Sounds of Lost Futures

Jamie Sexton is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University. His publications include Freak Scenes: American Indie Cinema and Indie Music Cultures (2022) and Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2025).

For a while, I’d been hoping someone would write a book like this. Hauntology can be an elusive and ambiguous idea, and while Sexton sums up many existing writers’ positions, he also adds his own to the mix, anchoring it to a galaxy of remarkable and overwhelmingly British musicians. Erudite, wide-ranging and effortlessly engaging, it provides both a valuable guide to existing debates and fresh insight into music’s spectral dimensions. - Kevin Donnelly, Professor of Film and Film Music, University of SouthamptonJamie Sexton’s The Sounds of Lost Futures is a fascinating time traveller’s guide to sonic landscapes and the psychic imaginary. A subversive field guide to invisible worlds and the temporal uncertainty of haunted sound. - Jeff Young, author and playwright, winner of the 2025 TLS Ackerley PrizeThis meditation on the spectral afterlives of English culture offers a compelling account of the significance of hauntology within postwar British music and culture. Drawing together critical theory, media archaeology and close readings of sonic and visual culture, the book traces the persistence of forgotten promises across the landscapes of English popular memory. It illuminates how British music became a privileged site for negotiating nostalgia, temporality and cultural decay, exploring topics ranging from public broadcasting and electronic experimentation to lost past futures and post-industrial melancholy. Fascinating and deeply insightful, this important contribution to contemporary cultural criticism captures a cultural moment that maybe many of the participants consciously didn’t recognise they were making, yet one that has profoundly shaped the sensibility of the present. - Ivan Seal, painter and sound artist