Burial – Antidawn

117,00 lei

Label: Hyperdub – HDBLP050
Format: Vinyl, LP, EP
Country: UK, Europe & US
Released: Jan 28, 2022
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient

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Burial’s Antidawn opens with a sound so subtle, so instinctive, you might miss it the first half-dozen times: the muted harrumph of a throat being cleared. But no opening line or expository declaration materializes in its wake. Instead, a thousand shades of gray rush in to fill the void. In the background, a blunted stylus pushes its way endlessly through a dusty vinyl rut, the Sisyphean loop that carries all Burial’s music. Chimes shimmer in the darkness; a low wind blows. Far in the distance, a voice faintly reminiscent of Gregorian chant flares up and is snuffed out, like a votive in a drafty nave. Almost a full minute passes before we hear the next thing resembling a melody—a brief snippet of a voice plaintively singing, “You came around my way”—but its appearance is fleeting, followed only by more emptiness.

Across five tracks, Burial proceeds like this for nearly 44 minutes, teasing imminent emotional payoff and then slipping back into the murk. It is his longest offering since 2007’s Untrue—long enough to qualify as his long-awaited third album, if he had chosen to call it that. But it is also the London musician’s most insubstantial release, seemingly by design. The music simply meanders, drifting across stray synthesizers, snatches of voice, and Burial’s habitual diegetic sound effects—coughs, lighter flicks, crickets, thunder, rainfall—severed from any context. There are few musical landmarks and little in the way of recognizable compositional form. Crucially, there are almost no drums. Not the 2-step rhythms that have defined Burial’s work since the very beginning. Not the thrumming trance and techno pulses that have been leaking into songs like “Space Cadet” as of late. Not even the soft downbeat grooves of a ballad like “Her Revolution” or “His Rope.” (The salient exception: a brief stretch of muted kick drums, halfway through “New Love,” whose cottony thump recalls Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project.) Burial is no stranger to doom and gloom, but Antidawn is a barren wasteland, warmed only by the occasional church organ or doleful scrap of love song.

This is not the first time Burial has muted his drums. He did it on 2016’s “Nightmarket,” an eerie collage of beatless synth melodies and static that marked a significant break from the hard-charging “Temple Sleeper.” The following year’s spacious “Subtemple” and “Beachfires” descended deeper into ambient music’s chilly nether regions, and he went undersea spelunking once again with last year’s “Dolphinz,” a nine-minute expanse of cetacean wails and ominous sub-bass drone. Within the ambient corner of Burial’s oeuvre, what distinguishes Antidawn, beyond its extreme sprawl, is the collaged chorus of voices that holds together its windswept expanse of undulating nothingness. Mostly sung rather than spoken, these sampled utterances coalesce around themes of absence, desire, and unease.

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