Burial / Four Tet
Moth / Wolf Cub

LA RECENSIONE

A 10" vinyl slipped into a black package, no writing, no information about the record, just the names of the artists and the track titles.

Reading them, you understand, Burial and Four Tet: masters of electronic avant-garde (but not only, in fact, electronics is just the tip of the iceberg) enigmatic like few others, both in music and in life. An unexpected yet astonishing collaboration. 18 minutes of music, 2 tracks, one per side: all you need to know, the rest is told by the music.

And then "Moth", a moth flying decisively towards dark and mysterious places: an alienating synth loop, always the same, on an even rhythm, always the same, for nine minutes. And beneath, disoriented vocals typical of Burial's production, chimes, mysterious silences. A monotonous, repetitive, peristaltic, incessant movement, almost indescribable. It intoxicates and suffocates. The more it suffocates, the more it intoxicates. You listen to it and feel at peace with yourself, it's just you and this rough and mechanical sound that envelops and massages you, you could almost fall asleep and sleep in a fetal position, regressing to an emotionally embryonic state. A synth that repeats, voices popping up from nowhere, a deep bass making your whole body pulse, metal filaments flying coldly and frictioning each other. A musical embrace, incredibly warm amidst the frigidness of the individual sounds, endless, wonderful. You could listen to this sound forever and never get bored.

On the other side, "Wolf Cub", here we are in the world of Four Tet: exotic sounds evoking the Orient and boundless, wild places, that our imagination struggles to process. A music box from another planet duets with an electronic spout. The two sounds intertwine and then break apart driven by a deep bass like a well that goes down to the center of the earth, where the lack of light is not "darkness" anymore, it is something more, terrifying, so dark that it's as if you no longer exist. And there it is, the hyper-skewed odd rhythm of Burial, intrusive, that seems to push you from all sides: you can only curl up and hold your breath, pretend it's just a dream. It is a free fall, a spiral dive into the unconscious. Any "objective" description becomes meaningless. It is music to be faced alone. It cannot be shared: so slippery, shapeless, and shadowy, always different depending on who looks at it. Each of us will fight it differently. Hold your nose, close your eyes. It's not a walk in the park.

Two masters. Two tracks. Eighteen minutes. Not a single second wasted. Five.

Bon voyage