Burial "Untrue"

[nomadologist]

I decided I liked Dog Shelter a whole lot. The "B side" is kinda growing on me a lot...

Still need to trip and listen, maybe tomorrow, then I will really be able to tell you what I think...

EDIT: It would be fine with me if JT were singing "Archangel"!!

 

[gek-opel]

The last Burial album needed to be listened to half drunk/half tired falling asleep at a bus stop in the middle of an urban area in late autumn... THIS one, I don't know... it has more of a lusty fear/desire lover's recrimination thing going on...

 

[nomadologist]

It's like if you just found out the person you've been trying to sleep with just slept with your absolute least favorite asshole on the planet.

I think it sounds more summery than autumn...especially like a rainy summer in NY (this new one I mean)

 

[adruu]

i like homeless right now the most, and the ghost hardware ep is for me the release of the year.

i was really really excited by stairwell, so it will be interesting if he pushes that ultra darkside tempo sound a bit. i'm all for it, but im a freak =)

 

[noel emits]

It's like if you just found out the person you've been trying to sleep with just slept with your absolute least favorite asshole on the planet.

Think I might draw for the Whitehouse first.

Burial for when the emotional exhaustion kicks in.

 

[continuum]

love the Chantelle Fiddy sample at the start of Etched Headplate

 

[nomadologist]

Think I might draw for the Whitehouse first.

Burial for when the emotional exhaustion kicks in.

Haha! Yeah for me it would be Burial first, until the frustration really started to eat away at me, then I'd probably put on D.A.F. and kick things.

My new roommate is hilarious, he's more of a hip-hop person, but my boyfriend put on "Los Ninos del Parque" to play for him and he immediately started jamming to it and said:

"This is awesome, it makes me want to do drugs, dance, and punch someone in the face!"

 

[nomadologist]

Then after I got the physical frustration assuaged for long enough to feel the emotional exhaustion, I'd listen to "Teach Me How to Fight" by Junior Boys on repeat for a couple days and sob.

 

[noel emits]

Yeah, Burial's more for the stunned numbness.

 

[straight]

actually was able to give the album a bit of time over the weekend and it hasnt dissappointed. I do agree the sequencing isnt great, archangel peaks it way too early and apart from the title track ive yet to fall in love with any of the other tracks ( but it took a while for the first to do its magic).
Im surprised there hasnt been as much talk about the trancey side of the album, it seems as much of a component as garage, is everyone determined to keep it on the 'inuum?. The interlude on the first record which sounds like a trance breakdown and a snatch of female vocal sowed the seeds in my head of working on some distant radio based trance-like drone works and now id definitely like to investigate something along this line.
I also knocked out a quick techy 4/4 edit of archangel last night for a set ender, i might post it up here for a laugh when its finished.

 

[gek-opel]

In think the trance-iness is from a common ancestor of lush vocal rave dramatics to be fair... but there certainly exist undeniable similarities. Interestingly as you say the raviest/tranciest elements are kept within the entirely beatless tracks, which is pretty unique... instant anthemics could be created with the mere addition of a beat to a lot of those pieces (especially the one you mentioned on the first album)... but obviously Burial doesn't want to make it as easy as that! Indeed it is almost as if the blissy components and the beat components have been pulled apart from one another- almost in hauntological protest...?

 

[audiofelch]

The last Burial album needed to be listened to half drunk/half tired falling asleep at a bus stop in the middle of an urban area in late autumn... THIS one, I don't know... it has more of a lusty fear/desire lover's recrimination thing going on...

i really got this feeling from the new record as well. Your point about the genius of Archangel's lyrical ambiguity is OTM. he manages to turn this spliced, repitched voice into a character of incredible emotional depth and nuance. its totally compelling. and fucking brilliant pop: the kind that condenses a whole feast of turmoil and depth into the simplest of saccharine vocals.

 

[gek-opel]

i really got this feeling from the new record as well. Your point about the genius of Archangel's lyrical ambiguity is OTM. he manages to turn this spliced, repitched voice into a character of incredible emotional depth and nuance. its totally compelling. and fucking brilliant pop: the kind that condenses a whole feast of turmoil and depth into the simplest of saccharine vocals.

Also although the lyrics are still pretty bare-bones simple on the new record, they have enough cohesion within a given song to work as more than just the vague refrains on the debut... and hence the greater humanity of the record, you feel as if you are intruding onto little private psychodramas, rather than merely catching the exhalations of spectral presences in a depopulated urban space...

 

[Numbers]

Dog shelter sounds like Enya.

Yes. Probably in a perverted Moby remix. I could almost hear the 'Sail away, sail away', followed by a punchy 'Go!'. If that isn't haunted, then what is!
(Mind, that's not to say I didn't like the album. This particular track is just way too epic for me.)

When listening to Etched Headplate this morning, I wondered if Burial (or someone else) would ever refix some of the beat-less tracks. I sure would like to hear a 4x4 version of Etched Headplate. Agreed, it would be absolutely contrary to the whole ambition of the album, but stil...

 

[dHarry]

i really got this feeling from the new record as well. Your point about the genius of Archangel's lyrical ambiguity is OTM. he manages to turn this spliced, repitched voice into a character of incredible emotional depth and nuance. its totally compelling. and fucking brilliant pop: the kind that condenses a whole feast of turmoil and depth into the simplest of saccharine vocals.

Yes, the way he pitch-forces the samples to sing different melodies is fantastic; such a simple abuse of technology that we're all aware of since Fairlights' melodic barking dogs in the 80's, yet it was never done quite this way before, to create a new inhuman singing persona. And I would reverse your last point, that he foments and extrapolates a feast of turmoil from the simple vox.

the greater humanity of the record, you feel as if you are intruding onto little private psychodramas, rather than merely catching the exhalations of spectral presences in a depopulated urban space

*alarm bells* - greater humanity...private psychodramas... *alarm bells*
While Untrue feels like a step forward, I have to admit I prefer the old exhalations of spectral presences in a depopulated urban space; this has potential for territorialising and reducing the hauntologic/uncanniness in his vision to the personal-individual-ego.

 

[gek-opel]

Hmm... but I think that in doing so he has opened up a firmer dialogue with "pop"-- and whilst approaching a more conventional song-form the ambiguity of his manipulated vocal lines (full of not just pitch-shifted denaturalisation but also the ability thru cutting and pasting of syllables to transform the linguistic meaning of the original sample- "untrue" yes?) becomes ever more foregrounded: by moving closer to a "normal" structure the oddness becomes even more stark... the ghostliness comes in that he makes dead recorded sound speak for his own emotional agenda, he re-animates it, stitching together fragments into something which approximates a garage pop song, whilst like a Frankenstein's monster the stitches in the skin are all too visible. The emotional response that it generates in the listener then is complicated by the ever-present awareness of the unnatural form of construction, which immediately problematises the straightforwardly ego-psychological interpretation of the song. To whose ego are we referring? The singer of the song? Burial himself as engineer? Or some abstract third party character depicted in the song... equally the blurring of gender distinctions is even more subtle- Burial deliberately obscuring identifiable gender signifiers in the lyrics and vocal tones being used... every time you think you find the meaning it slips immediately from your grasp ("I can't take my eyes of you my..." Boy? Does the voice sing that or what exactly? Then later "I envied you..." Girl?) ... All you are left with is desire and recrimination circling each other... the delirium of love is contained in the very fabric of the recording... As such this record stands much closer to the theoretical presentation of the hauntological agenda in sound, rather than the more atmospheric debut.

In a sense rather than the ghosts of pirate radio, it is now more snatches of half understood mobile telephone conversations between technologically distanced lovers overheard on public transport... where you can't quite tell if they're laughing or crying...

 

[noel emits]

Yes, the way he pitch-forces the samples to sing different melodies is fantastic; such a simple abuse of technology that we're all aware of since Fairlights' melodic barking dogs in the 80's, yet it was never done quite this way before, to create a new inhuman singing persona. And I would reverse your last point, that he foments and extrapolates a feast of turmoil from the simple vox.

Not to demystify the process too much (but what the heck - if it can't survive analysis...), I don't think it's just straight re-pitching.

It sounds like a combination of re-pitching, pitch-shifting and formant correction. Pitch-shifting shifts the harmonic content whilst retaining the temporal, while formant adjustment allows the sound to still retain a recognisable vocal character, sometimes with the effect of turning male vox into female and vice versa.

Maybe Jarre's Zoolook or Holger Czukay's 'Cool In The Pool' could be seen as forerunners in terms of technique? But yeah, can't think of anyone outside of academic music (Paul Lansky maybe), who's taken it this far, even though it can now be done with even free plugins.

Eno was playing around with lots of vocal manipulation on a recent album wasn't he?

 

[noel emits]

Synthesized and processed voices nearly always have an uncanny resonance. The language response centers in our brains are incredibly sensitive and powerful in their unyielding drive to extract meaning from vocal sound. Our ears are most responsive in the frequency range that the human voice operates in.

 

[noel emits]

the ghostliness comes in that he makes dead recorded sound speak for his own emotional agenda, he re-animates it, stitching together fragments into something which approximates a garage pop song, whilst like a Frankenstein's monster the stitches in the skin are all too visible. The emotional response that it generates in the listener then is complicated by the ever-present awareness of the unnatural form of construction, which immediately problematises the straightforwardly ego-psychological interpretation of the song. To whose ego are we referring? The singer of the song? Burial himself as engineer? Or some abstract third party character depicted in the song...

Great analysis.

The third party is always there in the experience of music and song - one can never experience the other directly but always through the filter of one's own character. The Burial process makes it possible to perceive more clearly this entity that is formed at the interface by revealing how the artificial construction can still result in a genuine response. It is then something we then share collectively amongst us more profoundly than we can our own private isolated experience.

Hmm, not sure about this. Maybe what is revealed is our own unconscious interpretation mechanism, where we form an image of the other.

 

[gek-opel]

Great analysis.

The third party is always there in the experience of music and song - one can never experience the other directly but always through the filter of one's own character. The Burial process makes it possible to perceive more clearly this entity that is formed at the interface. It is then something we then share collectively amongst us more profoundly than we can our own private isolated experience.

It is about the public/private sphere distinction also... the de/re-territorialisation of both through technology and the way that snippets of intimacy escape their intended bounds and fill up the ambient space in urban centres, a collage of personal dramas all ripped out of context... on the street and the bus and the tube, all these little fragments... so in a sense Burial is still talking about the urban space, but this time not as a Martin Hannett esque industrial echo-chamber (all smashing glass and wrought iron debris) but the human urban space... just as populated by spectral presences...