Burial ::: Burial ::: Hyperdub

Very tasty slice of phuture garage breakbeat soul filtered out into a serious selection. Musically I found the sculpted, well produced tracks – witness the subtle double vocal on the second track, ‘Distant Lights’: in general razor sharp dub production, utilising lots of little sounds and details that render at a high resolution, musically speaking. The cover, all low level urban views as if taken from a helicopter or a UFO: distant, twinkly lights, the visual virus or code of our cities, populations.

Musical influences unfold like you’re taking in Saturday night going through the wave bands, exploring radiospace. Slow burning colours and crisply snappy, textured breaks take place within an ambience of sub-bass and sounds: a bit like the Future Sound of London in the early 90’s, or A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Black Secret Technology’, creating futuristic spaces. Stephan Betke’s ‘Pole’ project has been mentioned in reviews and I can see why, the sounds seriously focussed dub pressure at times. The cd also opens out to much more ambient spaces and at times synthesis of the Pole sound and well sculpted two step rhythms: at others something slower and religious takes place, like mixing Pole with Massive Attack, or Autechre, dubbing it out on ‘Gutted’ (8) or ‘Wounder’ (4). The smearing bass sound that is often heard in this cd raises interesting thoughts about parallels, i.e. when u smoke skunk you’re smearing your head in a way, and the video that accompanied the Kode_9 track ‘9 Samurai’ in a recent art show visually illustrated this to some extent, playing with the idea of sound and rupture. New sounds, new mixes, new visions.

What does this hail after?: ‘Night Bus’ makes me think about lonely, urban scenes, the modern day medieval reincarnated:, a narrative of something of scale: a kind of religious feel, choral elements used in a totally coherent way but combined with other styles of production too. ‘Forgive’ seems to hint about redemption.

There are some good samples: I’m not sure how many but at the start there is one from ’21 Grams’, Benicio Del Toro’s character – the ‘bad’ guy in Sean Penn’s ’21 Grams’ – imploring “God even knows when a hair moves on your head”. Or the string’s, for example in ‘U Hurt Me’, very beautiful middle eastern type sounds set to dope rhythms. Music that resonates with a kind of techno paradigm: production on the interestingly titled ‘Southern Comfort’ utilises techno style sounds but played with in a very human way, like Carl Craig say on his ‘More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art’ (Planet E).

Burials single ‘South London Boroughs’, which I believe has been reissued to accompany the cd, also gives it up, offering the same full on bassline business mixed with a coherent and detailed soundstage. Not a lot has done it for me since the jungle/drum and bass situation of the early to mid-90’s: this is doing it. ‘Broken Home’ kicks off a bit like an ambient Kid606 track, all reverb and space, then focussing down to mournful broken beat machinic, but human, twinkly ambience, like the best 90’s sampladelia.

http://www.hyperdub.com/

http://kode9.blogspot.com/

http://www.ccru.net

August 2006