Giving Up The Ghost- Fisher's Slow Cancellation of the Future

I want to preface this by giving a brief summary of my personal experience with Burial's music, which I wrote on 3 years prior to discovering Fisher here. 

I discovered Burial's music when I was about 13 years old. With the help of Youtube's algorithm, I found Burial alongside artists such as Blu Mar Ten, Vacant and various other 2-step, future garage type artists, or what Fisher would later describe as those belonging to Derrida's hauntological canon. 

I was drawn to Burial the first time I heard him and he quickly became my favourite artist. To this day he remains one of my favourite artists, my name 'archangel' remaining unchanged on instagram for around almost a decade now. 

Why Burial has resonated with me so strongly and consistently for the past 8 or so years I've never been able to articulate. I feel like Burial's music, more than any artist I know, has an elusive ghostly quality that is overwhelmingly comforting and offers solace in  urban decay.

Fisher suggests that the ability of Burial's sound to connect so deeply with so many people in the last 15 years is suggestive of the collective isolation that digital culture has ensued, that has brought 'new forms of solitude' and feelings of being 'alone together'. 

Nigel Cooke: Fisher noted his paintings reminded him of 'perfect visuals of Burial's sound'(p. 100)

He argued that the illusive artist's ability to evoke images of dilapidation and vacant, run down spaces through his hybrid dance-music come ghostly vocals veiled in the signature crackle indicative of 'a tantalising tissue of traces'(p. 104), is reflective of a sense of failed mourning, of finding comfort in being haunted by a nostalgia that isn't quite yours.

The significance of the crackle Burial uses in his music, 'the principle sonic signature of hauntology', is its existential orientation that makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint' (p. 21).

Here, the dilapidated form of the music is inspired by a rave scene that Burial himself was too young to experience, as he feels a nostalgia for a place in time he never occupied. He is haunted by events he failed to attend yet that he simultaneously lost. His music, according to Fisher, expresses a sense of mourning for the 'collective delirium' that once took place in these decayed spaces that once hosted 90s Jungle, Garage and DnB rave culture. This feeling is indicative of Fishers depiction of 21st century the feeling that;

'The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion....the feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed'.

I am struck by how Fisher attributes this sense of anachronism, of time folding back on itself to the rise in digital culture. In a time of such rapid technological advances, culture appears to have slowed down, and is in a state of stasis; the paradox being the stark contrast between the monumental technological advances in level of distribution and consumption of culture coinciding which a huge deceleration in music culture itself. He highlights the birth of the ipod in 2005, and observes the rapid technological growth since then that has contrasted with a lack thereof in musical forms which have continued to borrow from past forms and have failed to sound as radically different in 10 years as the 10 year increments since the 50s have done.

This idea of being haunted by a past that seldom bares any relevance to our own experiences, of a time that superseded our births, I feel is particularly prominent in my generation who cling to the idea that they were 'born in the wrong era', and often feel a deep level of attachment to music produced decades before their birth and bare little relevance to our current cultural, sociological or political climate. In a time of rapid technological advancement, we look backwards instead of to the future, as we indulge in Derrida's concept of hauntology, which gesticulates a failed mourning for the past, a failure to 'give up the ghost' leading us to be haunted by a sense of loss for what had been, creating what Fisher describes as 'the slow cancellation of the future'.

Fisher draws parallels between Burial's hauntology and that which he believed defined Joy Division (another one of my teenage-hood's favourite bands that led me to don a 'love will tear us apart again' poster above my bed for many years) 's position, a band which elegised 'the sound of British cultures speed comedown' with their use of reverb and ties to abandoned industrial spaces that superseed the realm of familiar and occupied an inhuman ghostly vacuum. Fisher writes, 'Speed is a connectivity drug, a drug which made sense of a world in which electronic connections were madly proliferating. But the comedown is vicious.'

When analysing Joy Division's 'Decades', Fisher accuses Curtis of writing 'with a depressive's iron certainty about life as some pre-scripted film.' where his voice assumes the sound of 'a man who is already dead, or who has entered an appalling state of suspended animation, death-within-life'. I feel that Burial's connection to the ghostly is one that is far more comforting, as he recalls traversing the streets of London and feeling; “Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.”

One vivid memory I hold of Burial's music and what it meant to me materialises in a London night bus journey. Growing up I was plagued with depression in an ontological sense, where I always had a sense of finitude and doom plaguing my view of the world and my life, which made me prone to methods of escapism. I vividly remember frequenting the 321 night bus to New Cross and across central London made possible by my beloved under 18 free travel oyster card.

My refuge place became the London night bus. Here, I would bury myself into a corner seat with my headphones in (I don't think my headphones left my ears for a majority of my youth), and observed London through the lens of Burial's haunted nostalgia. The overwhelming sense of loss I felt characterised a city slipping into urban decay was comforting to me, and Burial's music became the perfect soundtrack.

'Untrue' will always signify to me escapism and shelter, a damning depiction perhaps of a youth plagued with feeling an insurmountable urge to get away which would materialise in solitary bus journeys through the London night with a pair of headphones and an old ipod. 

Coincidentally, today I stumbled across Burial's most recent 2020 release, entitled 'Her Revolution'. I almost feel as though it's title and quiet optimism correlates with a sense of progress I feel from the work I have done over the past 2 years to escape the 'the most malign spectre that has dogged my life' (p. 28) that has often made me feel, 'walled off from the lifeworld, so that [my] own frozen inner-life or inner death overwhelms everything'. 

There is so much to unpack in Fisher's work and for this reason I have chosen to focus this post on his discussion of Burial's place in Fisher's hauntological canon that distinguished him as an artist that he believed to be 'one of the most important cultural statements to come out of the UK in the first because of the 21st Century'. I hope to explore Fisher further in the future once I finish his 'Ghosts of My Life', in particular his links between late capitalist realism and retrospection.