Key words and concepts: Time, memory, nostalgia, hauntology, longing, tension, diagnostic and symptomatic music.

Originally written into a notebook, the following text is an attempt at realising an organised (yet vague) flow of the paper’s content:

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1. MEMORY IS A POTENT SOURCE FOR SONIC EXPLORATIONS

• Sound is an invisible medium. Sound is a temporal medium.
• The ghostly, transitory and invisible state of sound interacts uniquely with the intangibility of memory.
• Objects, images and writings can be preserved forever. Sound occurs and dissipates. the same is true with memory.
• It is therefore that in their similarities, sound can be used to explore memory and vice versa.

2. A LISTENER IS A MEDIUM WHO DRAWS MEANING FROM SOMETHING THAT IS NOT ENTIRELY THERE

• So often , sound functions as a metaphor or representation of immaterial worlds.
• Listening is constructed from narratives of myth, fiction and the silent arts.
• A close listener will draw meaning from the intangible nature of sound and in doing so, the listeners own shards of memory and scraps of nostalgia will be used to colour this meaning
• Therefore with nostalgia as such a potent emotive pool, it is no great surprise that so much music is created as an ‘homage’ or ‘tribute’ to a culture or sound that has existed before.

3. YET IN THIS OFTEN DESPERATE ATTEMPT AT FINDING MEANING OR CONNECTION THROUGH NOSTALGIA, THERE IS POTENTIAL DANGER

• If we rely on the allure of nostalgia, we run risk of trapping ourselves in a culture that constantly recycles the past. This blocks the ability to create new sounds and new futures for ourselves. I’d like to argue that like Mark Fisher, this has already happened.
• Opening the door to any music venue here in South London, I am greeted by the tired ghosts of rock or the empty husks of punk music. There is a tangible yearning for idealised past glories.
• I’d like to propose that such music or music scene is ‘symptomatic‘ – it is a by-product of what Mark Fisher describes as ‘Capitalist Realism’ – the belief that nothing outside the current system is possible. Nostalgia works in tandem with capitalist realism by making radical transformation seem unthinkable – If the only “good times” are behind us, then no future alternative feels believable.

4. SYMTPOM AND DIAGNOSIS – MY PROPOSAL

• Music can be symptomatic: “Artic Monkeys airbrush cultural time and appeal to this endless return and timelessness of rock”- Mark Fisher
  • I believe a great deal of music written today acts is a symptom of a culture that is choking on its own lack of identity, forced to idealise a past that never really existed – a glossy re-enactment “Nostalgia… is not for the past as it was lived, but for the past as mythologized.”
    — Ghosts of My Life.
  • It’s a slow cancellation of the future – nostalgic culture isn’t just backward-looking; it’s politically immobilizing because it trains people to see the past as the only source of meaningful experience.
• Yet, music can act as diagnosis: Music can identify this cultural yearning for new futures, new identity and harness it to create something new:

-Mark Fisher noted that Burial understood the continuum of British dance music, and his position as an artist in relation to the near past , the collective euphoria of the 90s.

-With this acknowledgment, Burial stages his work as an attempt to return to this period of nostalgia, yet finds himself unable to continue it in a much bleaker 21st century.

This perspective does not come from saying things were great in the ’90s and now they’re not. It is to say, there was a trajectory running through post-war culture, a trajectory Fisher calls popular modernism, which created high expectations.

That trajectory terminated and it’s the craving for the futures that we projected from the 20^th century, that is the crucial thing. What we’ve got in the 21^st century is a confusion of the contemporary with the modern, in fact the contemporary cannot deliver the modern; there’s a kind of depthless contemporary.

In a sense, Burial is emblematic of what I would describe as diagnostic music. It acknowledges the past and its influences while identifying the yearnings of nostalgia