and Heligoland (2004);
filmmakers such as the aforementioned Chris Petitperhaps most noted for his
psychogeographic, music-driven road movie Radio On (1980)and Patrick Keiller,
whose static frame explorations of England in film, such as London (1994) and
Robinson in Space (1997), have often been considered similar in tone to the literature
of Sinclair; as well as the music group Saint Etienne, whose pop songs and associated
cover art have often evoked a nostalgic attachment to the spaces and sounds of
London (particularly from, though not limited to, the 1960s).
The interest in land amongst the agents I am discussing is not limited to urban
spaces, however (though urban space does feature); there is also a fascination with
rural spaces. English Heretic, in particular, regularly features information about
geographical investigations undertaken and, on its website, claims that we aim to
help people decode and realise the alchemical ciphers and conspiratorial interplay of
the buildings and landscapes around them. The importance of place is also linked to
a number of films and television programs referenced by Ghost Box and its artists.
For example, the films The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973) and Blood on Satans Claw
(Haggard, 1971) have both been cited as influential by Ghost Box (and have also had
their soundtracks released by Trunk Records), and both films centrally feature the
British rural landscape and link this to pagan practices. Witchfinder General (Reeves,
1968) is another film in which rural Britain plays a crucial role, and it has been
employed by English Heretic in its Sacred Geographies of British Cinema project,
which investigates sites that have been used within some of the most powerful and
frightening scenes in British film history. English Heretic further claims that by
providing guidance on exploring these sites, it aims to provide a tangible portal to
fantastic and uncanny realms.
15
The Wicker Man itself has continued to inspire peopleusually referred to as

Wicker Headsvisiting the locations where it was filmed (Smith 111 12). The
media pilgrimage (Couldry) has become a common part of modern life, as physical
locations become overwritten with meanings and values which emerge from their use
within fictional environments. Yet The Wicker Man, as a cult film (once critically
derided but eventually becoming celebrated by a number of fans), and as a film that
features a pagan community, tends to link to a form of alternative heritage. The film
has now, in a sense, become a rather canonical text amongst a range of marginal
communities, yet one which maintains its alternative values. In fact, the release of The
Wicker Man soundtrack on Trunk Records in 1997 has been credited by Julian House of
Ghost Box with sparking his interest in folk music, and it has also been cited as a key
text by musicians connected to the resurgence of interest in folk music (both in Britain
and elsewhere, especially the USA), which has been termed neofolk and freak folk.
Another Ghost Box release, Mount Vernon Arts Labs The Seance at Hobs Lane, is
also inspired by a fictional location featured within Quatermass and the Pit (made for
television in 1953; the film version was released in 1967), and can be considered to be
a kind of ritual sound excursion inspired by a fictional space. (It is also important to
note that Drew Mulholland of Mount Vernon Arts Lab claimed that a visit to the
location where the final scene of The Wicker Man was filmed also inspired some of the
music.) Both actual and fictional locations (and their overlaps), then, importantly feed
into the aesthetic of Ghost Box and some of its associates. Nick Couldry has argued that
any journey to a distant location or person in the media can potentially be a media
pilgrimage (77); through the creation of music inspired by a number of fictional
spaces, as well as other design texts produced by the label, Ghost Box and other
hauntological artists are engaged in mediated media pilgrimages, summoning up
forgotten, imaginary, and occult influences. Locations permeate images and titles of
many hauntological artists, including, most prominently, the Belbury Polys name,
some of its titles (e.g. The Moonlawn, Wetland, Pans Garden, and the album The
Willows, named after an Algernon Blackwood story), its covers (the cover of Farmers
Angle features the English countryside, the cover of From An Ancient Star features
a megalith), and the field guide to the fictional town Belbury found within the CD of
The Owls Map; and The Caretakers album Selected Memories From the Haunted
Ballroom, which is inspired by the ballroom scene in The Shining (Kubrick, 1980).
Ghost Box, and many figures it has forged links with, connect to a form of alternative
heritage through the types of culture and art referred to (most of which are relatively
obscure, though some certainly more than others) and through connections to both
psychogeography and folklore. This, as noted, is a quite self-conscious defamiliarization of more conservative notions of heritage: whereas that form of heritage generally
celebrates the past as a safe haven, Ghost Box emphasizes the more eerie, unsettling
vestiges of cultural history; whereas that mode of heritage vilified post-war Brutalist
architecture, Ghost Box includes it as another inspirational touchstone.
16
J. Sexton
Uncanniness and Dualisms

The creation of an aesthetic universe in which rural landscapes mix freely with
modernist, post-war urban environments may at first sight seem to be a rather odd
combination. Yet it is in keeping with the labels tendency to intermix references that
may at first sight appear to be strange bedfellows. The Ghost Box aesthetic involves the
juxtaposition of horror and the seemingly more prosaic realms of informational
programming, as well as of folk traditions and analogue electronics, and, less saliently,
of analogue and digital technologies. In one sense, these juxtapositions are part of a
strategy aimed at creating a sense of uncanniness; in a broader sense, links are being
made between these seemingly dissimilar reference points.
Freud wrote in a widely cited article on the uncanny that an uncanny experience
occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more
revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted
seem once more to be confirmed. The uncanny experience relies on something
strange occurring amid the familiar; it is when things largely seem normal but
something is not quite right. The not quite right effect is produced by the sudden
revival of either repressed or surmounted knowledge as it re-asserts itself; an example
of the former is when a mislaid memory suddenly reappears and produces the
uncanny feeling of deja` vu; an example of the latter is if we momentarily interpret
inanimate objects as alive, a belief which has to be produced through the reversion to
so-called primitive beliefs about reality.
The employment of less obviously occult-related signifiers within the Ghost
Box aesthetic, then, can be considered in one sense to be a key component in creating
an uncanny environment. The more prosaic signifiers, such as public service
broadcasting and post-war concrete edifices, are themselves possible uncanny triggers,
containing the potential to revivify dormant memories. They are also, through being
juxtaposed with an array of more overtly eldritch references, posited as uncanny:
though they may on the surface represent the everyday, they may nonetheless indicate
unease. Jon Brooks of the Advisory Circle has touched upon the rather spooky nature
of public information films, for example: There are so many appealing aspects to
Public Information Films. Obviously, there is the overall authoritative aura they
create. Theres a cosy, safe dont worry, well look out for you thing going on in a lot
of them, but always a more disturbing undercurrent running in parallel (Stannard).
This was particularly the case with some of the films made to publicize health and
safety. Certain films, such as Lonely Water (Grant, 1973), became noted for their eerie,
unsettling atmosphere: narrated by Donald Pleasance (as the spirit of dark and lonely
water) and featuring foggy, gothic shots of swampy territory, it demonstrated how
public information films could unsettle through smuggling horror-influenced
material into programming aimed at children.
Through the juxtaposition of an array of references, links are posited between
properties that appear disparate on first glance. The label has contended, for example, that
connections can be made between the electronic experimentation of the Radiophonic
17
Workshop and folk music, contrary to their apparent differences. House and Jupp have
noted in an interview that David Cain from the Workshop studied medieval music and
also made a dark folky electronic album called The Seasons, while also noting that
a few of Paddy Kingslands [another Workshop member] arrangements even bring to
mind Pentangle, a British folk rock band active in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Anon.).
By being placed within a unified aesthetic framework, these apparently dissimilar
references are uncannily connected, made strange through their interrelationships.
It is, perhaps, the digital/analogue dualism that most interestingly feeds into the
Ghost Box aesthetic and opens up a number of issues. Whilst there is a marked
preference for analogue technologies running through Ghost Box and some of its
hauntological associates, this is not a form of analogue fetishism that automatically
leads to a rejection of the digital. Ghost Box has, for example, released nearly all of its
music in digital format (on CD and digital download); it is only recently that it has
released anything on vinyl.4 Many of the labels acts also employ digital technologies in
the construction of their music; Jim Jupps Belbury Poly, for example, uses a number of
analogue synthesizers to make his music but combines these with digital tools; Julian
Houses the Focus Group uses a number of sampled analogue sounds and digitally
processes them. The analogue/digital dualism has been noted by Ghost Box as an
important part of its aesthetic, a dualism which it once again plays upon and attempts
to blur. House has stated that Ghost Box likes to confuse the boundaries between
analogue and digital and links this to a further dualism between virtual and concrete
spaces: I think its to do with the space between what happens in the computer and
what happens outside of it: the recording of space, real reverb/room sound and the
virtual space on the hard drive. Theyre like different dimensions (Anon.).
The distinction between real space and virtual space links to the importance
of recording within the Ghost Box aesthetic, a process that itself intertwines
with haunting and uncanniness. As Barry Curtis has written, Ghosts, and the ways
in which they trouble categories and shape themselves in confrontations, have
always been implicated in the use of media, from the ectoplasmic traces on
photographic plates to the taps and static that have been the secret sharers of familiar
telecommunications (122). Ghost Box and associated hauntologists tend to reflect
on this haunted nature of media, in both analogue and digital form. The name Ghost
Box itself is a reference to television and its own uncanny nature, and this is an issue
that has accompanied the introduction of many new technologies, as has been
illustrated by Jeffrey Sconce, who writes:
Sound and image without material substance, the electronically mediated worlds of
telecommunications often evoke the supernatural by creating virtual beings that
appear to have no physical form. By bringing this spectral world into the home, the
TV set in particular can take on the appearance of a haunted apparatus. (4)
Ghost Box celebrates haunted media in a double sense: first, most of the cultural work
it references relates to horror and the supernatural; second, it posits media as haunted,
18
J. Sexton
through the ability to rematerialize convincing illusions of people, objects, etc. that
have occurred elsewhere (an uncanny, phantasmal materialization).
Ghosts in media are often associated with interference: imperfect television
reception through analogue transmission often resulted in ghosting, in which a
replica of the television image becomes superimposed in a slightly offset position;
whilst in the realm of audio recording, degradation of analogue tape produces an
aging effect. Noise produced by the media recording or transmission, then, has
often been associated with hauntings from unwanted visitors. These visitors are often
the results of previous use and can be partly considered as the ghostly presences of
such use. As Hilderbrand has noted in discussing the degradation of analogue video
cassettes, such effects can be considered indexical evidence of use and duration
through time. Here the technology becomes a text, and such recordings become
historical records of audiences interactions with the media objects (15).
With the introduction of digital media, many of these ghostly elements were thought
to have been overcome: Anne Friedberg has noted how Phillips advertised its early
compact disc players with the slogan perfect sound forever, but it wasnt long before
people realized that CDs did contain their own particular degradation features, such as
the skips created by damaged surface areas (33). And, with the increasing use of digital
files such as MP3s being used to play music, the effects of compression become another
factor to consider in assessing the overall quality of media sounds and images. With the
omnipresence of digital media, so-called old media nevertheless refuse to die as they are
adopted by niche groups who value their qualities in contrast to digital media. Often
the qualities may be expressed as being somehow more human and warm than the
cold and soulless nature of digital media, particularly amongst selected champions
of analogue audio media. Not only vinyl records, but even audio cassetteswhich had
long been maligned for their sound qualityhave become preferred over digital media
formats by a number of people (Sonic Youths Thurston Moore has claimed that he only
listens to music on audio cassette). In relation to the newer formats, particularly virtual
formats, older media take on more personal qualities, whether through their less massproduced nature, their physical nature (the 12 vinyl record and sleeve constituting a
very physical object, or the personal mixtape as expressive of home-made devotion), or
the actual quality of sounds associated with them.
The warmth and human associations that various analogue media have accrued
may also relate to their ghostly nature: if digital media are marked by absence of
humanity, for example, then they are perhaps capable not so much of producing
ghosts as they are of producing a form of soulless interference. Scottish duo Boards
of Canadaan ambient electronic act sometimes cited as important precursors to
hauntology (Reynolds, Society; Harper)have claimed that the ghostly nature of
analogue is one of the reasons they favor using such equipment for the production of
music. Largely (though not totally) eschewing digital software, Boards of Canada go
to great lengths to create an aged feel to their music through the use (and abuse) of
vintage equipment. Mike Sandison from Boards of Canada thus explains:.
19
. . . for us a lot of the time, were not trying to capture how perfect something
might have been at its inception, but more how it would sound now after years of
use. Of course, you cant instantly make a song into something chronologically
aged, so thats where a lot of our work goes, into finding ways of artificially
imprinting an aged, nostalgic feel. (Hutton)
This is achieved through various methods, including recording musical samples on

low-quality tape machines (sometimes re-recording onto tape again), and other forms
of lo-fi experimentation.
Ghost Boxs aesthetic procedures, whilst certainly drawing on the uncanny
dimensions of analogue media, do not discount digital technologies from having
their own ghostly features, and instead foreground the intermixing of analogue and
digital. If we think of analogue and digital in terms of the haunting metaphor, then it is
possible to argue that digital media from their outset were haunted by the specter of
analogue: musical compact discs, laserdiscs, and DVDs, for example, were originally
promoted as offering something superior to analogue sound. Their quality was posited
as superior to their analogue counterparts through the removal of interference, and their
overall identity was therefore informed by analogue (it was only through being
positioned in relation to analogue media that the particular qualities of digital media
were established). A wealth of early advertisements and other discourses promoting
digital media were engaged in a strategy that attempted to stress the superiority of digital
and gradually kill off analogue. Yet this did not happen; whilst digital technologies have
largely replaced analogue technologies in a range of media production and playback
consumables, analogue has not completely died (further, digital technologies are used to
share and distribute greater amounts of older material, whether this is newly discovered
or reissued/remastered material). Whilst digital consumables were promoted and largely
embraced, analogue technologies themselves began to acquire further values and an
overall identity in contradistinction to the new digital order. Thus, warmth and
humanness were values which began to become widespread in the identity of analogue
at the point when digital technologies began to dominate within the consumer market,
values which for some held more sway than the consumer-fuelled idea of interference
and noise (such as tape hiss, noise bars, vinyl pops, etc.). Analogue is now a steady, albeit
minor, presence within the consumer market, kept alive by its defenders, who may also
prefer its surrounding markets and communities as attractive alternatives to the larger
mass-consumer market. For others, analogue forms of media may be considered
increasingly antiquated, relics of a dying age supported by quaint nostalgists.
Conclusion
Whilst I would argue that Ghost Box is a label/project that speculates on the ways in
which analogue and digital intermix in the current media climate, I would like to
conclude this article by considering two conceptsnostalgia and pastichewhich
have often been linked to musical hauntology but in ways that tend to distance the
artists involved from such concepts. This is perhaps rooted in the ways that this
20
J. Sexton
movement has been lauded in publications that tend to denigrate pastiche and nostalgia
as suspect practices. Critics and broader publications covering and praising
hauntologyfor example, Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher, the Wire, the Guardian,
Fact Magazineare often left-leaning in terms of their political/cultural perspectives,
and nostalgia in particular has often been regarded as a conservative notion. When the
concept has been broached, it has often been refused or deflected. Thus, Jon Brooks (of
the Advisory Circle) claims that when he first listened to Ghost Box material, what he
heard was not pastiche or a simplistic nostalgic parody of what had gone before, rather
it was a representation of futures which never materialised (Stannard). Mark Fisher,
meanwhile, has argued that because many hauntological artists openly address
nostalgia in their work, they do not belong to the nostalgia mode that he considers
indicative of postmodernism.
I think Fishers contention can be accepted up to a point: certainly, self-conscious
references to the process of nostalgia should not be conflated with nostalgia per se.
However, there is for me too neat a distinction being drawn between hauntology and
postmodernist nostalgia here. Fisher uses postmodernism as an example of negative
nostalgiaof a crash-and-grab retro mindset which actually conceals its nostalgic
operations and instead posits a kind of end of history timelessness (where all
temporal moments collapse into the present). Yet Fisher has to rely on a very reductive
notion of postmodernism in order to support this distinction, which collapses the
variegated discourses associated with the concept in a manner that is too conveniently
tidy. In actual fact, some notable postmodernist interrogations of art do not quite tally
with his contention that postmodern art conceals its nostalgic operations; Rosalind
Krauss has argued, for example, that postmodernist art tends to foreground its
antecedents much more saliently than modernist art, which, instead, tended to
downplay its referents in order to promote its own uniqueness (161 63). Further,
Fisher uses a rather suspect example to support his broader point, an example
borrowed from Frederic Jamesons work on postmodernism. Contrasting hauntologys
speculations on nostalgia with the nostalgia mode, Fisher refers to Jamesons claims
that Body Heat is a postmodernist text because while the film engages in pasticheby
setting the film in the modern day but clearly made according to formal conventions
of 40s noirthe film disavows its temporal disjunctures. In this sense, hauntology
escapes the taint of nostalgia because it signposts its intentions, and because those
intentions are declared as being about nostalgia rather than actually indulging in
nostalgia. Pastiche itself, though, according to Dyer, needs to be recognized as such: it
is, unlike related practices such as forgery or plagiarism, textually marked imitation
(23). Body Heat (Kasdan, 1981), in this sense, should not be thought of as a film that
disavowed its nostalgic mode; its reception by critics and academics certainly would
attest to its pastiche exercises being a visible aspect of its identity. Dyer claims that
what neo-noir imitates is not straightforwardly noir but the memory of noir, a
memory that may be inaccurate or selective (124). This doesnt actually sound
remarkably different from the strategies of some of the hauntologists.
21
Fisher is one of the few critics who have tackled these notions in detail, but
unsurprisingly he distances the hauntologists from them because of their negative
values. However, nostalgia itselfas many critics have arguedis not necessarily
conservative and can actually be mobilized for progressive purposes. Stuart Tannock
has argued that nostalgia responds to a diversity of personal needs and political
desires. Nostalgic narratives may embody any number of different visions, values, and
ideals. And, as a cultural resource or strategy, nostalgia may be put to use in a variety
of ways (454). He notes, for example, the connection between nostalgia and struggles
for change which were evident in the seventeenth-century Diggers and the Land
Chartists (455). Pastiche, meanwhile, has turned into a suspect concept amongst leftwing theorists who often consider it a postmodern retreat from politics and a revelling
in consumer culture. This, once again, is a rather limited conception of pastiche (one
very much associated with Jamesons analysis). Even when Simon Reynolds mentions
pastiche in relation to hauntology, he goes on to distinguish it from the kind of
pastiche perceived as symptomatic of a more straightforward retro-culture, in that
hauntology doesnt leach off the past but allows the past to leak into it, to pass
through in an almost mediumistic way (Reynolds, Society 32).
Yet Ghost Box and other hauntologists are undoubtedly involved in strategies of
nostalgia and pastiche, and in this sense their output is surely a lot closer to a retro
aestheticwhat many critics have dubbed an uninspired retreading of the pastthan
it has been credited with. I would contend, however, that critics have been led to
overlook this point by the overall framework within which the music has been
packaged and positioned, in addition to the values attached to the recurrent references
cited. Ghost Box, for example, offers a form of heritage and nostalgia that is very
much associated with alternative values (particularly paganism, psychogeography and
public education) and packages its releases carefully in order to construct psychic
heterotopias. And if not all of the music that Ghost Box releases can be termed
pastiche, some of itselected output from the Advisory Circle and Belbury Poly in
particularcertainly can. Yet this is a mode of pastiche that can be largely
differentiated from other forms through its ransacking of generally obscure sources. It
is, therefore, not so much the absence of pastiche and nostalgia that typifies the label
and its general critical acclaim, but rather the displacing of these concepts through
strategies of selectivity and framing. The selection of particular types of music (a large
amount of it not widely known), and the framing of the music through design and
discourse, creates links to texts and values generally favored within the critical
communities embracing hauntology as a movement. Thus, similar to the way in
which Ghost Box can be seen as engaging in alternative forms of heritage, it can also be
considered to be practicing alternative forms of nostalgia and pastiche.
Notes
[1] Whilst some related organizations referred to here may be marked as English, I will myself
more broadly refer to this movement as British. Even if a sense of Englishness is thought to
pervade much of the cultural formation I investigate, there are important non-English aspects
22
J. Sexton
which feed into it. Both co-founders of Ghost Box, for example, come from South Wales, as
does one of their literary touchstones, Arthur Machen. The Scottish region in which Hardys
The Wicker Man was filmed, is also an important reference point for many within this culture.
[2] As such, I will not analyze a number of American artists who have also been associated with
this movement/concept, such as Ariel Pinks Haunted Graffiti or James Ferraro (see Keenan).
Keenans overview of this movement does not mention hauntology; he works with the
conceptual phrase hypnagogic pop, but the work of a number of the artists he discusses has
been discussed within the hauntological framework elsewhere, particularly that of Ariel Pink.
[3] It is likely that Jupp, House, and other figures associated with hauntology would have
experienced the work of writers such as Machen and Blackwood through radio plays, an
inspiration that was recently paid homage to in a series of supernatural radio dramas (by
established writers such as Nigel Kneale and Sir Andrew Caldecott, and also contemporary
writers) accompanied by new soundtracks (by artists such as Belbury Poly, Mordant Music, and
Moon Wiring Club). This series was entitled Weird Tales for Winter and was broadcast by
Resonance 104.4 FM between 25 January and 2 February 2010. A second season of Weird Tales for
Winter was broadcast between 29 January and 5 February 2011 (also on Resonance 104.4 FM).
[4] The first Ghost Box vinyl release was an extended re-release of the Advisory Circles Mind How
You Go on 12 vinyl in 2010 and, later in the same year, two 7 singles which are part of a
Study Series were released. More vinyl has been released since, yet Ghost Box has still released
more material in digital form than on vinyl.
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Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. (2nd ed.). London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002. Print.
Discography
The Advisory Circle. Mind How you Go, Ghost Box, 2005.
. Other Channels. Ghost Box, 2008.
. Mind How you Go (Revised Edition), Ghost Box, 2010.
Mount Vernon Arts Lab. The Seance at Hobs Lane, Ghost Box, 2007.
Belbury Poly. The Farmers Angle, Ghost Box, 2004.
. The Willows, Ghost Box, 2004.
. The Owls Map, Ghost Box, 2006.
. From an Ancient Star, Ghost Box, 2009.
. The Farmers Angle (Revised Edition), Ghost Box, 2010.
Broadcast and The Focus Group. Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, Warp, 2009.
The Caretaker. Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, VVM, 1999.
The Focus Group. Sketches and Spells, Ghost Box, 2004.
. Hey Let Loose Your Love, Ghost Box, 2005.
. We Are All Pans People, Ghost Box, 2007.
Videography
Blood on Satans Claw. Haggard, 1971. Film.
Body Heat. Kasdan, 1981. Film.
Distant Voices, Still Lives. Davies, 1988. Film.
London. Keiller, 1994. Film.
24
J. Sexton
London Orbital. Petit and Sinclair, 2002. Film.

Lonely Water. Grant, 1973. Film.
The Long Day Closes. Davies, 1992. Film.
Quatermass and the Pit. Ward Baker, 1967. Film.
Radio On. Petit, 1980. Film.
Robinson in Space. Keiller, 1997. Film.
The Shining. Kubrick, 1980. Film.
Small Faces. MacKinnon, 1996. Film.
The Wicker Man. Hardy, 1973. Film.
Witchfinder General. Reeves, 1968. Film.
Notes on Contributor
Dr Jamie Sexton is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria
University, UK. His publications include an edited work, Music, Sound and
Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual (2007), and Cult Cinema: An Introduction
(co-authored with Ernest Mathijs, 2011).

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