Electronic Nostalgia

By Jane McBride

Graphic by Sofya Rakitina

Electronic music belongs as much to the past as it does to the future. After all, electronica has been around since the early 20th century. (For more on its history, check out Mars by 1980 by David Stubbs.) There’s a deep warmth that comes with listening to past electronica, from Laurie Spiegel’s gentle drones to classic house and garage.

Sounds change with time. Not just production, but perception. Kind of like the wow and flutter effect. What used to sound new and futuristic slowly becomes faded and dated. Is this bad? Not necessarily. 

Think of old sci-fi soundtracks. Theremins and tape loops. Spooky sounds. Things that were new back then have become layered with dust, clanky from lack of use. As production techniques become more svelte, the old sounds become like rusty old trains next to the fast new bullet models. Delia Derbyshire and her colleagues at the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra are formerly futuristic, now retro. 

Think of sampling, something that has been part of electronica since the sound collages of musique concréte. Taking older sounds and using them to make something new creates a sense of déjà vu, even when those samples aren’t immediately recognisable. 93 Til Infinity by Souls of Mischief samples Billy Cobham’s jazz instrumental Heather, twisting and tangling it into the deep, warm background of a hip-hop beat.

In electronic pop, you have Daft Punk and Saint Etienne, taking samples and cues from pop of the past and filtering them through contemporary production techniques. Pop music production these days takes so much from electronica, and has done so for decades now, to the point that nostalgia for pop can also mean nostalgia for electronica.

One of the most cited books on nostalgia in music is Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. I’m ambivalent about this, to be honest. A collection of blog posts and interviews, Ghosts of My Life attempts to combine music journalism and political theory, but the two never quite come together. Fisher’s musings on politics and sociology are a little undeveloped, drawing mostly on trends in popular music to make observations about the role played by nostalgia in contemporary life. It’s an interesting perspective, but one that needs grounding in research and data. The prose is engaging, and Fisher’s description of a live TV performance by the synth-pop band Japan is beautiful, but there’s too much wordplay overall for my taste. 

Fisher should have been a DJ. He shone as a curator. Treat Ghosts of My Life as a playlist or primer. Ghosts of My Life brings together a wide range of references, from spooky old British TV shows to music from all genres, under the umbrella of hauntology, a term popularised by Fisher but coined by Jacques Derrida. Fisher described hauntology as the sense of being haunted by a future that was hoped for, even planned out, but never fulfilled. It’s a bitter nostalgia. You can hear it in the music of Pye Corner Audio and most artists associated with the Ghost Box Label. You can hear it too in the songs of Broadcast, Trish Keenan’s voice tinged with something metallic. And you can hear it most of all in Boards of Canada’s music. The term is never used in their album titles or liner notes, but they capture that feeling better than anyone.

Boards of Canada’s first album, Music Has the Right to Children, is blissful nostalgia. The hints of unease are too dreamy to cause tension. It combines samples from public information films, sunny ambient synths, and stark, catchy beats. Their second, Geogaddi, shows the underside of this nostalgia. It’s just as dreamy, even relaxing at times, but the samples here are more sinister, taking influence from backmasking and the Satanic Panic. There’s a similar vibe to old Memphis rap tapes, which were rumoured to contain dark sigils thanks to their early horrorcore sound. Geogaddi is a reminder that nostalgia has its negatives. Electronica can create the sounds of dark pasts, and dark futures too. (Just listen to Luigi Russolo’s noise machines!)

The majority of hauntological music comes from the UK, making it sound like a British companion to Vaporwave. Vaporwave takes US pop music from past decades and slows it down, turning it into muzak. Even when drawing from other countries’ media, it feels American. Classical statues are removed from their place of origin and put on display in shopping malls, while footage from Japanese adverts is cut up and looped. Vaporwave takes music we’d associate with a place (elevators and convenience stores, for example) and puts it somewhere placeless, showing how absurd and reductive nostalgia can be. While it may remind you of the past, you’re listening in the present. As Roisin Kiberd explains in The Disconnect, “Vaporwave is happening to you. It’s a way of seeing, of being, pitched somewhere between the internet and real life.”

Recently, I’ve become a fan of Meitei, whose sound is described by music label Kitchen as existing “between the temporal gap between past and present.” It reminds me of Burial but drawing from the Floating World instead of 90s raves. His music has the same elegiac nature as Yasunari Kawabata’s fiction, using modern styles to evoke the fading past. Meitei’s tracks are accompanied with imagery from different periods of Japanese history, from artwork to old photographs. Like with all nostalgia, this past is more imagined than real. It allows us to slip into false memories, a jumbled collection of things from the past. Just keep in mind it’s only an illusion. You’ve never been there.

In a series of articles for Blue Pyramid, Matt Bluemink uses the term anti-hauntology to describe how “Sophie and Arca (among others) represented a new wave of creativity in music production that could no longer be described as hauntological. In fact, it actively pushed against hauntology.” He also cites Iglooghost as a producer whose work is uniquely anti-hauntological. Anti-hauntology provides an alternative to hauntology’s melancholy. As Bluemink explains, “[a]nti-hauntology has to seek out new vectors rather than repeating old ones.”

This is what electronica is all about. As fascinating and meaningful as nostalgia can be, I love electronica because of its place in the present and future. I want to hear music that sounds shiny and fresh, not coated in dust and grease. The most enduring electronica is the kind that will always sound like it belongs in the here and now. The past is okay to visit, but it’s not home.