What We Mean at Hwael When We Say Hauntology

A homeless man, name unknown, once sang a hymn into a documentary microphone somewhere around Waterloo in London. He died before he could hear what was done with thirteen bars of it.

In 1971 Gavin Bryars found the fragment among the outtakes of a film about people living rough, noticed that it made an effective loop 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. Bryars liked to tell how he left the loop running in a room at the art school where he taught and came back to find the place unusually subdued, someone quietly weeping.

I came to it by accident, on a late-night radio programme whose presenters, I suspect, 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 rose 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 died without hearing the small cathedral the other built round his thirteen bars. That unsettled me more than the sadness of the song. It is one of the most haunted records ever made, there is not a synthesiser anywhere on it, and it was made long 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 will be told: analogue synthesisers, library music, the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, Ghost Box, a very English nostalgia for the public-information films of a lost 1973. That music is real and often wonderful, and it is one dialect of a larger language. Taking it for the whole has shrunk a philosophy into a genre. At Hwael we use the word more widely, closer, we think, to where it began, so it is worth saying plainly what we mean.

I. The revenant

Jacques Derrida coined hantologie in Spectres de Marx (1993), a pun on ontologie: in place of the study of what is, a study of what haunts, the spectre that is neither present nor absent and returns without being 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 found the same thing in the photograph. Every photograph, he wrote in La Chambre claire, carries a ça-a-été, a "that-has-been", and is therefore a small spectre, an image of a moment that is over and somehow still here, looking back.

A recording is a photograph of a sound.

Bryars's man is dead, and the record is his that-has-been, still singing. At root hauntology is an aesthetics of the trace, of a presence that is also an absence: it was a condition long before it became a style. Bryars found his loop twenty-two years before Derrida's book. In 1993, the year it appeared, he recorded the piece again, and for the last twenty minutes or so Tom Waits sings alongside the man, a living voice keeping company with a dead one. By the end only Waits is left singing.

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 had been promised and never given, surviving as the crackle of old media. He took the phrase "the slow cancellation of the future" from Franco "Bifo" Berardi and made it the title of one of his key essays. The signifiers followed: decayed tape, sad synthesisers, sleeves dressed up as the output of a defunct government agency. The label Ghost Box built a whole fictional England from them, and it was a real achievement.

The synthesiser and the worn tape are wholly hauntological, and Ghost Box is as haunted as Grouper. This music is one province of a much larger country, and we have been handed it as the whole map. Even Reynolds, who helped name the strand, called it more a flavour or atmosphere than a style.

It is a northern province in most senses, technological and national in its instincts, with a coolness built into the sound. Even its stranger corners stay close to the medium: Position Normal's charity-shop collages are ghosts made from second-hand junk, and the junk is still the point. By now the lost future is the ghost people expect.

III. A hauntology of the limen

Widen the word again and the family turns out to be enormous. Áine O'Dwyer played the pipe organ of a London church while the cleaners worked around her, and the vacuum, children's voices and the echo of the nave all leaked onto the tape. Music for Church Cleaners is haunted by a present absence, the congregation that is not there, a sacred building overheard doing nothing in particular. Philip Jeck made whole records from worn vinyl and from locked grooves he cut himself with tape, glue and a scalpel, so that the point where the music stops and the object keeps turning became the piece. None of this would pass for Ghost Box.

This is also the current under most of what we write about here. It runs through Grouper's voice turning to vapour inside its own reverb, present and impossible to hold. It runs through anemoia, homesickness for a past you never lived through, distance with no home 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 where the English strand has one of media. What holds these together 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. Old synthesisers are optional. The nerve to stand on a threshold without stepping over is harder to come by.

The Ghost Box lineage stays a cousin, and we will visit gladly whenever a record earns it. The house is older and stranger: a homeless man singing thirteen bars for ever, a church cleaning itself, a voice thinning into air at the end of a song.

Last revised: July 2026