The Voice of the Dead: Hauntology, Divinity, and Disintegration

Today it no longer seems extraordinary to hear the voices of the dead on demand. In No Maps for These Territories (2000), writer William Gibson recalls a newspaper story about an English cleric who first heard a phonograph at a garden party and was traumatized. He described it as "a voice from hell", an "undead, horrifying parody of the human voice", and concluded that humanity was condemned by such devices.

When Eduardo Wilde –Argentine physician, politician, and intellectual of the Generation of 1880– attended a Thomas Edison exhibition in Brooklyn at the end of the 19th century, he was so struck by hearing the late Spanish tenor Julián Gayarre on a phonograph that he wrote in La Prensa that the device "stopped life and perpetuated moments": "With it, the spoken word has no past. What a curious phenomenon—to make the dead speak!" Wilde concluded that the dead in Brooklyn's cemetery were communicating through Edison's machines.

As Simon Reynolds notes, Roland Barthes often compared the emotion of looking at photographs of his dead mother to the uncanny sensation of hearing recorded voices of dead singers. What happens once we grow used to those ghosts –and their textures? Hearing the singing of the absent ceases to unsettle us; habit makes us forget that listening to music is, often enough, the esoteric act of listening to the voices of the dead.

One night, the fugitive protagonist of The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940), hiding in a museum on what he thinks is an uninhabited island, wakes to phonograph music –proof of another presence. Tourists? Hallucinations? Apparitions? He learns they are projections: technical illusions, ghosts rendered by a machine that perfectly reproduces reality. Recognizing them first repulses him; then, habituation sets in. Discomfort remains, but it passes into a strange normalcy.

Morel frames media as technologies against absence: television, cinema, and photography for the eye; radio, telephone, and phonograph for the ear. In a 1940 fictional frame, he deems cinematography and photography poor archives, while the phonograph excels –and, for the voice, humans need no longer fear death. Thomas Edison imagined the phonograph less for music than to preserve loved ones' voices after death. Morel goes further: a machine to soften our fear of death not only via hearing, but sight, touch –and soul. A technology to literally revive the dead.

Hauntological Music

For 130 years, Edison's 1878 phonograph was believed to be the first device to record the human voice –until 2008, when the First Sounds Initiative traced the phonautograph, patented by French bookseller-printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in March 1857, twenty years before Edison. At the French Patent Office they found two 1860 traces –sound waves etched as vibrations on soot-blackened paper. These phonautograms, once unreproducible, were scanned and digitally processed with an algorithm developed at the Library of Congress to recover sound.

When they finally played it, they heard the 17th-century song "Au clair de la lune", likely sung by Scott de Martinville himself. Patrick Feaster of First Sounds told the BBC that realizing he was the first person to hear a recorded voice from before the U.S. Civil War gave him goosebumps. Unlike Edison's phonograph, Scott's device was meant to study acoustic waves –to "photograph" words, not reproduce them. Today we hear that pioneer's voice restored, compressed, digitized –and still, it is hauntological music.

Cultural critic Grafton Tanner argues that analog media invited ghosts, unlike digital sound, often neat and cold as a hospital room –lacking grit, cracks, imperfections: the needle's crackle on vinyl, cassette tape wear. That absence of texture strips away the uncanny, the spectral aura. Ironically, even digitization couldn't exorcise the ghostliness of this first voice. Search YouTube for Scott de Martinville's "Au clair de la lune"; even as an MP3 on a smartphone, its fissures and textures open a passage for time's ghosts. It sounds as the voice of the dead ought to sound.

A Connection to the Divine

Death and music have been linked since the beginning: to fashion sound-making tools, living beings died or were sacrificed. The earliest known wind instruments –carved, pierced bones– date back ~43,000 years. The Mesopotamian lyre used gut strings. Viscera, remains –at humanity's dawn, music was possible thanks to death. Early drums –bones, stretched hides, and more– served not just recreation or signaling but liturgy: sacred rites and ceremonies. In other words, people sought their gods through percussion fashioned from the remains of creatures.

Many cultures still distinguish sacred-ritual from everyday uses of music. In Central and South America, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian traditions –Umbanda, Candomblé, Santería– use percussion, chant, and dance to enter trance (gira): a mediumistic act in which a dancer lends their body to be momentarily "possessed" by spiritual entities –orixás, exús, caboclos, pretos-velhos– manifesting on the earthly plane.

It is the voice of the dead that speaks in these rites –spirits made present through music and dance, live and unmediated by electronics. Percussion and dance likewise undergird candombe, comparsas, and samba –practices rooted in such ceremonies yet, as popular/radio forms, largely stripped of possession.

Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) died convinced his music could redeem humanity, dedicating his last years to an unfinished magnum opus, Mysterium. Influenced by Russian Symbolist poetry; Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Solovyov; Chopin and Wagner; and, above all, Blavatsky's theosophy, Scriabin sought a transcendental event to attune humanity to cosmic harmony –beyond the physical plane, across astral routes, toward higher consciousness.

He envisioned a seven-day, seven-night ritual in a purpose-built temple at the Himalayas' foot –sacred-geometry architecture, immersive acoustics, and a synesthetic keyboard projecting color with pitch– joined by dance, painting, and theater to amplify transformation. Performed together, these forces would guide listeners and performers into ecstasy, generating a spiritual vibration so powerful it would dematerialize first the temple, then reality itself –ushering all into a higher spiritual plane.

Pharoah Sanders –Coltrane sideman turned father of "spiritual jazz"– aimed to take audiences on a transcendental arc: arousal, agitation, return to calm. Scriabin, by contrast, offered no return ticket. Mysterium was a one-way passage –ending the world through music, because art could open portals to higher dimensions.

By the mid-1950s, a mystical experience led Coltrane to quit alcohol and heroin. Like Scriabin, he came to believe art could change the world literally, not metaphorically. Seeing music as revelation, he pursued extravagant, messianic methods –making it rain through improvisation, healing through song– striving to master music's true, still-unknown powers, which he believed should be every musician's aim.

A note among Scriabin0s papers reportedly read, "I am God". Coltrane, unwittingly, came closer to divinity: soon after his death, worshippers formed a community around his music that became the St. John Coltrane Church (1971), later received into the African Orthodox Church. Archbishop Franzo King and his wife recall, hearing Coltrane in 1965, the Holy Spirit manifest through saxophone –the voice of God, a wrenching into the divine. Since then: Saint Coltrane.

Many musicians write simply –and wonderfully– to make us dance. For Scriabin, Coltrane, and Sanders, composition meant pushing art's edge: turning sound into a channel to the divine, with the power to transform life.

Hauntology and Disintegration

In the 21st century, James Leyland Kirby and William Basinski –heirs to musique concrète, minimalism, and ambient– crafted ambitious works aimed beyond casual listening, closer to using sound to access altered planes of consciousness. Strikingly, these avant-garde projects seeped into pop culture via social media.

In summer 2001, Basinski digitized decades-old analog tapes and noticed flakes of magnetic oxide shedding with each pass. The horror of loss yielded discovery: the digital transfer captured the very disintegration, creating something new. "Each melody faded in its own way yet somehow retained its essence", he said. "Recording the life and death of these tunes was profoundly moving."

On the morning of September 11, 2001, as he finished digitizing the decaying loops in his Manhattan home studio, the attacks began. He blasted The Disintegration Loops, went up to the roof, and watched smoke and ruin –an epiphany: those weeks-old pieces had become an elegy. He borrowed a camera to film the apocalyptic skyline; those images later became the cover art of the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops, dedicated to the victims of 9/11.

Heard in the right state, The Disintegration Loops can be transcendental: the physical decay and death of music in real time. Entropy, audible. Time itself as the instrument. A melancholic, apocalyptic cinema of sound that reminds us: time passes; body and mind decline; entropy wins.

In 2019, James Leyland Kirby recorded the swan song of his alter ego The Caretaker –and then killed him. Everywhere at the End of Time (six stages issued 2016–2019) spans muzak/easy listening to dark ambient, industrial, and oppressive noise. Not world-ending, not faith-healing –but a six-hour, sample-built exploration of dementia's advance: original, risky, ambitious.

Kirby wants to provoke –better, to provoke something: emotions, psychic jolts, bodily sensations– so the listener can not only imagine but feel memory's destruction. He mines ballroom-era 78s and early big-band croons –the Hollywood gloss and Depression-era halls– looped into portals to a receding past. This is plunderphonics: sampling and deforming existing recordings until, stripped of context and rewoven, they become something new.

As Simon Reynolds writes, sampling is strange –and stranger still how quickly we acclimate. Six hours of sample collage –loops as time-portals, broken instrumentals sinking you into memory– push far beyond casual listening. An avant-garde project turned pop anomaly as weirdcore/dreamcore/traumacore, analog-horror, and liminal-space creators adopted it as soundtrack –bringing thousands of teens, often for the first time, into experimental electronic music.

Then came the Caretaker Challenge on TikTok: listen to Everywhere at the End of Time straight through and report back–a test of endurance and will, a sometimes harrowing ambient marathon. As Kirby told The Quietus: "That it's a TikTok challenge is endemic to youth social-media tropes –shared experience is everything… But it's also helped young people grasp what dementia's symptoms can feel like. If they see music as experience –beyond what's manufactured and blasted– independent musicians benefit".

We live amid rapid consumption and discard, shrinking attention, one-minute shorts. How did a six-hour concept album become a TikTok challenge? Is it the sheer force of a work that breaks norms –an extraordinary, terrifying listen that captivates even a dopamine-trained generation– or late capitalism taming and devouring whatever threatens its hegemony?

You're not a better music lover for gutting through all six albums of Everywhere at the End of Time –no more than you're a better gamer for finishing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (or any FromSoftware title), or a better reader for conquering Joyce's Ulysses without guides. But those works await –challenging us, reminding us there are other ways to listen, to read, to play.