Chapter 21 stone tapes Ghost box, nostalgia, and postwar britain by david pattie

Ghost Box records uses radical nostalgia to critique the past. This makes me think of some of the work being done by publications like Hellebore Magazine, delving into British folk horror and reexamining elements of the past.

The quote below is from an abstract of a chapter called Chapter 21 Stone Tapes: Ghost Box, Nostalgia, and Postwar Britain by David Pattie in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016), a book published by OUP.

I tried to log in here to read the full text, but I got an error with my New York Public Library number, even though I know it works. You gotta access it through the database section of the NYPL website; just search for OUP’s portal and it’ll let you in.

The abstract:

This chapter discusses the work of a small British record label, Ghost Box, whose output is set in a fictionalized version of the United Kingdom between 1945 and 1979. The label’s output has been described (by Simon Reynolds, among others) as hauntological, that is, as music creating a fictional, ghostly version of the past. This chapter argues that the virtual Britain created in the music released on Ghost Box is, in fact, a faithful representation not of the historical reality of the postwar UK but of the cultural assumptions and fears that shaped the period. The chapter discusses Ghost Box’s work as an example of radical nostalgia, as an investigation and critique of the cultural attitudes of the past, rather than a celebration of them.

Ghost Box record label [[ hauntology ]] [[ The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality ]]