"What you thought was a snare or a high hat might actually be a gun reloading or the game’s main character picking up an extra life..."

Have you forgotten what we were like then?

Burial will dig you out from a mire of numbness and linear thinking, which is why he’s named himself after the act of going under. His is a consciousness submerged in a lucid dream. He cannot come up here with you, and anonymity like this lives deep beneath all of our identity politicking. The sages, the ones released from samsara, know how to embrace it and work with it as if manipulating a quantum field. As a persona, Burial is among them, ancient to the future. It’s easy to merge with his sound and forget it’s not your own—whimpering, yelping, fighting with yourself to see which mask suits the moment. Appropriating Burial’s brittle and singular utopia as where we want to live for a while is part of hearing it. We access it as a matter of luck or serendipity of the soul—are you fortunate enough to see the value in a heap of ruins staggering up to you, part human, part machine, prone to either embrace or hurl you into the bonfire of traces and trances it uses to keep warm?

Here you are, a prisoner of swoon. The sound pursues you with an earnestness that makes you question its nature, beautiful but also desperate with a legible incoherence that seems unfair. How did Burial discover the axis of murmur and articulation first; and how did he know to isolate it as lyric? True beauty is lawless and defies any logic beyond itself; it is unjust and a spectacle of justice. Here’s the “Ugly Beauty” that Thelonious Monk introduced in analog, bypassing decades of revision to reinstate itself in the digital world, ugly synthetic beauty deepened by its ability to manipulate tone and texture and displace sequence. Here loud rain can interrupt a jittery walk through an abandoned factory and induce a flood on concrete, a floating city. A shard of Beyoncé’s most literal singing can find itself disembodied and threatened with violent abstraction in the London underground, groping for the familiar, an orphaned carefree that without its previous habitat transforms into a haunting cry for help.

The composer wishes to remain anonymous; he might even want to decompose and reemerge as his sound. He’s not so scarce that the music cannot be released and subject to an audience, but he is inconnu enough that you don’t listen with one ear scrutinizing its maker and the other focused on the song. The lack of a clear source makes the music more like an ancient scroll passed down from mystic to student. This is music that Rumi might arrange, or Sun Ra’s child, or Billie Holiday if she had survived and escaped to Europe to disappear. 

Here sorrow is as impulsive and delightful as a crowded dance floor at a rave. Glimmers of ecstatic pennance feel like gifts and charge you with purpose. You look up and you’re in the belly of a whale whose tongue is laced with everything you’re afraid to say, confessions gathered immobile and specific and damp. It’s called a burial but we attend hoping to raise the dead or lift our own spirits in naming them. He calls himself Burial but invades the crypt and digs up deluged and deluded skeletons to teach them angelic learning.

Burial released his first album on the UK’s Hyperdub label in 2006, after a few years of EPs. The self-titled work opens with a sample of Benicio Del Toro talking in the film 21 Grams: God even knows when a single hair moves on your head. Del Toro’s raspy indignance feeds seamlessly into “Distant Lights,” a sharp dance track that abducts this all-knowing God in search of adventurous sins. “Spaceape,” the album’s third track, intervenes as the monster who will inevitably appear when you doubt the gods, and declares we are hostile aliens immune from dying. The curse of immortality without dignity gives us this almost comically abrasive sound—a bluff that goes on for long enough to become militant and real. The album’s heart is “U Hurt Me.” The track samples Nas and Ashanti and repeats its accusatory refrain until u hurt me begins to sound like hurry, like an urge to flip pain and panic into liberation as in the Frank O’Hara line each time my heart is broken it makes me more adventurous. The Spaceape’s return is as a romantic. He hinges his gun on his love like a soldier’s broken letter home (my love, mylovemylove) and uses a nonstop cocking firearm to inflect that adoration with sultry predictable danger—a fatal attraction turned resurrection. Here’s where Burial starts seducing us into his upended crypt. “Forgive” releases the tension of entry, a spectral into the middle. I hear the phrase heal your heart but it’s a mirage. The voice could be saying anything, two octaves up from a baby crying; your soul could be needing anything. This song mirrors what you need to hear and reconcile. The imagined lyric isn’t meant to be corrected, it must be misheard to be perceived at all. Things get more ominous, there’s blatant surrender of whatever armor lets us march confidently, brazenly, into this abyss. Burial’s debut album is marked by erratic displays of bravery and retreat that ensconce the listener in her own psyche and make her face it and dance it into full conscious testimony in the body first, then the spirit. Spunky and delicate at the same time, this music induces the feeling of falling in love and forces you to turn it on yourself like a dagger.

True Love

Untrue was released in 2007. Burial’s sophomore album is a sparse and demure extension of some of the excavations begun on his first. Untrue is where it becomes apparent that there is a poetics to his method of sampling, a method that allows the sampled songs to exceed and defy themselves when improvised within his landscapes and to achieve this without seeming appropriated. It’s the ardent assembly work of a prudent collector of miniatures who wants to construct his own city of petit replicas of his obsessions, a city of whispers, hearsay, rumor. Abandoned phrases function like abandoned buildings in this wartorn metropolis. One by one they tell the story of a fragmented psyche that hopes to piece itself back together. The stakes are higher this round. There’s no Spaceape to add grandiosity or disrupt the vulnerability, which now shrouds itself in erotics instead of aggression. The tones are looser without sounding frayed, as if the year in between the debut and Untrue induced a dynamic reverence for cosmic forces where materialism once reigned. Maybe it was love and heartbreak, or maybe it’s none of our business, but this is the sound of secrets seeking divulgence over time, of the hermit flirting with the idea of self-revelation. Closer, closer, one song insists in its chorus, its atmosphere implying the looming proximity of aroused bodies on a nightclub dance floor, but you can also hear the song's composer teasing himself from behind his own veil of sound. The burden of public life and the burden of anonymity are beginning to trade places or become equally disruptive, both thieves of creative freedom for opposite reasons.

As technology has invaded the human condition, outcries about the sanctity of privacy have been forced to reevaluate their legitimacy. In this new context, excessively performative mystique can now seem as clownish as minstrelsy; an extension of minstrelsy, even, remixed to accommodate a modern sense of elegance predicated on drawing attention to itself. It’s easy to differentiate dignified withholding from the hiding behind various masks that’s done for gravitas or clout. At the same time, there’s nothing more heinous than the data miners, who, through technocratic surveillance, use our collective testimony to extort our desires for profit. Burial’s music understands that all of these shifts are occurring simultaneously, and it rides them, then overrides them to bring some pleasure to a bleak set of distinctions. That pleasure is what keeps us coming back, we real masochists who want to be reminded of what we’re up against when we are fearless enough to love beauty and erotics and despise the pathologizing of joy and open-heartedness.

What’s accused of being untrue here is the prevailing myth that all enjoyment is toxic or oppressive and should inspire shame. Playful austerity and an eerie mischievousness in the face of amorous feelings: they help tell the story of a hero longing for a former lover who he is also rejecting. Once upon a time it was you that I adored / You look different: this is the cold haunting couplet that dominates the song “In McDonalds,” which feels like a breakup scene in a sad apocalypse movie or a sad small town film like Buffalo 66 meets Mulholland Drive meets goodbye.

The songs on Untrue fixate on an absence so striking it comes alive and escorts itself, trembling, writhing, slow-spinning in a fog, never quite emerging for reconciliation because the objective is to yearn, to remind ourselves to keep yearning until we reunite with our most fulfilling desires. An impossible order. But as devout listeners to this forlorn tale, we can’t help but chant it to ourselves and oblige. The placement and selection of samples leaves cravings in our hearts the way sugared sour candy does at the movies; we will keep reaching for them until all that remains are dust and plastic. The isolated lonely phrases will keep reaching back, as if through the bars of an imaginary captivity or stuck in the shuddering quicksand beneath the beat, just out of reach. Strangely, the mood is ultimately celebratory, one of deliberate and ritualistic letting go, of the self and the people and ideas the self latches onto for comfort or to avoid healing wounds, pains, and bad dreams that have become addictive. Together we release all that. We are left in shambles but more effectively ourselves, realer, more mythic, unfaithful to anything disenchanting about our pasts, recovered, untrue.

Not long after Untrue’s release, Burial gave an extensive interview with the journalist Mark Fisher and his identity was unearthed. The most stunning details of the interview are not his name (he was born William Bevan; he was raised in South London). They’re the moment when he refers to his music as a talisman, and a passage where he describes listening to Sam Cooke and hearing the torment and portent in the smiling notes. We learn about Burial’s upbringing, how he inherited a love of sound from his brother and video game soundscapes. We discover how the depth of his music was informed by very tangible and mundane events: the death of his dog, a conversation with his mother, a walk through town alone over and over and over until his ideas about sound became inevitable threads of his sense of being. When you have a sensibility like his it seems the choices are either madness or communication. Revealing his identity, one sensed, was a rejection of purgatory and the potential for insanity within its narrow confines. It was also his way of not engaging the mystic as an act, divulging just enough to keep himself casually unknowable.

Rude Awakening, Love

For more than a decade, Burial contented himself releasing sundry sonic experiments. But then, in January 2022, we got Antidawn. It’s a five-song EP that sounds like the shedding of a skin in real time, the comedown after never-ending mania. There’s no beat to move to and distract us from the melancholy, just a pulse and a tremble. New voices continue the odyssey that began in Untrue, and it’s clear that estrangement has deepened and refined itself, almost pledged fidelity to its condition. Antidawn functions like an epic in five parts, each song around ten minutes long as compared to the three-minute segments of previous albums and the sublime hunter’s quality of his even more recent EP, Streetlands.

Antidawn opens with a phrase: You came around my way. The line repeats, accusing someone of almost returning, teasing return only to still be unreachable. The crackle of fire lights this new land. We are drifters together beneath flamelight. The title track follows, a stupor or searchlight blues when I come around. A lost soul threatens, like a zombie trying to reanimate and using the future as a prayer for grace. “Shadow Paradise” is a mirage where wishes come true. Let me hold you, a voice pleads. Mumbling responses produce an almost yes. A paradise of almosts, still no beats, just crackles and sparse nests of organs that signify the fallen, a wall of synths broken by operatic voices celebrating an imagined embrace. This is a record of two years of isolation with no collective outlets, no dance floors, no crowded boulevards, just the voices in our heads reinterpreted over and over like broken promises. Antidawn seduces with an alienation that grows expansive. Where before the ache had a party to get to, this new desolation has nowhere to be but inside itself. The last human survivor on earth exists here in this sound, questioning whether it’s worth it to keep trying, nodding in affirmation and terror. The oblivion here has enough charisma to sustain us, and reminds us that so do our lives without the velocity of distraction. If it all collapsed tomorrow and we had to revert to the telepathic and heliocentric, we would recognize these voices as our own better selves. They’re sending a warning from the future, a warning about how one day Sisyphus stops pushing the boulder up the hill and finds there is no hill, just his guilt weighing on him at an obnoxious slant.

It’s not important who Burial is privately, because he’s on a mission to disinherit every bias that comes with his received identity as he improvises with his favorite alternatives. His poetry is a line-by-line record of disheveled hearsay warmed in effigy at the last good party. A party where everyone has headphones on, playing a different song, longing for a different rumor to become so significant it’s meaningless, so pronounced it’s wordless screaming coughed up like good blood offered at the altar of our heroes who have been destroyed by their need to scandalize themselves. It wouldn’t be so enticing if we weren’t all busy party-hopping in a horror movie and auditioning the good nights for paradise, where we expect to be discovered as deities and winners. Burial’s albums comprise gorgeous audition tapes for our next selves. They move in tone from subtle exhibitionism to the stark minimalism of remorse, as if it’s embarrassing that we ever needed a beat to give us permission to dance. All we should need is an empty room and a catastrophe to get us strut-stepping like heathens and guessing our new names in a raffle of distorted phrases so distressed they are poems. What is present in all of his work is the will to disappear, the constant scanning for where it might be appropriate to decapitate the former self and let it live on as a headless dancing body. This is what the world tricks all of us into considering, becoming frivolous to shake off our demons. When we refuse, it’s the demons who disappear. We might even miss them, Burial suggests, from deep underground where the gold and the gods live. ♦