Origin of 'Hauntology' in Music

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In 2005, the music and culture critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher (RIP) began using the term hauntology — a riff on “ontology” — to describe an emergent genre in UK music, built from archival recordings from post-war England, vinyl crackle, and haunted, elegiac atmospherics. (Think: Burial, The Caretaker, and the eerie catalog of the label Ghost Box.) They borrowed the term from Jacques Derrida, who used it to describe a present haunted by futures that had never arrived; Reynolds and Fisher heard that idea vibrating through a generation of musicians excavating Britain’s cultural memory.

Fisher explored hauntology’s political dimension, rooting the movement in a longing for Britain’s pre-Thatcherite social democratic past and an affection for cultural touchstones like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Brutalist architecture, and films like The Wickerman. Reynolds, meanwhile, mapped its musical lineage—back to ’90s hauntology predecessors like Boards of Canada and Broadcast, and across the pond to J Dilla-era hip-hop and underground movements like freak folk, hypnagogic pop, and chillwave.

A recent CUJO reading group on the topic inspired us to invite Simon—the author of books like Rip It Up and Start Again, Retromania, and Futuromania (listen to our ep about it!)—to help us mark the 20th anniversary of hauntology and explore what it has to teach us about mobilizing the culture of the past in a way that feels meaningful and even forward-looking

Simon joins us to dig into the cultural factors that gave rise to hauntology, the 21st-century fetish for obsolete media, and the differences between hauntology and simple nostalgia or “retro.” We also talk about the pasts that continue to haunt us—from rave culture to Marxism—and he gives us a sneak peek at his forthcoming book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994, arriving in 2026.

Listen to our HAUNTOLOGY PLAYLIST on Apple Music and YouTube

Read more of Simon on hauntology in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past and over at ReynoldsRetro

Keep up with Simon and his writing on blissblog

Follow Simon on X

Additional reading:

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993.

Mark Fisher, “October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder,” 2005.

Simon Reynolds, “Haunted Audio, a/k/a Society of the Spectral: Ghost Box, Mordant Music, and Hauntology,” director’s cut of an article in the November 2006 issue of The Wire.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, chapter 2, 2014.

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