Burial
Burial

From above. Downwards. In a night flight. Over the gloomy suburbs of South London. Industries. Warehouses. Tenements. Even lower. Inside the new geographies of fear. Riding the wave of a bassline. An excellent tool for crossing boundaries.

In London. For almost thirty years. Since the guitar closed itself in the house. To outline romantic arabesques or express existential syndromes. Since punk ran its course. In London. The deep, syncopated heartbeat of the street comes from the bass. For almost thirty years, the forefront has been its domain.
Those forefronts generated in Jamaica. Manipulated on-site by alchemists like Mark Stewart and Adrian Sherwood. Contaminated by outsiders like Jah Wobble. Those forefronts that interpret the sentiment of the time. Of lost generations. Awaiting escape routes. Visible on the “left side” of the street. Almost always under “massive attack.” Those lines insinuate into the “underworld.” They couple with the beats of the drums. And create “new forms.” Mutants. Mutated into fat and broken rhythms. For a few years lost in dead ends or swallowed by the mainstream.

Now, in 2006, in a temporarily autonomous zone those lines resurface. From the darkness of an endless night. Relentless hyperdubbed basslines hold up a phantom sound. A sound traversed by electrostatic flows, pirate waves, pressed keyboards, charred jazz samples, female whispers, and wandering voices.

This spectral sound seems to be visible. A restless guest shaking the manholes of our cities. Of our dark places. Of our underworlds.
It seems to be visible, the enigmatic Burial, intercepting, with the cassette player, urban inquietudes. And then overlaying and saturating them with the computer until they become a contemporary mood. Close to explosion.
This is the schizoid and hallucinatory, damnably real virtue, that invites to listen to Burial.
If only to ask oneself if this will be the record that, in the end, will look at all the others. From above.
Downwards.