Haunter Records

Haunter Records is an Italian record label founded together by Daniele Guerrini and Franscesco Birsa Alessandri with a third person in Milan in 2013. After the trio had momentary wiped themselves out, Federico Scudeler now helps out, primarily with the imprints’ graphics and the website. Before personal changes were going on, the label’s roots were founded on the same realisation: “We all felt the urge within us to respond to – or in our self-consciousness to express – the confusing social circumstances surrounding us.” Under the motto which was borrowed from the post industrial band Coil ‘by working the soil we cultivate the sky’ Haunter took its beginning, not only as a label but also with a series of events in Macao, a busy, self-managed culture centre in Milan.

According to their own statements the collective is primarily about installing their own scene, where before there was little to see and hear. Predominately most of the output is therefore limited to the projects, in which for example Guerrini is involved in, something like Heith and Cage Suburbia. On a musical level there is – apart from a certain punk-spirit, which is really in the labels heart – no real uniformity. The madcap modular synthesiser etudes of the likes of a Somec and the gloomy, clattering industrial tracks of the Swiss SSSS could perhaps be united by an attitude. In superficial terms, uniting them under the same label doesn’t seem to make sense.

But that is exactly what Haunter celebrates: musical polyphony in front of ideological harmony. The label devotes itself to “cracked electronics, irregular noise and post-structuralist dance music”. Wait a minute, post-structuralism? “Well, that was originally meant as a joke” is their response. “Nevertheless much of the music is post-structuralism in the sense of it deconstructing its own genre. It uses what Gilles Deleuze referred to as ‘little language’: a type of barbaric dialect that undermines the official ways of communication. It is about a state of alienation in your homeland, a characterisation that describes most of our published acts.” A seemingly abstract explanation that – looking at and listing to the elaborately designed tape and vinyl releases of Haunter Records – soon starts making sense.