On Thursday I attended a 2 hour lecture by Wire writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, in which he spoke a good deal about the music of Burial, relating it to his theory of 'hauntology'. Whilst it was fascinating, none of it could convince me this music was any good or substantially different to anything I'd heard before.
He was basically arguing that the music of Burial (Kode 9 and The Caretaker) was nostalgic for the 'progressive' rave music of the 90's; much like Sunn O))) carries a trace of Metal. In sense, it is the spectral haunting of those genres. He explained it pretty well, but I'm profoundly unconvinced by the music he chose to illustrate his ideas. I don't feel that we live in an adjunct of history, in which the genuinely new can't conceivably be created. And I think that there is nothing weaker than adding 'crackle' to records.
It almost seemed like a classic theorist, theorizing out the possibility of new potentials, because in a sense they don't understand creativity.
Anyway, here's him blogging about it:
London after the Rave
Dub Housing
[His ideas originated in Derrida's
Specters of Marx and were related to Fukuyama's
End of History, pivoting round the idea that we are now nostalgic for a future that never arrived]
