What looks like nostalgia for the past can actually be a longing for modernism.

Evidence

Naturally, Ghost Box have been accused of nostalgia, and of course this plays a part in their appeal. But their aesthetic in fact exhibits a more paradoxical impulse: in a culture dominated by retrospection, what they are nostalgic for is nothing less than (popular) modernism itself. Ghost Box are at their most beguiling when they foreground dyschronia, broken time – as on Belbury Poly’s ‘Caermaen’ (from 2004’s The Willows) and ‘Wetland’ (from 2006’s The Owl’s Map) where folk voices summoned from beyond the grave are made to sing new songs. Dyschronia is integral to the Focus Group’s whole methodology; the joins are too audible, the samples too jagged, for their tracks to sound like refurbished artefacts. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 317

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s broader claim across the book that ‘nostalgic pasts serve as fantasies where duty and enjoyment coincide’ (ch16), and offers a counter-reading of the same material. — connects to: Pervasive cultural nostalgia signals an inability to make new memories — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 249; Postmodern citation replaces the uncanny with a knowingness that kills it. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 310; Burial’s longing for lost forward motion resists the nostalgia mode — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2428 (+1 more)