The Advisory Circle - Ways of Seeing (2018)
–Dziga Vertov
What the hell is Hauntology music? I had no idea this genre existed, although it appears I’d been loitering in its neighborhood for years. As it happens, the Hauntology moniker is often applied retroactively, e.g. bands like the brilliant Boards of Canada, who have been ex post facto shoved under the Hauntology umbrella along with a dozen other sub-genres. But what is it, really? Is it ghost music? Spooky, ambient sounds from a parallel world? Oblong drones I’d never have the patience to listen to? Turns out, most of this is correct! Kind of.
It turns out Hauntology is some pretty heady stuff! The term takes from the 20th Century French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and specifically his writings on Marxism. The core idea of Hauntology, as it relates to art and music, is that the present is haunted by the spectre of the past’s lost futures. What the hell does that even mean? The idea is of a past longing for a utopian future that expired before it arrived, leaving us unfulfilled, melancholic, and feeling like we somehow missed the departure time for our planet’s spaceship that was supposed to whisk us off to an idealized future. It’s sad sci-fi, an exercise in nostalgia for a time that didn't actually happen, played back through the hiss of decaying tape, vinyl pops and crackles, and a patchwork looping and sampling of things past AND future. Hence, Haunt-ology.
Fascinating stuff! But really, we’ve seen this face before--40 or so years ago in fact. Anyone familiar with any number of leftfield British, French or Italian Library music labels from the 1980s, like Bruton, Monique Music Library, Sonimage or Telemusic will immediately be struck (or dare I say, haunted!) by how curiously many Hauntology recordings sound like a 1980’s music library record, filled with excerpts that are clearly inspired by, or borrow directly from public information films, corporate training videos and documentaries from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for example. Many tracks sound like they could be long lost tracks from a 1982 Trevor Bastow-led Bruton Music session about the futuristic rise of computers in the year 2000, or a theme for a 1970s BBC public announcement on civil defence that aired at 3 AM every Sunday across the British Isles.
As for the album in question, The Advisory Circle is an alias for the English musician, Cate Brooks. Her Ways of Seeing embraces these concepts and builds the album’s narrative loosely around Dziga Vertov’s ideas about the “cinematic eye” and also John Berger’s 1972 essay on visual culture, not coincidentally called, Ways of Seeing, a book I’ve never read, and not a work I can pretend to know very well outside of some brief research for this review. (although I did watch his made-for-TV documentary on the topic, which is available on YouTube, which I’d highly recommend.)
Brook’s Ways of Seeing begins with a 6 second authentic library cue called Ektachrom Logotone setting the stage for the album’s most grooving track, the heavy synth, industrial-machinery jam, Be Seeing You!, which sounds like it’s right out of the early ‘80s Bruton library playbook. Other standout tracks are the nostalgic Flight Capture, with a punchy bassline conjuring the visual inner workings of some mechanical object, perhaps a clock, or a maybe a video accompaniment to a factory line producing metal appliances. All I know is this track, and the entire album, sounds amazing on my stereo. There’s also the futuristic, VHS-inspired video-age-sounding Skyways; the underwater, languid, melodic transcendence of Scuba; and for the cherry on top--the best song on the album--the achingly beautiful, time-ticking, atmospheric, No Way Back, the only song on the album with a lyric, with the repeating refrain of “There’s No Way Back… for you now…”, which perfectly captures the devastation of that forlorn scene of the feeling of missing our planet’s spaceship to some faraway, non-existent utopia. That ship has sailed and there’s nothing you can do about it except sit wistfully and listen to music that imagines that imagined scene.
There are no weak tracks on Ways of Seeing. Even, and I might say especially, the spoken dialogue of track 7, A Mechanical Eye, which recites the Dziga Vertov quote that begins this review, introduces the manifesto that is meant to underscore the music. As the backing synth and effects slowly advance and then deteriorate into some dystopian landscape like in Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, the listener, ideally, realizes the quote’s relevance to the bigger picture, to the grander tale this music wishes to relate. Here, the mostly wordless narrative in Ways of Seeing begins to crystalize and what was just a collection of songs is now impregnated with all sorts of meaning, the kind of meaning that makes you want to Google Dziga Vertov and read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
When Dziga Vertov wrote about the mechanical eye more than 100 years ago, he was referring to the movie camera, and more broadly the cinematic eye, and how this eye reveals the world as only a machine can see it. This cinematic eye is magical, for it can transport us into the past or even the future, or to times unknown or unreal. Vertov’s all-seeing eye takes on even more meaning in this world of AI.
Anemoia is a term that describes a feeling of nostalgia for a time or place you’ve never in fact known or experienced. Ways of Seeing, like much great Hauntology music that aims for the same end, creates a new perception of the world through sound by looking at the past’s future through the metaphorical machine’s lens. The listener is forced to listen, to imagine, to experience a world that is at once familiar and entirely beyond our grasp.
Standout Tracks: The whole album. A must-listen from start to finish.
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