Essays

What we Mean at Hwael When We Say Hauntology

Ask what hauntology sounds like and you'll be told: analogue synths, Ghost Box, a lost English 1973. But that's a dialect, not the language. From Bryars's looped dead man to an empty church to Grouper's vapour-voice — a manifesto for hauntology as the aesthetics of the threshold.

A homeless man, name unknown, once sang thirteen bars of a religious song into a documentary microphone on a London street near Waterloo. He died before anything came of it.

In 1971 Gavin Bryars found the fragment, noticed it looped cleanly and sat in tune with his piano, and began, very slowly, to build an orchestra around it. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet is that loop: the dead man's voice coming round and round while strings gather over it like weather that will not break. Nothing resolves. He never finishes, and he is never allowed to stop.

I came to it by accident, on a late radio programme whose presenters, I think, had no idea what they were playing. For a while I took it for what it pretends to be: a scratchy church tape of some old gospel singer, caught mid-hymn. Only as the strings began to rise under him, too composed, arriving from somewhere the voice could never have come from, did I realise the two were strangers. The man singing and the hand arranging him had never met and never could: one had been dead for years while the other slowly built a small cathedral around his thirteen bars. It unsettled me more than the sadness of the song did. It is one of the most haunted records ever made, and there is not a synthesiser anywhere on it. It was made two decades before anyone thought to call such a thing hauntology.

I start here because the word has been quietly narrowed. Ask what hauntology sounds like and you'll be told: analogue synthesisers, library music, the Radiophonic Workshop, Ghost Box, a very English nostalgia for the public-information films of a lost 1973. That music is real and often wonderful. But it is a dialect. Not the language. Treating it as the whole has shrunk a philosophy into a genre. At Hwael we use the word a little differently, closer, we think, to where it began. So it's worth saying plainly what we mean.

I. The Revenant

Jacques Derrida coined hantologie in Spectres de Marx (1993), a pun on ontologie. Not the study of what is. The study of what haunts, the spectre that is neither present nor absent, that returns and will not be laid to rest. The ghost is the figure of the threshold. It stands exactly where the categories give way, and to be haunted is to be held at a border you can neither cross nor leave.

Barthes had already found the same thing in the photograph. Every photograph, he wrote, carries a ça-a-été, a "that-has-been," and is therefore a small spectre: an image of a moment that is over and is somehow still here, looking back at you. A recording is a photograph of a sound. Bryars's man is dead; the record is his that-has-been, still singing. This is what hauntology is at root, the aesthetics of the trace, of a presence that is also an absence. A condition, long before it is a style.

II. The English Dialect

What Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds did, in the mid-2000s, was give that condition one brilliant, specific reading. For Fisher the ghost was the lost future, the tomorrows post-war Britain was promised and never handed, surviving now as the crackle of old media. The phrase he used for it, "the slow cancellation of the future," he took from Franco "Bifo" Berardi and made the title of his own key essay. The signifiers followed. The decayed tape, the sad synthesiser, the sleeve got up to look like a defunct government agency. Ghost Box built a whole fictional England out of it, and it was a real achievement.

Let there be no misunderstanding here. The synthesiser and the worn tape are wholly hauntological; Ghost Box is no less a ghost than Grouper. The point isn't that this music is false, only that it is one province of a much larger country, and we've been handed it as the whole map. Even Reynolds, who named the strand, called it "more a flavour or atmosphere than a style."

And it is a northern province in most senses, technological and national in its instincts, with a certain coolness built into the sound itself. Even its stranger corners stay close to the medium: Position Normal's charity-shop collages are ghosts made from second-hand junk rather than synth patches, but they are still made from things. The lost future is one shape the spectre can take. By now it is the assumed one, and when a word comes to mean only its most famous example, the word loses most of its reach.

III. A Hauntology of the Limen

Widen it again and the family turns out to be enormous. Áine O'Dwyer spent Saturday mornings playing the pipe organ of a London church while the cleaners worked around her; the whoosh of the vacuum, a child's laugh, the echo of the empty nave all leaked onto the tape. Music for Church Cleaners is haunted not by a lost future but by a present absence: the congregation that isn't there, the sacred building overheard doing nothing in particular. Philip Jeck made whole records out of worn vinyl and locked grooves, letting the run-out — the point where the music stops and the object keeps turning — become the piece. None of this is Ghost Box. All of it is the ghost at the threshold.

It is also, I think, the current under everything we write about here. It runs through Grouper's voice going to vapour inside its own reverb, present and impossible to hold. It runs through anemoia, the homesickness for a past you never lived, which is distance with no home left to return to. And it runs through scialbìa, the southern ghost with flesh and sweat on it, the embalmed who keep talking: a hauntology of matter rather than of media. What holds these together is not a synthesiser or a decade. It is the limen, the thin line where you can no longer tell whether you are still here or already gone.

Hauntology, for us, is any music that keeps you on that line. Not music that describes a ghost, but music that is one — that holds you between presence and absence, the living voice and the recorded dead. It doesn't need old synthesisers. It needs a threshold, and the nerve to stand on it without stepping over.

The Ghost Box lineage stays a cousin, and we'll visit gladly whenever a record earns it. But it's a cousin, not the house. The house is older and stranger than that: a homeless man singing thirteen bars forever, a church cleaning itself, a voice thinning into air at the end of a song. That is the ghost we mean.

Editorial Note

The definition proposed here is intentionally broader than the musical usage that developed in Britain during the mid-2000s. Jacques Derrida’s hauntology did not originally name a genre, an instrumentation or a visual style. It described a disturbance in presence: the return of something that can be neither wholly present nor conclusively absent. Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds later gave that disturbance an influential musical and historical form, connecting it with lost futures, decaying media and the unrealised promises of post-war Britain.

Hwael treats that British electronic tradition as a major dialect of hauntological art rather than its complete territory. The term is used here for works in which an absence remains materially active: a recorded voice outliving its unidentified singer, an emptied ritual still audible in a building, a damaged medium carrying traces of earlier use, or a landscape retaining forms of life and memory no longer immediately visible.

The comparison with Roland Barthes is interpretative. Barthes’s ça-a-été concerns the photograph’s testimony that its subject once stood before the camera; this essay extends that logic to recorded sound. It does not claim that Barthes himself developed a theory of musical hauntology.

Last revised: July 2026