Howdy Haunts!
The following is a copy/paste of my forthcoming Haunt Manual chapter that should be released tomorrow!This one is kind of a heft snog in many ideas. As said, I hope to have it out tomorrow with some further edits and formatting!
Haunt on,
Keats
Aspectre Spirals Unwound
∴ The Aspectre Working Haunts On
My intention to document the hollow side of these hallowed rituals; the ramshackle journalism of such porch-pickin’ practices always include the bouts and brawls. And the Aspectre was no different.
My last Dim Session, the Aspectre Working, intended to invoke an aspect of self long thought forgot. Specifically, a personage not unlike my wide-eyed and not-yet-wearied youthful zest for experimentation, free of self-judgement and wholly interested in wayfaring creative gusts. I utilized talismanic tools that were akin to this aspect of my past late-night toils as a kid: circuit bent casios, cassette tapes, etc. These talismanic tools foreshadowed a specificity for the otherwise nebulous Aspectre, and may have brought forth a time I was wholly unprepared for.
However, the working’s intentions to inspire childlike-creativity has been wholly successful! It has proven surefire in its revelry of late night tinkering and creative abandon since summoned…
Cue Tom Wait’s “What’s he building in there.”
Since the hauntomancy working of the Aspectre, I’ve felt a raptured freeform expression with little-to-no regard of expectation. This said, it has also further proved the inherent contradiction I intended to survey via these workings, for good and for ill.
The Audiomancy Dim Session, which would become my new project, ECTOGASM, is a perfect example of smiting the self-doubt of expectation and empowered by the sounds and tools used all those years ago to create something sonically like nothing that came before. A perfect encapsulation of a forgotten self brought forward into the present; a ghost that encompasses the past but punches forth into the now. The ECTOGASM record is not unlike an album I would’ve made in highschool when the Aspect I intended to charge was beating brightly – however it is now made with the the weathered-eye-soul of the present.
I spent my birthday adrift in the Aspectre – forgoing any communal or social aspect with the only want to tinker and create. I woke up on 2/23 with a revelatory plan to release my Spectre’s Audiomancy working as a Dakota Slim album. I had kept Dakota Slim, specifically, for my deeply written works, but as the Aspectre poked and poked to forego that ceremony. Therefore I decided to release the album without any pompous rabble-rousing. After a birthday spent in a solemn toil in my Dimming Room, adding drums and vocals to a track and editing the songs, I birthed a new release. “The Spectre Of 223” was released on my Dakota Slim bandcamp page to no promotion or fanfare; a quiet water birth. The release was very much the same way as I had back in the teenage mp3.com days of the early millennium – brash and without overthought – excited to release to the ether.
Another bright (re)birth was born of the Zozobra Scene that sparked the Aspectre working. My long tinkered fictional work’s scene was made into a radioplay for this year’s Hauntquinox, and PragMagick as a whole turned into a irreverent amalgam of the radio programs that reared me as a kid (See: Orson Welles’ The Shadow). I was able to utilize the hauntological aspect of an unrealized work made manifest in a new medium – and charged it forward, further.
Both the Spectre and Aspectre workings were solidified in a tactile artform, and the Zozobra scene helped fortify the invocation of creative wyles long sought and solidified in the recording of the radioplay. Something I have always wanted to create but felt shy or embarrassed about my voice, acting, and the alienation of a listenership. These were conquered and something new was conjured:
“The second, ‘hauntological’ layer [in hauntological art] problematises, compromises and obfuscates the first layer… While the first layer might express hope and confidence, the hauntological layer contradicts and undoes this by expressing a satirical doubt and disillusionment.”
But as with the Spectre Working, the Aspectre has proven to be a dual diagnosis of intended results and unintended side-effects. My intention to document the hollow side of these hallowed rituals; the ramshackle journalism of such porch-pickin’ practices always include the bouts and brawls. And the Aspectre was no different.
You see, when communion with this ASPECTRE was sparked via a non-year-specific abstract as opposed to the SPECTRE’s 2017 quadrant, but I may have accidentally charged a time period where the ASPECTRE was at its pinnacle. As aforementioned, my talismans used in the ritual really did consort a certain time period in my life. This has been revealed to be 20 years ago, right before my life forever changed, and the last vestige of a familial life and ability to tinker into the night free from the worries of the day.
The 20 year cycle became ever present for me personally due to a resounding exoteric happening; February had this here ghost finishing some unfinished business 20 years later relating to the band UNWOUND.
Mary and I saw Unwound, reformed after 20 year break, in both Portland and Seattle in early February. I was able to see them, twice, on a reunion tour. Though the 20 year nostalgia loop is culturally verifiable by the band’s re-emergence, it was its personal tendrils that pulled the wool from thine eyes.
Although I intended on a looser interpretation of a past-self rather than a specific year, the ASPECTRE was truly anchored during the aforementioned life lived 20 years ago. And Unwound’s resurgence is the perfect sumtotal of CW’s Nostalgia Loop theory in both cultural and personal aspects while also being beautifully anchored to the ASPECTRE of my teenage whim, wonder and creative abandon in its penultimate form 20 years ago.
When I arrived at my father’s in California, it was with bleached hair and ripped jeans with MELVINS written in white-out on my Jansport. But in a few short years, I had advanced from the Nirvana train, now fully enmeshed in Kill Rock Stars, K Records, Gold Standard Labs, Touch and Go sonics. One major influence during this time was that of Tacoma’s Unwound. They had just released an incredibly aural church of a record in Leaves Turn Inside You.
The record was cinematic, angular, DIY, haunting and ambitious for the trio, and the mood and sonicality truly became one of the many musical touchstones of my youth. And 20 years ago, I had a chance to see them tour on that record but famously remarked, “They’ve been a band for ten years, I’ll catch them next time they’re coming through.” You see, even though I was performing, creating ramshackle albums via mp3.com and haunting the high-school halls with Dakota Slim tapes, I started to become weary of social gatherings and would later see this time as being a progenitor of mental disfluencies that would fully manifest years later in my twenties. Yet, Unwound and plenty of other influential works would linger in my own folklore even if I simply wasn’t interested in sharing their tutelage in the somatic.
I actually used the concept of Leaves Turn Inside You to frame the foreword for Derek Hunter’s The End of The World, a Love Chaos philosophy book last year. This illustrates how deep of a time-riddled sinew the album sowed all those years ago and is taut still!
I was in an exo/esoteric 20 year loop since the Aspectre working, mending lost synapses of creative works and experimentation, and the ability to see such a magnanimous influential act during this very time was synchronous to see the very least.
I spent 20 years with the knowledge that there was no “next time” when it came to Unwound. Turns out Leaves Turn Inside You was their Magnum Opus, and directly after that tour, they resigned the outfit and retired UNWOUND. And I have always kicked myself since, with the event being a marker of missed connections and regretful missive…
…Until Now…
NorthEastern Spiders Weave
∴ The 20 Year Nostalgia Loop & Chronomancy
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“My time travel works!” -C.W. Chanter
Upon my realization of this unintended hauntological trauma work of 20 years ago, I found it incredibly synchronous that it was relating to fellow practitioners’ anarchic works, namely CW Chanter’s “Nostalgia Loop / MetaRPG construction” and Bobby Hale & Leah Farris’s “Listening Post Alpha” (which I will further illustrate in the next chapter) – alongside these “Hauntomancy” workings, it is as if a magickally-minded hauntological is forming a tetherless triangle, or ThreeScene (∴).
The 20 year Nostalgia Loop is a theory that chronomagick mage, CW Chanter, has long discussed.
I came across CW via my connection with dear friends, and art magi, Sam Shadow and Saroth the Mage. During this time, he was wildly known for his shitkicking of ufology charlatans. I even had him on Pragmagick to discuss his crusade against these well-monetized, new age humbugs and to dive into the creation of his pragmatic Common Well Chanting religion.
My recent bouts with ufology deserves it’s own essay, but I will just say that I now bow out of the popular ufology disccussions, with debunker or experiencer, due to the stagnant and redundant discussions. I have found my experiences and philosophies of phenomena are far better discussed in occultnik circles where the ultraterrestrial and similar theories are not shunned. But I digress…
What kept me coming back to CW’s work was his ever-evolving chronomagick and the idea of the 20 year nostalgia loop. Although he often discusses the popular culture tendrils of the nostalgia loop, his internal and personal practice in deciphering the phenomena is what keeps me tuned. Through the loose rubric of the loop, one can log and notarize personal re-occurrences of motifs and zeitgeists.
Although CW’s rubric for such a work is ever-fortifying, the main practice is seemingly logging the re-occurrences in a sort-of free-form, poetic narrative; transcribing the loop’s sparks of quick whisps in meditative automatic writings. Instead of using a modern scrying item like a Spirit Box’s shifting radio frequencies, this communion utilizes his subconscious, his memories, or even popular culture et al. as a metaphorical Spirit Box.1
“Part of the metaRPG is so much of our Collective Unconscious is now recorded…this goes right to a very Philip K dick concept of our memories being remembered for us and our memories being artificially implanted into us. How much of our [memories] at the end of our of our lives [are ours] as opposed to the lives that were lived by countless generations before us? How many of our waking moments will have been programmed experiential moments? Consciousness will have literally been pacified, and we will have been put into a literal recording state – not only a recording state- but a recording state that we will ourselves into.”
Much to CW’s chagrin I have also found that when doing so (in tandem with my Hauntomancy workings) I can touchstone personal inspirations and their synchronicities as well as regrets and lost memories to seemingly “travel” back to the time of a subject’s inception. This is utilized through the invocation of media that has conformed my life; the most solid rubric of CW’s chronomancy.
Upon studying and applying the practice of noting the Nostalgia Loop, other viewers and I have found that one should be careful through this chronomagick, as invoking the loop could bring you back to a place you’d rather forget. However, CW often exclaims that the point is more of the pop cultural significance of this “time travel” exercise, especially evidenced in his gameified MetaRPG, is more of his intention and to take it as hauntologically serious as I do is not his intended application:
“The whole point of this this metaRPG and the time travel aspect [20 Year Nostalgia Loop] of it [is that] there’s no aspect about this that is necessarily about you going back to your past and confronting this shit. We’re watching fucking movies! I tell people all the time if you are going back and you are talking to your dead father all the time, like why the fuck are you watching?!”
Alas, here we are, and I am admittedly bastardizing the point of his concept because of its synchronous tendrils into my own Hauntomancy workings!
“My time travel works!” signs off CW, half-jokingly, at the end of his many Nostalgia Loop livestreams. And I can confirm this, as independently and through my Hauntomancy workings (as evidenced in this Haunt Manual) I have performed similar hauntological time-travel correspondences.
Via my workings, automatic writing a shared liminal rite before each Dim Session. Whether it was invoking a certain year, 2017 in the Spectre working, or an aspect of a lost-self as in the Aspectre working, a meditative key was logged through talismanic appliance in the instruments used, and a key of swift words to charge each intention logged.
And after the revelation that my ASPECTRE working was regurgitating a self that was 20 years ago, perfectly in the loop, I have been able to calculate and dignify the source of many an ailment.
Salvo Siempre Salvo
∴ Serpentine Spirals Unwound
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“I’m such a nihilistic jerk half the time. I’m so fucking sarcastic at times and then at other times I’m still vulnerable and so sincere.” Kurt Cobain
20 years ago I was a High School junior in the very last months of familial living. My father and family would high-tail to Colorado for financial reasons, as I stayed behind in California renting a room and attempting to finishing High School. I was working full time at a Blockbuster and a movie theater to keep me afloat, but felt firmly disconnected from a three year stasis in a mad dash.
I had my issues with my father, often feeling alienated and strange in a house and state I moved into after a toxic Arizona send-off courtesy of my ex-step-father. I know now that I had shifted too much in dramatic environments with my mother and her husbands, and couldn’t quite comprehend the placidity of my father’s home. I suppose I always felt like a charity case to my father’s family, often feeling dejected no matter how hard they tried to give me stability I long needed prior.
I had 3 years of healthy family dynamics where I was the beacon of disarray. Although I had some healthy jousts with growth, it always felt as if it was arrested in an unfinished mold when they left. They often say that I wouldn’t have gone with them even if they attempted to make me, and granted, I had a girlfriend, a final year of high school, a band, and a stasis I didn’t want to leave. I had grown up leaving friends and family, and I wanted to hold on. When my immediate reaction was “no way” it wasn’t met with attempts to bring me, it was supported with a steadfast decision to let me stay behind.
20 years ago, before my life set on it’s largely independent path, was also the genesis of mental disfluencies which would go undiagnosed and unmedicated through my hedonistic twenties.
While playing the ol’ AAA ELECTRA 99 art gallery back in highschool, I recall the stresses and anxieties that began to rear. It was also a time where my concert going lifestyle became so intertwined with my personage that I began to suffer social anxieties hitherto unknown. You see, the Aspectre needed a past-ghost to personify, and it turns out, that 20 years ago, the penultimate year of any sense of security was the ghost it charged.
DRATS! I didn’t want to go back. I’m done with Nostalgia! I demanded to take from when to make new, to make present! But as it turns out, the Aspectre has shown me that this ghost has more than unfinished business than seeing a band I missed 20 years ago, it was time I reassessed the fortified spectre of deep traumatic patchworking that has led me here.
Screw nostalgia, screw nostalgiamancy – how does one keep sentimental without the opium of what-was?
Hauntological Contradictions & Paradoxes
∴ The Communion of Communion is Ironic
“The concept [Hauntology] posited by Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s and relies on the intersections of memories and how we are haunted by the past – a past that anticipated a future that never occurred. This concept was adopted as a genre designator by the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who suggests that the artists that fall under the umbrella of hauntology are ‘haunted by a paradoxical nostalgia’”2
At the first Unwound Reunion show at the Showbox in Seattle, I found myself less and less interested in the concert mechanism. Similar to my latter teenage years, I realized my anxieties echoed as they had back when. Mary and I decided the live sound engineering was terrible3, the band great albeit heavy in the machinations of covering songs from all parts of their storied career, like ghosts conjured by demand. We ended up leaving the show early – almost uncaring about resolving my unfinished business with seeing the band all those years ago.
We decided the Portland show would fair better since it would be at the better venue and decided to dance around the wet and vacant Seattle public market, disinterested in nostalgia and hell bent on creating new memories. And I realized that not seeing Unwound all those years ago was because their music meant much, and the dog and pony act of concerts always dissatisfied me. I had forgotten that I didn’t actually want to see them all those years ago, to sever my anxieties about a sort of hero worship. And I realized nostalgiamancy is not what interests me, but a sort of sentimancy is. I would sacrifice nostalgia trotting for the ghost of sentimentality – or the prospect of making current sentiments instead of wallowing in past ones.
The Aspectre ritual was all about diving deep into creative abandon and supercharging a present sentimentality, not wallowing in the annals of self as the Spectre had barked. It was all about action, not reminiscing, it was all about manifesting new memories! Or so I had intended…
It was clear that the ghost of the Aspectre had run its course. I was gifted the revelation to close this loop and double knot the taut tethers of what I needed to reintroduce. However, the present began to flicker and fade into the unresolved trauma of my own nostalgia loop, and it was time to cut the head off that serpentine engine.
I am consistently reminded of the irony concerning my “hauntomantic” workings, or hauntological magicks, used to both e/invoke memory whilst banishing trauma. But am I forever to find the contradiction that this anarchic practice was born out of? I had often stated that the evocation of the contradiction that has heretofore soiled my resolve would, in a sense, reaffirm it as a superpower. And yes, I am aware of the seeming contradiction in this undertaking. As above, so bellowed.
According to a wonderful post by Adam Harper via the Rouge’s Foam blog entitled Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present, I am forever present of the past as the present-ghost, not as the past-ghost, and forever besmirching the unmanned pathworkings as a purveyor of this time-track. When discussing Hauntology in art, I am astounded at the implications of my own Hauntomancy works – even though it is self-refreential magicks and not an overall aesthetic commentary – or is it?
“Just as it’s impossible to pin down a ghost conceptually, it’s not always easy to separate the two opposing layers of a hauntological text because they occur simultaneously. The first layer is ‘inside’ the second layer (‘the past inside the present’). The first layer (‘the past’) can only be seen through the medium of the second layer (‘the present’) so that we can’t be entirely sure of the image portrayed by the first layer. This process of obfuscation is a metaphor for memory (or more specifically an allegory of memory), and more broadly an allegory of any sort of representation of the world or any inadequately (‘untruthfully’) symbolic or imaginary conceptualisation… The perceived inability of something to adequately express the ‘truths’ expected of it is sometimes referred to as its ‘Death’, as in ‘the Death of Painting’, ‘the Death of Rock’, ‘the Death of God’ etc. Appropriately enough, hauntological art negotiates these sorts of ‘Deaths’.”
The Aspectre was the second layer of the hauntological whole of these audiomancy workings, as the Spectre was the first. The want to charge the present with this forgotten aspect has shown me the allegory of my own memory – just as the Spectre had in its own resolve.
The Death of the Aspectre, or the aspect of self once sought is the death knell of memory; discovering that it, like the Spectre working, is forever wrought with a misinterpretation of the past – and the work has revealed that the rosey memory of beingness I had hoped to reinvigorate has shown me the truth of its scarred blossom.
This all seemed to coincide with the second annual HAUNTQUINOX – a celebration liminalstream of fellow Haunts’ creative works. But I had become defunct and distressed, amassed in a globule of anguish and alienating grumps. I had overworked the Aspectre and the qualms of the 20 year Loop were barking bad. I began to fester as I had all those years ago, disgruntled and alone, without proper skills to communicate the harrowing wallows. I was angry, middle-fingering the past and any and all relationships abound, wanting to be left alone to tinker and toil. It was a perfect signifier of the end of the Aspectre’s bounties, and the overstayed haunting of a poltergeist of past.
Although the machinations of either the Spectre or Aspectre workings were different, I am astounded to find a larger picture of my own contradictory nature coyote-yelping forward. I am not remiss, however, these workings are essentially lore workings, workings to inspire and enhance the present with supercharges of my own past. Both workings have perfectly encapsulated while re-imagining the lore and prisms of memory. They have gifted me new pathways toward synapses long thought lost, both good and bad, but overall for a necessary spelunking of the self.
“In many cases a hauntological layer in art pointedly reminds us that what we’re witnessing is an imperfect, failure-prone and/or all-too-human construction by drawing our attention to the form or medium of the art: we hear the sonic by-products of obsolete or broken technology, we see the unrealism of painting, and art’s status as a magical window onto the world is denied. Such aesthetic experiences can haunt, mock, accuse and open our minds to the delicately contingent and circumstantial nature of art and history.”4
It was time to look forward, past the loop, past the hauntological irony of a present self looking backward and into uninformed territory. It was time to conjure a prospect of self, to commune a possible future-ghost to break the loop and close the circle. Right? What could be the final dot in the tethered triangle?
Can there be a third layer of hauntological magickal workings? What would it seek to commune?
Perhaps it would be to shelve the past and generate the new. Wasn’t that what the Aspectre working was intended to do? Yes, however, this new ghost to conjure is one I haven’t encapsulated. It was time to speak with the “other”, and what better way to commune with spectres outside of myself through my audiomancy than The Spirit Box?
It was time for a new working I entitled the PROSPECTRE working.
NEXT CHAPTER: The Prospectre Cometh
∴ The Prospectre and SpiritBox Communion
The hauntological connotations to my audiomantic Dim Sessions get stranger as transmissions from a literal SpiritBox, the English Qabbala cipher and my experiments with the Listening Post Alpha births a Prospectre-of-Self…
Take note of this metaphor, as the literal Spirit Box will come into play later when we discuss the Listening Post Alpha workings.
https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/cultural-ghosts-hauntology-and-the-caretaker/
A common excuse for my anxieties and annoyance at my profession as a live event technician.
http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/10/hauntology-past-inside-present.html?m=1
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