Burial
Rival Dealer

On the day I was imposed silence, I began to listen.

Fortunately, the latter is an art that touches many creatures of human knowledge, so it was easy for me to quickly learn to listen to many nonsilences like the hiss of the neon light, the night barking, the smell of burning embers. And to learn to listen to persistence.

In the squared ordinariness of a room naturally placed outside of the mechanics of time, one could learn to listen to persistence, without having the presumption of living it, defining its contours right in that dead space that denied movement and affection. The ingredients of my transient being in that room were the usual: a worn-out dresser inherited from some old move, a desk buried under prints and blank CDs, a headboard-less bed, and the faded scraps stuck on the wardrobe with images of the current sports idols.

There was the secret hope that one day time would penetrate the walls of that lopsided room to make it float in the ether like a hypercube.

I am the last inhabitant of the most remote island on Earth, and I made sure to hook my old CD player to the usual jeans two sizes too big, whose flaunted modernity seems to break the gray monotony of the furnishings, retuning it to a more embodied shade. Tonight's listening is "Rival Dealer," an EP of solid experience by William Emmanuel Bevan, known as Burial, with sounds promiscuously suspended between something that might remind of ambient and an evolution of dubstep. But labels in this case are very tenuous. I turn on the player and it's a nice anticipation to hear the CD speed up, recalling the naturalness that resides in the mechanism of what generates the sound. At that exact moment, the contours blur.

I like to think that the start is similar to the stuttering initiation of a locomotive, with that "I'm gonna love you more than anyone" repeated as a Tibetan mantra throughout the intro, that title track which makes a clear declaration of intent blowing in the ears an intangible dust that drains away every residue of absence. In a moment, the convex folds of my room fill with shiny dark magma, and I lose a bit of perception of what surrounds me, so in the end, the gaze turns inevitably to the outside world where unseen, the neon hiss, the barking of dogs, and the acrid smell of crackling embers seem even more pronounced. My resilience has not yet been overcome, but I already feel annihilated. "Hiders" is like a blade of very white light that heals wounds and slices through the dark pitch of unconsciousness, redeeming its idle and vile nature. The neon hiss is a roar, the barking a clamor, the smell of the embers is an anesthetic balm.

In my uncertain progress on the island, which I thought happy in its static rigor, while "Come Down to Us" makes its long journey, for the first time I decide to break the chains anchoring me to my seat as an absent spectator: with a decisive gesture, I knock my rough knuckles on the window glass and finally let time inundate the room. The fourth wall is broken: I can finally see those neon lights and the black eyes of the dogs and the hot embers burst into flame. And the migrations. And the sheaves. And persistence.

My hands no longer bleed. Years after that epiphany that was the incursion of time into my life, I look at my arms whipped by the wind and the scars on my knees. I look around, and today like then, "Rival Dealer" is a listening that takes care of me. Everything as and more than then, with time layering slowly on the threshold and changing things. But one thing escaped memory and is no more. And it will not return.

My room is no more.