Burial’s productions chronicle an inescapable sense of disintegration. These inconstant, drifting, longing voices, carried away on winds import the cycle of finding people and losing them again, here, sped up and caught on brittle tape. There is a notable absence of drums of any kind, or even similarly structured sounds masquerading as percussion. If Burial’s past work can be characterized as downbeat or downtempo, his latest release “Antidawn” firmly emphasizes the latter.
The EP starts with “Strange Neighborhood.” An oversaturated voice and a retro organ quivers with matching uncertainty. A vampiric quality haunts the composition of this track. These are not the chords of so-called western choral composition but rather something warped to become more sinister fugue states, made evident by the release artwork. A few major chords in this track seem to be ripped right out of an eighties baseball victory montage as they shine in the sky like a burning Dodge Challenger before vaporizing into thin air. A voice calls out with uncertainty, but it’s not the voice of a lover; it’s the voice of a demon imitating a lover as it calls from the other side of the veil. A shiver passes through the vocals as the record hisses etched tones underneath. It’s reminiscent of the way a spiritual medium might scan radio stations and interpret the fragments of song that break through to be an entity communicating to them through the chaos.
On the title track, wisp-thin swells of creaky pads and bells accompany, almost sympathetically, these haunted voices. Like lost souls digitized, added to some purgatorial matrix, and left to ruin by a careless God, the soundscapes seem like a life force ebbing away into the ether with each utterance of some generic last rites.
“Shadow Paradise” is buttressed by the same gothic, organ undertones and is punctuated with moments of joy before slipping back into smoothed dissonance as rapid-fire swathes of sound are held together. Voices and sentences are reduced to something less than clearly defined meaning, fighting the same unwinnable war with erasure as the creaking, memoryless instruments. Something tugs at the lower notes like a frequency-selective black hole desperate to obliterate information, releasing it as pure radiation into cold space.
Listen to this release alongside Untrue and it is clear that Burial is possessed of a singular, genetically unshakable style; but what does that style consist of exactly? What are its signature traces, as in, what goes into the sauce?
Burial is not limited by the sampling process any more than Francis Bacon was limited by turpentine, and the way it could make colors run muddy on canvas (one can easily imagine one of Bacon’s faceless, hideous monsters crawling through the battered, postwar landscapes Burial carves out here).
These inconstant, drifting, longing voices carried away on winds import the cycle of finding people and losing them again, here, sped up and caught on brittle tape. For a brief moment there’s a breach of hats, something structural, but it is subsumed again into the constantly shifting organic whorls. Rhythm can’t last– it must be orchestrated, and costs something to maintain. There is a notable absence of drums of any kind, or even similarly structured sounds masquerading as percussion. If Burial’s past work can be characterized as downbeat or downtempo, the emphasis is now firmly on the latter.
This mystery of these voices’ origins is responsible in part for the sensation of loss captured in his music. These voices could belong to hugely successful artists lost to time, or some random girl who uploaded a YouTube video covering her favorite Regina Spektor song from a suburban bedroom ten years ago.
These voices are all of us and they are no one’s. They are isolated from their source by Burial’s equalizing and atomizing blender of sonic reintegration. Burial finds a way to sculpt something essential from the data surpluses streaming by us on informatic seas every day. What traces of our lives will haunt the digital purgatory we leave behind? Who will judge or rearrange what we leave? Who among us will be restructured into art; and who is doomed to a death so complete that they are erased from the informatic sphere completely?
Anyways, it’s actually very nice to listen to.
-Winston Mann
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