Listening to Landscape

Hauntology and the Echoes of Albion
An exploration of national identity that considers how dominant, antiquated versions of Englishness are currently being challenged through contemporary, experimental, electronic music.

The first book-length exploration of how English landscapes are represented in contemporary electronic and experimental music, Listening to Landscape ploughs its own furrow, combining ideas from psychogeography, hauntology and landscape studies to offer a distinctive take on the way contemporary music deals with the ghosts of an England that is fast disappearing.

Away from the Top 40, and often circulating in the form of obscure cassette releases and limited vinyl runs, acts including Belbury Poly, Craven Faults, epic45, Gilroy Mere, Spaceship, Vic Mars, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - and many others besides - work in experimental genres including folktronica, ambient, modular synth, drone, post-rock and noise. But all have an apparent preoccupation with summoning the essence of place, often working with ideas of memory, loss and thwarted futurity associated with disappearing or threatened English landscapes.

Moving deftly between cultural theory, musicology and geography, Listening to Landscape serves as a primer on the ‘hauntological’ music scene that appears fixated on questions of landscape and Englishness. It argues this music is no mere exercise in nostalgia, but a provocation asking us to re-imagine England’s place in the world at a time of economic and environmental crisis. Listening to Landscape speaks to urgent questions of national identity in the post-Brexit era, offering a distinctive take on the way contemporary culture deals with the ghosts and memories of Albion.

Includes a foreword by Justin P. Hopper, author of The Old Weird Albion.

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