#hauntographic

Michael C Coldwell - Ganister Quarry 1905-2017

Rephotography of Godfrey Bingley for The Remote Viewer installation.

For the last six months or so I have been collaborating with SJH on a project that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It began simply enough as a small web label for hauntologically-inspired music; that is, music that appears to be haunted by sounds from another era - invariably the seventies. SJH wanted to have a handful of “artists” and he and his musical friends would create the music and I would produce their art and band logos - just like I did for the Bedroom Cassette Masters series.

But SJH got a little carried away with ideas and he inspired me so much that I began to think of more things we could do too so we now have a situation whereby we have sort or invented an alternative version of the 70′s in visual and musical form. The rule was that we would create everything ourselves, so for example when SJH wanted to include references to a (real) vintage magazine called The Unexplained, I created a template for one called The Inexplicable. This meant we could put our own references to the ghosts and mythologies we were inventing onto the cover of a contemporary magazine.

But SJH began to get wilder ideas. He wanted an explanation as to why now - in 2016 - someone was using the name he had chosen for the entire project - which a quick google proved is pretty obscure - so he wrote synopses for a series of supernatural paperbacks published in the 1970s which included the word, complete with author biography and asked me to do the covers and a few of the inside pages. We then found we needed a “book publisher” - something like the Armada Books of our youth, so I did that too.

Then SJH had the idea that for one of the artists in particular, the digital music download would include a PDF with lots of this artwork and each album project would have variations - so that the first musical album (all about poltergeists) would include a front cover of The Inexplicable, a Whinny Moor book, various paperbacks on the subject, a ‘Fuzzy Felt’ box lid, a BBC Time & Tunes for schools book cover, some kind of girl’s comic (like Misty) etc.. And then the second album would have the same elements for the next topic (it’s going to be witches).

So a lot of my time on this project has been tracking down old typefaces - (particularly swash versions!) - and poring over thousands of old book covers and comics and reproducing their graphic style.

For another of the 'artists’ in the project SJH had imagined a supernatural children’s television drama, the music being the programme’s soundtrack. For this I had to re-create some pages from TVTimes (thank so much soundsfamiliar) - so many typefaces in single page! I then had to insert our programme into a 1972 television schedule in a believable way: what time of day do you put on a children’s scary drama serial in a season when the Munich Olympics were on going and how do we explain that no-one seems to remember the series? Well we came up with a nice solution to that as you will see when you read it.

Another example of Paul Clipson’s film work, and another featuring multiple exposure / optical layering of images. This is certainly a hauntological device, not only in that it breaks time, but also in that it creates a layer of obfuscation:

“The second, ‘hauntological’ layer problematises, compromises and obfuscates the first layer, undermining or damaging it in some way” Adam Harper

Acorn Street and Great Garden Street, Leeds. Photographer and date unknown.

Used with kind permission from Leeds Library & Information Services. Source: Leodis.net.