Gola Trance (Screen Test Degradation) Redux

With [] to the likes of Kek, Doppel[], K-punk...
The secret of Hauntology lies in the corners, the liminal frames of the photographs. No, it's not what you're thinking; nothing remotely Ligotti or even The Dark Is Rising about it.

Nothing Green Knowe.

Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of Twenties and Thirties tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now'

It's no surprise that[ ] hid at first because it's only [ ] you suddenly understand where they are coming from. The critics who argue that hauntology is nostalgic are missing the point entirely; this is not at all about looking back fondly but rather the desire to reanimate SOMETHING [ ]; a kind of rose tint in reverse.

To understand, you need to look at the(ir) trainers.

The picture of [ ] (etc) in the June edition of The Wire [ ]; Gola trainers, even now partially hidden.

The Caretaker - what a world, what a life, what a love

Simple, classic styling with a nice bit of suede or canvas, possibly a gum sole here or there and you won't go far wrong. If they look like they've been stolen from a school gym circa 1979 then you've hit the jackpot. We've been campaigning for Gola to introduce some retro "heelies" but we don't think they're gonna deliver the goods. Bottlers.

Yeah, now they've found a way to be cool; even made a virtue of their [ ] (instead of the Adidas Littbarskis you were after). Everyone living in the hinterlands of the 70s and 80s, the upper reaches of the classic 'Ghost Box era' (from Gutterbreakz) will recognise The Gola trance, the slipped disc look [ ]. It's something that would have shaped most kids* around the classic [ ] Steel, Children Of The Stones, Screen Test era and it's not surprising that it's these sounds that find themselves worthy of excavation. By reclaiming these sounds, The Caretaker, The Ghost Box boys et al, can also reclaim the false consciousness that pretended that these [ ] were okay, had something about them, were somehow non-conformist.

((([ ] non-conformity didn't have the same allure then, did it?)))

And this angst runs deep; keeps wrecking dreams way after the individuals have come to terms with their own status, keeps haunting....

If the Anterograde sessions used Kubrick’s The Shining as their conceptual kick-off point, then the Death of Rave series occupies another sort of haunted ballroom. Kirby wiped rave music of its musical signifiers to create something that sounded hollowed-out and spectral, a sort of MDMA-depleted snapshot of a 1990 Leeds warehouse party. And, somewhere along the way, he managed to make ambient music sound cool again.

Cf; Burial - the lost spaces being the music. Burial hid like hell because of the Gola Trance he found himself remembering... you hardly need mdma-depletion...

And anyway ---- MDMA damage is neurologically aligned to STM rather than LTM i.e. the inability to create new memories rather than the loss of exisiting ones... a theme which was mentioned in the liner notes to The Caretaker's first collection but then gradually, ironically, degraded into a whole other beast...

A shame, because anterograde amnesia explain hauntology as a theory better than anything (of course people are looking at reinventing the past; they've forgotten that the present exists - a kind of awful reversal of that John Peel dictum:

"People ask me, ‘what was the best year for music?’ I always say, 'This year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year"

I also get a little twitchy re: the nuum(b)ness that seems to be pervading the blog hallways these days...

And as for (often the same) people wishing for the heady days of the early 1990s... when rave crossfired into jungle.... well, in my experience that's when music also started to reassert it's masculinity again; the early days of Jungle round these parts saw girls heading for the hills while the boys spasticked along to the beats in sweaty, disconcerting waves...

I'm not saying that these boys had difficulties with girls and were grateful when they all left and started listening to happy house and psytrance but...

;)

(((maybe not))) - i'm still stuttering; at the unfortunate My Generation stage of development; can't feel that the past needs to be better because i had Puma and, annoyingly, I still have Puma.... though once they were black and white and now they are pink and purple... the analysis of that shouldn't be too difficult...

Rave didn't die, perhaps?



Yeah, Sapphire and Steel was scary, for a zeitgeist [ ] hugging child [] slow for slow's sake []

We shouldn't be [ ] unknown here (((((((())))))))) isn't ontological, it's just logical; an extension of the way TV worked back then. S and S is creepy and unfinished, a real stare into the abyss... [ ] 3-2-1's arcane symbolic systems meant to be - Levi-Strauss would have struggled with Ted Roger's semiotic ((((())))))

The conceit of The Caretaker's Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole album's worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

Being in a Gola Trance [ ] those savage Green Flashes a while back [ ]

You go round to Ghost Box HQ and look at their trainers, you know what you'll find.

*[]