Burial
Tunes 2011-2019

I guess it makes sense to start from the beginning...

So, 2006, Burial's first album...

Voices that are like moments, moments that are like rain. Pale lights on fragments of glass. Sounds like shadows. Everything seems broken.

This was the album you had been waiting for years, right Marc?

Evocative melancholy, skeletal obsessions.

The remains of the rave banquet, the ashes of ritual fires, the elegy of missed futures. All things you have said...

A bit like the paranoia of an album like Neil Young's “On the Beach” after the dream of the sixties. Things never change and the “afters” all resemble each other.

Anyway, this Burial is clever...

The classic alchemist armed with scissors and glue locked in his little room; samples, devilry, and whatnot. Clever, yes, and the album is fantastic too...

I don't know why, but Joy Division comes to mind, music for desolate spaces, whether physical or interior doesn't matter. A philosophical connection only though...

As if certain rhythmic solutions and the love for the “minus sign” come from the late seventies post-punk, here the references are mostly the second summer of love and trip-hop...

With the second album, things change slightly. And, to make myself understood, I insist on Joy Division. I repeat, they don't have much to do with it, but the difference between the two albums is more or less like that between “Unknown Pleasures” and “Closer”...

The sound loses weight and slips towards the transcendent, the melancholy becomes ecstatic and everything is more airy and mysterious.

The voices, much more prominent than before, possess a strange angelic quality and the sense of loss becomes universal and almost otherworldly.

In short, a kind of ultramodern and ancient soul. Something never heard before...

Or, paraphrasing "The End", "Weird soul inside the gold mine"... except the mine is abandoned and there’s no trace of gold.

And the third album? The third album will never come out.

Just EPs, seven to be precise. This “Tunes 2011 to 2019” collects them all. About two and a half hours of music...

What can I say. Burial is a wizard, capable of finding new solutions like few others, and enriching his palette. He who broke and broke well now expands and expands even better.

He stretches things out, the tracks often go beyond ten minutes, a kind of luminous dance that takes you everywhere and almost always ends with a soul release...

Going up, up, up, up...

Going down...

Sure, there’s a lot on the fire and this is just one aspect, but it almost seems like the old rave days are back. Even if perhaps it’s like when you listen to old records and momentarily rediscover lost time.

In the end, it's always a ghost story...

…....

Can I fly?

Oxygen, endorphin release...

Can I cry?

The soul parachute...

A guy on YouTube says “I feel the ethereal charm of this music in every fiber of my being.” And I agree with him...

But is it a kind of new psychedelia?

Boh...

...

Entrance gate: a little less than half an hour of ambient with crackling. Like zero degree, like dead time, like a vague sense of horror. Then finally his very particular soul, all those colors/non-colors.

At a certain point it's a kind of fury with a mystical chant, shortly after the whale's voice gets caught in something metronomic. And then that thing we started from. Can I fly?

Can I cry?

It’s all too much and so from there it’s a matter of necessary decompression, even though moments of ecstasy are not lacking. Those voices that come in and out, only they do it divinely...

As the poet said? “I don’t know anymore if I’m dying or being born”...

I think it has something to do with the whale singing. This guy is obsessed with whales...

"People who know me laugh at me because I like whale songs. But I love them, I want the vocal parts to sound like that, like a cry in the night, an angelic animal"...