Dub is dup’ music.
—Lee “Scratch” Perry
Believers in Electronic Voice Phenomena hear ghosts in unrecorded audio tape. Lee Perry welcomes them as collaborators: blowing smoke into the tape heads, getting them high, letting resin condense, raising the noise floor, amplifiying their voices.
This is what hauntologists mean when they say digital media are soulless: the spirits have few footholds in RAM, no nutrients, little friction. They have to enter through narrow passages, scratchy larynxes and microphone diaphragms. Once in, they are frozen, sexless, latent. It is the job of the hauntologist to infuse data with heat, moisture, pheremones: aiming cameras at the smoke, generating seeds, scattering random numbers across the sterile fields of memory.
Image CC-BY by Vanessa Pike-Russell
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