Twenty years ago last month, Burial released his debut EP—and unleashed a ghost. The British producer’s music, shot through with a sense of loss and veiled in vinyl crackle, epitomized a blurry set of ideas about nostalgia and otherworldliness that were bubbling up across a swath of experimental music. Soon, shepherded by critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, a new term had entered the lexicon: “hauntology.” Borrowed from French postmodernist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx, hauntology, in Fisher’s framing, hovers miasmically over a loose nexus of ideas around melancholy, technology, memory, and capitalism. Examining the work of a number of like-minded artists, including Burial, Philip Jeck, the Caretaker, and the figures behind the Ghost Box label, he later wrote: “Their work sounded ‘ghostly,’ certainly, but the spectrality was not a mere question of atmospherics. What defined this ‘hauntological’ confluence more than anything else was its confrontation with a cultural impasse: the failure of the future.”
As a description of ghostly affect and 21st-century disappointment, hauntology has been a largely British phenomenon—and, despite Fisher’s philosophical intent, has often been invoked mainly to mean, “sounds spooky.” But for those who know where to look, Latin American electronic music has long buzzed with hauntological portent, and with good reason: With its overlapping histories of genocide, colonialism, dictatorship, migration, organized crime, thwarted utopia, and rapacious neoliberalism, Latin America knows a thing or two about failed futures. Numinous energy ripples through the wraithlike voices of Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines, No era sólida, and ¡Ay!; it chills the blood in Debit’s The Long Count, which used synthesis and machine learning to resuscitate the sounds of the ancient Maya; it rises like narcotic vapors from the plodding tempos of cumbia rebajada, born when a malfunctioning soundsystem began playing back the upbeat tropical style at a funereal pace and gravelly pitch. (“When you slow down the cumbia,” Nicolás Vallejo, whose work as Ezmeralda filters cumbia rebajada into an ambient haze, once explained, “the ghosts start to emerge.”)
Fantología I, released by the Quito, Ecuador, label +ambién, is framed as a Latin American response to the discourse around hauntology—a discourse that label heads Gregorio Hernández (DJ +1) and Daniel Lofredo (Quixosis) say has too often turned a blind eye to the Global South. The object of their scrutiny is “a very Latin American kind of uncertainty,” they write: “an ever-present ghost that shadows the region in the 21st century.” Where the Global North mourns “lost golden ages”—the sci-fi futurism of the 1960s, the renegade paradise of ’80s rave—they instead “confront the specter of failed statehood, chronic instability, and the fading promise of futures that may never arrive. These tracks reflect on a society forever negotiating a compromised tomorrow—and discovering how to live, even love, within that tension.”
What immediately stands out is how varied the compilation is. With its well established set of signifiers, hauntological music can be easy to parody, but there’s no color-by-numbers glumness here. The album opens with all the pregnant mystery of an orchestra tuning up: “Encuentros Invisibles,” by Dominican artist Alina Labour, teems with vibrant frequencies out of which a slow-moving bass melody gradually emerges, accompanied by rustles and sighs. Azulina—an alias of Buenos Aires’ Chancha Vía Circuito (Pedro Pablo Canale)—builds on the anticipatory mood with “Tundra,” an atmospheric scene-setter in which breathy flutes hover like mist over a craggy landscape of clicking and crackling. But not all of Fantología I is expressly ambient in nature. Mexican composer Isaac Soto’s “Volcanic House,” a highlight, abruptly shifts into a rhythmic mode, playing a tightly coiled drum groove against unsettling din, atonal violins, and eerily dubbed-out tendrils of synthesized sound—imagine Livity Sound or Hessle Audio possessed by poltergeists. Likewise, Quito’s Quixosis and Quantum Juan fashion shimmery ambient techno out of digital bell tones and syncopated machine beats.
The range of moods is just as wide; Fantología I often feels as much like a conversation as a compilation. Denver-based Fuya Fuya and Quito resident Entrañas’ “Tú Sé Tú” is a disorienting plunge into a dripping cavern of high-def sound design, like spelunking in THX. +ambién co-founder Gregorio +1 takes a similarly tactile approach to “Florecer,” smearing on FM chimes and foamy white noise. Buenos Aires’ Minicomponente, on the other hand, explores ethereal pop music on “Nacimos para morir,” her singing turning increasingly dissonant over loping electronic beats and unsettling synths that stab and swirl. If Ezmeralda’s “Los cielos” feels like an attempt to push music past the point of recognizability, drowning distant chords in a slurry of digital hiss, Guatemala’s Alex Hentze all but does away with artifice on “El Viento lo Sabe,” sketching a contrapuntal synthesizer melody that could translate to virtually any acoustic instrument or ensemble without losing its essence.
The most invigorating tracks contain multitudes. Zen Liminal’s “Pululahua,” a collaboration with Quito luthier Pablo Jacho, layers breathy flutes over rushing liquid and pulsing drones, at once calm and tensile—at rest, yet ready to pull apart at any moment. Dominican producer Boundary’s muted synth etude “Waverider” is wistful but also playful, rejecting the self-seriousness of so much European hauntology. Lima, Peru’s Orieta Chrem begins with earthy congas and pan flutes before building into a slow-moving, Drexciyan machine groove, blurring the line between the acoustic and the electronic. And Mexicali producer Siete Catorce, Ibarra-based Kichwa producer Mala Fama, and Bogotá’s Colombian Drone Mafia all infuse their respective tracks—a grinding triplet groove, a maelstrom of streaks and trackers, and an ultra-vivid explosion of rainforest psychedelia—with manifold sounds and emotions that resist being pinned down. Even at their moodiest, Fantología I’s contributors refuse to settle for the wistful resignation so often associated with northern hauntology. In their contradictions, these artists are seeding new futures.
