Crackle and Materiality

Crackle and Materiality names a specific sonic-ontological operation in which the accidental, degraded, or residual features of a recording medium — hiss, crackle, surface noise — are not edited out or treated as mere interference but are actively foregrounded as compositional matter. In Fisher's account of Burial's music, this practice is theoretically significant because it turns the indexical traces of time and physical wear into bearers of spectral meaning. The "crackle" is not noise to be suppressed; it is the material remainder of a past that has not fully disappeared, the sonic equivalent of a ghost. By refusing to repress these accidental materialities, Burial makes audible the irreducible gap between presence and absence that defines hauntological time.

This move articulates a materialist dimension of hauntology: the spectre is not merely a figure of speech or a cultural-theoretical metaphor, but something that can be instantiated through literal sonic texture. The crackle functions as what one might call, following Lacan's logic of the objet petit a, a leftover — a remainder that cannot be absorbed into the clean signal of the present, and which therefore testifies to the persistence of a lost past (or, in Fisher's specific formulation, a lost future). The foregrounding of accidental materiality is thus an ethical-aesthetic refusal: a refusal to let capitalism's smooth digitality erase the traces of what might have been.

Within ghosts-of-my-life-writings-on-depression-mark-fisher, the concept of Crackle and Materiality sits at the intersection of Hauntology and Lost Futures. Fisher's hauntology — drawn from Derrida and applied to post-Blair British culture — is fundamentally about the way the present is haunted by futures that were promised but never arrived. Burial's crackle materialises this logic sonically: the grain and degradation of the audio surface becomes the literal texture of temporal dislocation. This distinguishes Burial from dubstep more broadly, which Fisher argues forecloses spectrality by trading the rave continuum's utopian energy for a harder, more foreclosed sonic affect. The Hardcore Continuum is the genealogical tradition Burial elegises; crackle is the medium through which that elegy is carried.

The concept also intersects with Mourning and Melancholia and Spectrality. Where conventional mourning would work through the loss — cleaning up the signal, moving on — Burial's foregrounding of crackle enacts something closer to melancholic attachment: the lost object (the rave continuum's utopian promise) is kept alive as a sonic trace rather than surrendered. The Sublime is implicitly present too, insofar as the crackle indexes an excess that cannot be fully represented — an acoustic remainder that overwhelms clean signification. One might also read this against Afrofuturism: where Afrofuturism projects forward through technology, hauntological crackle insists on the return of what was technologically suppressed or abandoned, making the accidental materiality of sound a site of political as much as aesthetic meaning.

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost FuturesMark Fisher · 2014 (page unknown)

Burial conjures audio-spectres out of crackle, foregrounding rather than repressing sound's accidental materialities.

The phrase "audio-spectres out of crackle" is theoretically loaded because it fuses the ontological register of hauntology ("spectres") with the literal acoustic register of degraded media ("crackle"), refusing any separation between the metaphorical and the material; "foregrounding rather than repressing" then introduces a psychoanalytic logic — repression versus acknowledgement — making the compositional choice an act with quasi-analytic stakes about what a culture is willing to hear from its own past.