There have been many poetic attempts to describe the niche musical genre of hauntology that evokes themes of, among others, atemporality, impermanence, cultural memory decay, and the crystallization of selfhood. Here’s mine: hauntology is an aesthetic that pulls from the pool of our cultural subconscious the hypnotizing rusted trinkets our grandparents once prized above all other possessions.

My sense of things may not align perfectly with yours (like you I have my own oasis of understanding for such amorphous ideas like music genres), and neither have I listened to every artist that could be lumped into hauntology. Nor am I a music scholar, philosopher, or living ghost (the last one’s debatable)—I’m just an experimental music nerd. Nonetheless, I’m writing this in light of the “death” of James Leyland Kirby’s musical alter ego The Caretaker, who released (and was released from) Stage 6 of Alzheimer’s the other week. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll explain a little further down.

First, forgive me if you’ve read this part before. The concept of hauntology came from French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1993 as a mashup of Marx’s spectre (as in A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism) and the word ontology. Thus creating a portmanteau described by Colin Davis as “replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.” The discussion of hauntology doesn’t often have much to do with communism itself, as the origin of the word might suggest, but has become more about transgenerational communication and our collective fixation on “undead media” at this, the end of history.

There’s been much said about hauntology in literature, philosophy, and film, but I’m going to focus primarily on musicians like William Basinski and The Caretaker who seem to have ghosts from the radio age jamming up their machines. Basinski’s Disintegration Loops was perhaps my first conscious awareness of hauntology as a music genre, though I had been a fan of Boards of Canada for years before I even heard Basinski’s name (I tend to think of them as “hauntology-lite” these days).

A basic description of Disintegration Loops from Ian Simmons:

In late 2001, he was reviewing old tapes and came across a pastoral composition from 1982 which he had completely forgotten about. Intending to transfer it to digital format for preservation, he set the old tapes running, but time is not kind to magnetic tape and decay had fatally undermined their stability. As they played, fragments of iron oxide spalled off the tape’s surface and became dust, gradually, but progressively, breaking down the music into a ghost of its former self, becoming ever more fragmented as the recording progressed.

The Legend of the Loops says that Basinski was playing the piece for his friends in his New York apartment in 2001 as the planes flew into the World Trade Center. They sat listening as it mechanically repeated the same muted, mournful wails over and over as American ghosts poured from the devastation in front of them. In 2011, it was performed with a live orchestra at the Met as part of the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.

So this was my, and many people’s, first encounter with hauntology in a music context. While much of his other work is also based on loops, I don’t think it all fits neatly into the genre. Some of it is too optimistic. But hearing Disintegration Loops again, I’m reminded of the Brazilian/Portuguese idea of saudade, but where I tend to associate the longing of saudade with a flavor of erotic or passionate love, hauntological music has a quality of mourning for something you love, but maybe never even knew, that is still superficially here.

This brings us to the conceptual flower bed James Kirby planted in the retirement home of our minds as The Caretaker. In 1999, he released a trio of albums that treated old ballroom pop music from the 1920’s and 30’s to a little extra crackling, echo, reverb, stretching, and provided a dose of rhetorical support for the idea of it all. For nearly 20 years he built a body of work swirling with the eidolons of The Greatest Generation (this one is probably my favorite of that era), and then, in 2016, he announced he was going to deconstruct all of it:

‘Everywhere at the end of time’ is a new and finite series exploring dementia, its advance and its totality.

Featuring the sounds from the journey The Caretaker will make after being diagnosed as having early onset dementia.

Each stage will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration. Progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness.

Viewing dementia as a series of stages can be a useful way to understand the illness, but it is important to realise that this only provides a rough guide to the progress of the condition.

Drawing on a recorded history of 20 years of recollected memories this is one final journey and study into recreating the progression of dementia through sound.

Let’s stop here for a moment to consider some things I’ve seen others reference, but never seem to take to any useful conclusions. Diagnosing an alter ego with dementia is fraught. I don’t think it quite falls under the category of “appropriation,” but there is a risk Kirby runs of essentializing the experience of dementia. The whole concept of Everywhere at the end of time is designed to approximate someone else’s lived experience without feeling the actual pain of it in exchange for cultural capital (and maybe he’s made some actual money off it all too). And it’s further complicated by the fact that those who have dementia cannot exactly “approve” or “disapprove.” Not that everyone in that camp would have the same opinion.

Given the jaunty nature of the early releases of Everywhere at the end of time (the later ones are a different story), it was easy to read the project as a romanticization of a devastating illness that is already so difficult to emotionally comprehend. But I don’t think Kirby comes from a place of ill will or even uncriticality. The disease in question is just that: a disease that some of us may very well experience in the future. It would not be fair to say, for example, “Imagine if Kirby had diagnosed his musical alter ego with Autism and proceeded to release music that he thinks an Autistic person would make,” which, of course, would be indefensible. But whereas Autism is not a disease, Alzheimer’s is, and has progressive stages with distinct symptoms whose experiences can be estimated without erasing the voices of those who experience it.

So, in a way, the project could be seen as an aesthetic preparation for a decidedly non-aesthetic, hostile struggle for our own minds any one of us could end up fighting. My own useless conclusion to this convoluted thought then is that there is a line in here somewhere, and Kirby is probably walking on it. Regardless, I still find the project conceptually rife, and would also love if someone could enlighten us further to the knottier politics haunting The Caretaker’s fabricated descent into dementia.

Now that that part is sitting uncomfortably on the table, I wanted to return to the idea of cultural memory that I think is crucial to The Caretaker and hauntology in general. With the perfect prosthetic memory of the internet, we have unfortunately become constitutionally unable to lose things. It is now just a matter of which appendages of the cultural body are kept relevant, strong, healthy, and profitable, and which ones we are forced to watch as they decay in front of us but never fully disappear. Hauntology is concerned with the latter.

I think this is why the source material of much hauntology music is so compelling. The reconstructed 78’s of The Caretaker evoke an era that is rapidly slipping from living memory, but from the clutches of our grubby data-claws they will never escape. So as genres like hauntology, vaporwave, classic rock revival, and those fucking endless superhero movie remakes play the willing hosts to the ghosts of our past, our collective dyschronia deepens. (Here is a fun and slightly unhinged blog post I found welcoming us to the porridge of time). And as our time becomes more and more incomprehensible, maybe all we want to do is sit in a chair by the window listening to the music of our formative years on loop.

Like I said, though, I’m writing this with inspiration from the metaphorical death of The Caretaker, which I think has served as a rather tidy, closed-circle study of the larger cultural phenomenon here. Stage 6, entitled Everywhere, an empty bliss released with this statement:

One last chance to raise a charged glass for those we lost along the way, for all the works, for the ghosts from our past, for our uncertain future, and for The Caretaker.

This final installment is not exactly what you would call a victory lap for The Caretaker. It’s true to concept: as a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient, Everywhere, an empty bliss is barely even there some of the time. It’s simultaneously comforting and devastating. Accurately described in this review as “panic ambience.” The lilting recollections of glory days are completely gone by now, replaced with bare confusion, hissing and droning that will not relent. There’s no sense, as in earlier Stages, that the song is trying to remember how it’s supposed to go. It doesn’t even remember that there is a song anymore. And then, 15 minutes into the final piece titled Place in the world fades away, after the trauma of the previous 70 minutes of cavernous noise, we are gifted a final, tattered recollection of who The Caretaker was in the form of a melodic voice. In the words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, une petite victoire de l’Amour sur la Mort. A small victory of Love over Death.

The Caretaker may be dead, but I’m confident that spectropolitics and the deaths of our beloved hyperobjects will remain a subject of experimental music in some form until the end of history consumes us all.

There are more thoughts out there on this topic, especially concerning the literary and philosophical branches of hauntology that I would love to research more, so if you have any sources or thoughts of your own please let me know!