Darkstar’s music expresses electronic rot rather than spectral loss of futures

Evidence

To take up the example that Simon uses. When you compare the Darkstar cover of “Gold” to the Human League original, it’s not just that one is no more futuristic than the other. It is that neither are futuristic. The Human League track is clearly a superseded futurism, while the Darkstar track seems to come after the future. … Partly why I enjoy the Darkstar album is because, like many of the most interesting records of the last six or seven years, it seems to be about the failure of the future. This feeling of mourning lost futures isn’t so explicit as it was with the Burial records, but I believe it’s there at some level with Darkstar. Where with Burial you have a feeling of dereliction and spectrality, the lost future haunting the dead present, with Darkstar it’s a question of electronic rot, digital interference. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1239

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and distinguishes two registers of hauntological music: Burial’s dereliction/spectrality (lost future haunting dead present) versus Darkstar’s ‘electronic rot, digital interference’ (decay within the digital material itself).
• STORYSTEM: The distinction between a style that mourns a lost future and one that depicts entropy inside the digital medium itself could seed a speculative-fiction world where signals rot rather than vanish.