Listening to Landscape - by Phil Hubbard (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first book-length exploration of how English landscapes are represented in contemporary electronic and experimental music, Listening to Landscape ploughs its own furrow, combining ideas from psychogeography, hauntology and landscape studies to offer a distinctive take on the way contemporary music deals with the ghosts of an England that is fast disappearing.

Away from the Top 40, and often circulating in the form of obscure cassette releases and limited vinyl runs, acts including Belbury Poly, Craven Faults, epic45, Gilroy Mere, Spaceship, Vic Mars, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - and many others besides - work in experimental genres including folktronica, ambient, modular synth, drone, post-rock and noise. But all have an apparent preoccupation with summoning the essence of place, often working with ideas of memory, loss and thwarted futurity associated with disappearing or threatened English landscapes.

Moving deftly between cultural theory, musicology and geography, Listening to Landscape serves as a primer on the 'hauntological' music scene that appears fixated on questions of landscape and Englishness. It argues this music is no mere exercise in nostalgia, but a provocation asking us to re-imagine England's place in the world at a time of economic and environmental crisis. Listening to Landscape speaks to urgent questions of national identity in the post-Brexit era, offering a distinctive take on the way contemporary culture deals with the ghosts and memories of Albion.

Includes a foreword by Justin P. Hopper, author of The Old Weird Albion.

Review Quotes

A magical mystery tour for the 21st century, Phil Hubbard weaves a delightful narrative around the vibrant underground electronic music scene that draws on the English landscape and in turn defines the nation's very identity. Comes with a fantastic playlist to boot.
Neil Mason, Editor, Moonbuilding, UK

Both an elegant mapping of contemporary British electronic and hauntological music through its geographical imaginaries, and a social and cultural history of the present moment, Listening to Landscape is a political and poetic exploration of the (Wyrd) contemporary urge to evoke lost futures, spectral nationhood and eerie rurality in sonic form. Essential reading for fans, critics and academics alike.
Julian Holloway, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Phil Hubbard proves a companionable spirit guide to a musical terrain that, if haunted by a yesterday that was perversely both more pastoral and futuristic, cannot easily be dismissed as pure nostalgia, for, as he shows, artists working in this medium (and no other word will do) have often articulated something about our uneasy political present and our ongoing relationship with an environment threatened like never before by climate change. Timely stuff for a time out of joint.
Travis Elborough, author of Atlas of Vanishing Places (2019)

About the Author

Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies and Director of the Urban Futures Research Group at King's College London, UK. He is the author of Cities and Sexualities (2012), The Battle for the High Street (2017), City, Second Edition (2018), Borderland (2022), and co-editor of Key Thinkers in Space and Place, Third Edition (2024), among others.