Hauntology is a term coined by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993), a near-homophone of ontology for ideas that persist after their supposed death. In the mid-2000s the critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds turned it into a way of hearing a strand of British electronic music that seemed to listen back to its own past: a 2006 essay by Reynolds in The Wire placed the Ghost Box label, Broadcast, Mordant Music and The Caretaker under the same spectral heading.
Ghost Box, founded in 2004 by the producer Jim Jupp and the designer Julian House, drew on library music, musique concrète and the mood of 1970s public information films and school programmes. Fisher collected his writing on the subject in Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2014), arguing that culture is haunted by futures that never arrived. For drone listeners the idea explains why tape hiss, surface crackle and slowly decaying loops can register less as texture than as memory.