Burial's new EP "Kindred" is out now - a depressingly urban/hauntological track "kindred" is a cyan lit post crash example of spliced/brutalised vocogranularisms post produced to maximum (nihilistic) effect - (read cyberic -sonic fetishism - although not overt fetishism, it's a teasing, taunting, fetishism of absence).
I know that echo (in regular terms) and sampling aren't that new in music - but the haunting of the song by this half vocal, always slipping away, falling off the aural stage, evading the traditional prominence that affords satisfaction and leaving a loneliness, a decay, a loss feels strikingly negative (although Burial did do similar things on his first 2 LPs). The vocal power is always stifled, or smothered, asphyxiated by the cold, swirling winds of the contemporary vista (insert McCarthian prose at will): "choking out syllables smothered by the aural ash and soot that seems to soak the recording in a humongous, unearthly rumbling."(1). There is a tension between the voice and the track, an anxiety between "foggy vocal samples and the peaks and valleys of energy"(2)
I'm developing a bad habit of likening almost all art and music to a W. G. Sebald novel but I kinda think of the voice in Burial as taking the position of WWII in Sebalds work. Always there, never addressed directly, glimpsed on the periphery of narrative/audition but none the less the soul and power of the piece/peace....
(1)quoted from the you tube link
(2)quoted from The Wire 338 April 2012, Lisa Blanning (reviewer), pp. 67
P.S. - this new track is jostling for position, with Moth, as my favourite Burial track. Moth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUu32d8b3g
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