#subtemple

BURIAL  “Subtemple Ep”

[[ GROOVES N JAMS S.O.T.Y. 2017 ]]

[ nO. 16/50 ]

“Subtemple” by Burial

MG:

The negative space in Burial’s music always feels black, not white. This isn’t a canvas that he carefully alters with revealing fragments. It’s nighttime, it’s a darkened alley, it’s your mind when you close your eyes. I think it’s the blackness, the sense that however sparse the flickering sounds and however closely they resemble static the space is already filled and already meaningful, that is comforting. “Subtemple” might be classed as experimental but it’s not agitation that drives Burial, it’s agitation that surrounds Burial. The work is supremely peaceful and balanced; it’s realized. I like to listen to “Subtemple” when I’m going somewhere. The title suggests a sort of stasis, or a destination, at least, but the pace and stretch suit movement, a planned out here to there. Commutes, mostly. I know this isn’t Burial’s inspiration and probably not the ideal application, but it’s the closest I come to that pure moment of divinity.

DV:

just two weeks ago I managed to pick up a vinyl copy of Untrue by Burial, one of the twenty or so best British albums of the century so far. and though it was missing ‘Ghost Hardware’ for reasons I won’t rifle through the information trove of Discogs to find out, it was such a pleasure to play a genuine classic on a good format (here the mask slips and the bandcamp reviewer reveals his analogue bias!) and bask in the crystallisation of millennial discomfit and gloomy piss-sodden streets held on those four sides.

since then Burial has stuck to releasing EPs, forgoing knife-sharp percussion for long sides of smoky, wrecked, spartan ambience. Subtemple/Beachfires holds to this aesthetic seachange, digitally-manipulated smears of suggested cinematography. music for coming down to.

but the problem is that bandcamp shows there are people out-Burialling Burial at this new game. the crackling digital static, the filling of the stereo image, the suggestive rather than the overt. but it’s been done, done better, done more frequently, and now in 2017, ten years after the last real stab at vitality, the previous race-leader Burial is getting left behind.