#antidawn ep

[disease]

BURIAL // SHADOW PARADISE [ANTIDAWN EP, JAN 2022]

[oopsl]

Antidawn EP by Burial, 2022

[bagcitylights]

[bizarrobrain]

"Shadow Paradise" by Burial - From "Antidawn" EP (2022)

[groovesnjams]

“Strange Neighbourhood” by Burial

MG:

As someone who is learning to love winter, new years, and the alienating core of existence through the Burial drip (his habit of letting most of his releases trickle out in a year’s end or beginning) you may not be inclined to trust me when I say “Strange Neighbourhood” is reflective of Burial’s most straightforward and accessible music. His work often feeds off its own obscurity -- hard to decipher samples, vague titles that cannot be pinned to anything other than imagination, found sound ranging from the patter of footfall to a soft swallow -- but, here, that obscurity is offered up to the listener as the experience of wandering anonymity. “Strange Neighbourhood” is as simple as taking a walk around the block but in proper Burial fashion, it’s more like the walk is taking him. The production is full of all his favored ambient touches but never develops the usual two-step beat. Instead Burial takes us through a series of rooms, emotions, and identities, each passage both continuous and discrete. In the minutes we spend peering through all these different windows, the soft magic of simply being envelopes us. The wisps of other lives we’re treated to are mysterious and enchanting -- like the neighbor who’s a trained opera singer or a classical pianist, you don’t have to know anything about the rigors of their craft or pay to sit during their performance, it’s all right there in the air as you walk by. And the samples, though I still can’t quite be sure, sound like deeply familiar songs (the organ creak of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and the reverbed synths of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” are present in some way.) It’s a pleasure to exist at the same time as Burial and that’s the thought I always return to when the faucet twists back to life.

DV:

Part of me still resents how often MG makes me listen to Burial for this website. But I’ve come to appreciate how effectively he’s solved the issue of being a DJ in an economy that doesn’t reward DJ sets. Every Burial song sounds like an excerpted segment of a five-hour-long set, and for all I know they actually are. This makes these tracks a little frustrating to engage with when I’m not swept up into Burial’s vaguely rhythmic, particularly atmospheric ambience - which is most of the time. Of course, “Strange Neighbourhood” doesn’t even have those rhythms to hold onto, sounding like a radio being tuned in a dimension where the drum hasn’t been invented yet. So instead I’m clinging to this release strategy: good for Burial for figuring out that if you can’t make a living off distributing a DJ set to people who view the “single” and “album” as sacrosanct forms of music, you can dice up that set and call it something that people will buy, in both senses. It’s an inverse of mid-2000s mixtape culture, where rappers were releasing major, album-length statements as semi-legal free downloads. And it has the advantage that while a DJ set is liminal, subject to redaction or delisting, a label release legitimizes it and provides it with at least a kind of permanence. This isn’t a strategy that would work for everyone, in the same way that Beyoncé-ing your album only works if you’re actually Beyoncé. But it does make me wonder who else could get away with it.

[killadelphia]

* Ahem *drowning in the new burial ep