Mark Hjorthoy – ‘Future That Never Existed’ – ZeroK
Mark Hjorthoy’s The Future That Never Existed arrives steeped in the ideas of Mark Fisher, the British writer who spent his career diagnosing the strange temporal condition of late capitalism. It wasn’t an immediate draw to me either, but bear with me. Fisher argued that we live in a stalled timeline where promised futures never quite arrive and the past loops back on itself in increasingly uncanny ways. He called this hauntology, not in the ghost‑story sense but in the sense of being pressed upon by futures that failed to materialise.
Hauntology is now big business – not musically as such, but advertising thrives on this sense of eternal nostalgia, rewarding people for remembering what they ate 30 years ago. Yesteryear was always better – you know, with the strikes, and disease, and Jack the Ripper and all that. Hey, you could even leave your house door open when you went out! Using keys was complicated back then.
Hjorthoy’s album doesn’t illustrate these ideas directly. Instead, it behaves like one of Fisher’s essays, slow and heavy and slightly misaligned, as if the coordinates for forward motion have been scrambled.
As a full listen, the album can feel overlong. Its pacing is so deliberate that the edges begin to smear and the sense of progression dissolves. Yet dipping in and out reveals something far more articulate. Each track feels like a separate transmission from a future that refuses to settle into view. The cumulative drag becomes a feature rather than a flaw, a way of forcing the listener to confront the sensation Fisher described as cultural time slipping its gears.
‘Someone Else’s Memories’ captures this perfectly. It works like déjà vu with a pulse, a repeated rhythmic nudge that grows more insistent as if we are about to finally blurt out the name we have been chasing. The moment never arrives. The track sits in that suspended inhale, an apocalyptic sneeze that refuses to detonate no matter how ready we are for the release. It is a clever way of dramatising Fisher’s idea that the future keeps almost announcing itself before dissolving back into the present.
‘No Longer the Pleasures’ shifts the scale entirely. It moves with the inevitability of tectonic drift, an ancient heave that feels geological rather than simply slow. Beneath it, a metallic screech drags across the mix like something enormous trying to brake without finding any grip. The effect is unsettling. It suggests a world trying to change direction long after momentum has made that impossible. This is not the cosy crackle of hauntology’s more nostalgic corners. It is the sound of mass shifting without agency.
Across the album, there is a sense of walking in circles. Think of ‘The Blair Witch Project‘ and that agonising trudging for hours only to find yourself back at the same clearing. The music hints that the problem might not be the path but the angle of approach. There is an out‑of‑graspness to these pieces, a feeling that the signal is always just outside the frame and that looking directly at it only makes it slip further away. This misalignment becomes the album’s most compelling quality. It refuses to resolve, refuses to offer the satisfaction of revelation, refuses to let the listener believe they have finally triangulated the source.
In fragments, the record becomes sharper. As a whole, it becomes a single suspended gesture, a long exhale caught between anticipation and drift. Hjorthoy has made a work that does not simply reference Fisher but inhabits the same temporal pressure, a music of loops, misdirections and futures that hover just out of reach.
Daz Lawrence