Definitely-- we try and formulate some kind of model (psychological or situational or whatever) to make sense of the limited information. Burial's new album plays on this as the collage of voices can't easily be slotted into a conventional model of romantic dynamics, and the tension between the limited information and our apparent need to create an ordered interpretation is what gives the songs such depths, and also a real poignancy- like the overheard mobile conversation, you will never actually be able to know for sure what they were talking about...
Burial "Untrue"
- Thread starter Blackdown
- Start date
Definitely-- we try and formulate some kind of model (psychological or situational or whatever) to make sense of the limited information. Burial's new album plays on this as the collage of voices can't easily be slotted into a conventional model of romantic dynamics, and the tension between the limited information and our apparent need to create an ordered interpretation is what gives the songs such depths, and also a real poignancy- like the overheard mobile conversation, you will never actually be able to know for sure what they were talking about...
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
The public space becomes more and more haunted and abandoned as we shrink from the shattered horror.
The sense is that engaging with it threatens to destroy anything in us capable of resisting, and yet this must be a further illusion.
'It' wants us not to look at it, not to face each other over the abyss.
Ahem...
The sense is that engaging with it threatens to destroy anything in us capable of resisting, and yet this must be a further illusion.
'It' wants us not to look at it, not to face each other over the abyss.
Ahem...
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And in so doing Burial creates a nice allusion between the death of rave (=collective experience) and the death of the communal experience more generally-- though we hear the chatter of alien presences all around us... reminding us in a genuinely haematological manner of the mass/social nature of our world even as we retreat ever further into techno-solipsism.
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noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
And also on a personal scale, lost loves and futures that were never to be. Children that were not to be conceived.
And in that sense Burial could almost be seen as a love-lorn architect... stitching back together the possible that was snatched away (lovers reunited if only in denatured song, UK garage resuscitated if only in an abstracted form)... a kind of mourning then, but also a kind of return
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Literally immanentising the eschaton.
The ghost of the eschaton. A spectral pre-echo.
The ghost of the eschaton. A spectral pre-echo.
Great elaborations! This really is the creation of a new kind of voice, a de-individualised, uncanny, machined bearer of vocal, erotic, desiring etc. affects, both less and more than a "person", free-floating but intensified and piercingly affective, like the unconscious made sonorous... the next step in a mutant lineage running through opera's larger-than-life personas, the distorted intimacy of close mic technique (Sinatra/Crosby), effected vocals (Sun Studio's slapback on Elvis' voice, Joe Meek, Beatles & psychedelia etc.), Hannett & Ian Curtis, hip hop, Cocteau Twins, MBV, house and rave's vocal s-s-sampling and time-streeeeeeeetchchchchchchchiiiiiiing, sliced and diced rhythmedelia in Todd Terry <-> UKG...
Haha... Not quite... more like the idea of a lone techno-architect universe-builder (alone at the end of humanity) creating, from the fragments of the recorded world all around him a replication of what once was, animating it in an attempt to console himself in his isolation.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Heheh. A bit fanciful I know.
But then also to go back and reexamine where the ghosts come from, to replay the film and see what has been left undone and misplaced before moving on. And then perhaps moving on to a place where all those things can indeed be reunited and live again.
Out to Joe Smooth and MC William Blake...
N
nomadologist
Guest
This thread needs to be rated, it's one of the best conversations about an album that I've ever read on Dissensus. 
What's interesting to me about the vox, especially on "Archangel," but really the vox and the striking vocal concept behind the entire album is that it encompasses almost every voice of love/longing/desire/romantic torture-rapture I can think of from pop history, in terms of timbre and emotional depth of delivery. This is what I meant about "queered" up, this idea that there is no discernable gender involved, there is no "girl in distress, boy saves girl, boy is girl's hero" romantic narrative.
Burial has taken the pop vocal and turned it inside out so we see the seams instead of the smooth hemline. The voices on Untrue are deterritorialized and out of time, place, body--what's interesting on this album as opposed to the first is that on the first, he was remapping the psychogeography of the ex-raver's London. On this album, he's unmapping the psychogeography of dubstep, r&b, rock, rap, pop. He's letting the skeletons out of the rave closet.
What's interesting to me about the vox, especially on "Archangel," but really the vox and the striking vocal concept behind the entire album is that it encompasses almost every voice of love/longing/desire/romantic torture-rapture I can think of from pop history, in terms of timbre and emotional depth of delivery. This is what I meant about "queered" up, this idea that there is no discernable gender involved, there is no "girl in distress, boy saves girl, boy is girl's hero" romantic narrative.
Burial has taken the pop vocal and turned it inside out so we see the seams instead of the smooth hemline. The voices on Untrue are deterritorialized and out of time, place, body--what's interesting on this album as opposed to the first is that on the first, he was remapping the psychogeography of the ex-raver's London. On this album, he's unmapping the psychogeography of dubstep, r&b, rock, rap, pop. He's letting the skeletons out of the rave closet.
And hence the alienated emotionalism comes into play as the previously concrete world dematerializes entirely into images, recordings... like at a gig or club night where everyone is so caught up in recording the process on their mobile phones they don't actually experience it first hand... almost as if Burial-as-God of the hauntological realm is attempting to re-animate this chrono-displaced world...
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
I was going to mention Will Powers with reference to this, bit then they were a bit rubbish really.
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nomadologist
Guest
This quote should be on the packaging of the album!
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
What happens when those spectral presences become overlaid / replaced by reverberations of Burial songs? Like massive graf works in the virtual urban realm. Tagging the ether.
N
nomadologist
Guest
k-punk to thread! All of this reminds me very much of these paintings K-Punk had posted of these urban figures in decay, where there were depressed little vegetables smoking a cigarette, or those hooded figures with neon presences. Can't remember the artist's name, but I think his work fits in really well with Burial's...
This is exactly what I think this album is about.
This is why his remix of Bloc Party actually works amusingly well... the key hookline of the song is an anguished falsetto'd "where is home?" which in a hauntological remix sounds like the vocal-sample-ghost engaging in an auto-critique of their new environment-- the voodoo ghost inside the fetish object, endlessly sold on and reversioned... (although equally it could emphasises the alienation/disjuncture of the black immigrant experience, to return to another hauntological thematic)
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N
nomadologist
Guest
I think song titles like "Ghost Hardware" are keys to the whole conceptual conceit of the album. My dad quotes this Noble laureate all the time, and I can't for the life of me remember his name, in reference to his experiences with psychedelic drugs. He quotes this guy as saying "the human being is a machine that any ghost can operate"...of course, for my father, this has Christian significance, but it works well with Burial, too.
N
nomadologist
Guest
Just found it, Sir John Eccles, neuroscientist.
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
In 'Raver' they await us as dancing ghosts in the virtual realm. Have they just 'dreamed life'? Redemption is deferred, 'the world will be here', 'the world will be ours', they repeat to each other in order not to forget, something, important. 'Is it?'.