burial - truant + rough sleeper

i don't know what it is about burial.

burial is a british musician from the UK who makes music i can't even begin to understand.  and no, it's not a result of having just pricked my skin on his bizarrely beautiful anti-music.  i've listened to every one of his songs hundreds of times and i understand them and i don't fucking understand them at all.

a rigged patchwork composite of recorded sound effects, overwhelming vinyl crackle, rainsounds, whispers, clipped slipshod drums, videogame bits, mashed strings and jagged murmuring vocal samples and lullaby bassline meshes.  all this seemingly disparate matter composed into soundscapes that echo condemned buildings, sneakers sticking to wet concrete, lost souls dancing against streetlights like moths, neon lights spelling out your truths, passing cars, humble banshee girls next door, your mistakes, your redemption.  your secret favorite thing.  the shitty stupid thing you said to her, what she looked like when you said it and how she looked at you.  and, later, his music has that fucking indescribably impossible, anachronistic, chemical component: it says "it's ok".

i've listened to burial since i first started listening to him.  there's a reason his ramshackle tunes have persistently remained in the unforgiving eye of the culturati.  an anti-persona, an anti-musician, he paints a weird welcome and we all flock to it.  he really doesn't give a shit, except he totally does, he bleeds into these minutes released in their always-too-slow trickle.  longing for an era he missed by making music out of time, music that doesn't exist anymore, except he's making it, so it does, fucking up the spacetime continuum.

time travel.  wet concrete.  factories churning out smoke in the distance, away from us (doesn't really matter...right?).  there's a sound that comes off four houses down as we walk, it's a bark, a dog-sound, it's the dog we grew up with as a kid who died.  there he is, four houses down.  we walk past.  we're not crying, right? no.  we're adults now and we don't cry about that shit.

but there he is in the headphones.  scratching away at that shit.  soon our steps are catching his stepless rhythm, we find it, or find its lack of rhythm.  and then we are walking, walking.  and feeling miserable but alive.  there's the diner we like, tonight we don't go in, but it's there, it exists and things are OK.  we walk past the graffiti that's still there from last week, we appraise it again, amused and inspired by it, until it is in our peripheral, curling around our right arm with just the lightest tug.  we'll see it tomorrow.

and oh god there's the elevated train.  like an angel on ragged wings, ragged tracks, shaking the very earth, and it splits through the headphones until I am listening to "Stolen Dog" behind its casually beautiful carnage.

there is very, VERY little music these days that stirs a conversation within me.  2012 was a fantastic year for music and there was plenty bubbling in my little humble android player companion.  i would talk your ear off about it if humbly permitted.  but the truth is that very little of it communicates with me, back and forth and back again, aside from burial.  i listen to great records and I marvel at their greatness, their decisions, their failures and immense accomplishments.  their impressive fidelity, their curing properties, their escape.  and i listen to burial and i speak with it, and i walk with it, and it grounds me, sadly, pleasantly.  and i know it even though i would disagree with every choice, every badly placed beat, every tricky fucked up gritty missed trigger.  if i knew him i'd be like why the fuck, and who the fuck do you think you are, and come on clean that shit up, and come on come on.  and there at the 13:04 mark on "Rough Sleeper" is that fucking bizarre synthy bit that starts up, it comes on twice, twice before the end, because that's all that was there, because that's all that was needed.

it's always exactly right, shabby and worn and stubbornly confident.  it plays coy, and plays serious, and fucks with you, tricking your ears, painting something forgotten.  at night it joins me on walks home from work, or walks home from walks.  it's background music, except it's a feature film made entirely out of background pieces.  it's the video from Infinite Jest.  it's about the only characters you care about, but you've forgotten their names or wondered if they ever had any.  or if that matters.

burial released his last bit recently.  it stops and starts, it shrugs and straightens its tie.  it doesn't know if it's interesting, or if you'd care about it.  but everything within it is indiscreet, and its emotions shoot true.

the thing with burial is that he doesn't have any "tricks" you're not aware of; it's all true.  he's a terrific liar, for sure.  he hides in plain sight, a scribe for a history half-experienced, a guide to the only city he knows, the city that's not your own.  but it's all true.