Synthesised nostalgia: Exploring Inal Bilsel’s retro-futuristic sounds

A feature piece by Lance Peng on Inal Bilsel

With over two decades of experience in the music industry, Inal Bilsel has carved out a unique artistic identity—one that fuses music, visual arts and speculative narratives. A multifaceted composer, performer and educator, Inal’s work is a journey through contrasting worlds: fact and fiction, nostalgia and future dystopia, narrative and conceptual abstraction. His sound is influenced by science fiction, retro-futurism and musical hauntology, a genre that evokes the echoes of lost futures and fragmented memories. Whether through electronic compositions, orchestral pieces or immersive audio-visual performances, he pushes the boundaries of what music can communicate.

Hauntological Form: Where We Might Find the New in Contemporary Videogames

A post by James Sweeting

Introduction

To answer the question “where might we find the new” this paper will provide insight into the circumstances that encapsulate contemporary videogames. Acknowledging that since the start of the new millennium the future has been increasingly difficult to locate, simultaneously, contemporary videogames have been preoccupied with looking towards the past for answers. Nostalgia has often been considered as a potential source for the state of reverie that the past provides, whether that be from history or media form. However, nostalgia is not the source of the increasing reliance on the past, rather it is the identifiable symptom of something else, that being hauntology. 

Roots to Routes: Community Resilience through Ancestral Knowledge

A post by Lance Peng

In a world where progress and innovation are often prioritised, I highlight the need to reconnect with the past, drawing on the wisdom passed down through generations. Mnemohistory, which focuses on how societies remember and reinterpret their history, shows that communities don’t just preserve events but also pass on cultural practices, stories, and shared experiences that shape their identities, and by tracing developmental paths through this historical knowledge, we can see how communities use their past to deal with present challenges and plan for the future. This approach goes beyond written records, exploring how the act of remembering and reimagining the past connects with shaping the future, with ancestral knowledge serving as a key resource in strengthening community resilience.