BURIAL

RIVAL DEALER (Hyperdub)

19/20

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way: Rival Dealer is Burial doing Burial, but an amplified, exaggerated version of Burial. Sure, rain still lashes on backstreets and haunted crackles still lick at wafting drifts of melancholy, but with these three tracks, there’s a radical reworking of the formula: Rival Dealer is classic late-period Burial, with its attendant stops, starts and hiss, but he throws abrasive, steely techno into the mix. Hiders is euphoric end-of-the-night synthpop, Arthur Russell falling into a K-hole. Come Down to Us sounds like an ascension into heaven, an Orientalist reimagining of Blade Runner that dovetails into a Christmassy clutter of huge chords and melodious twinkles, before collapsing back into itself. He can do no wrong. It’s Burial. You know it’ll be incredible.

What’s arguably more interesting is that this EP is the first time a Burial record is explicitly readable as about something. Burial-discourse, especially around Untrue, focused on the producer’s ability to conjure impressionistic evocations of something. Was it nightbusses? Finding yourself in unfamiliar parts of cities you thought you knew as new dawn fades and all the goodwill you’d amassed in the club that night dissipates into a dispiriting gloop of resentment, tiredness, sadness? Was it smoking bad weed and worrying that the electricity metre was gonna run out, but it was a Sunday and the only place where you’d be able to top it up is that garage out by Asda?

This intentional lack of delineated intention meant the listener was free to perform the aural version of Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory: Burial, whoever he is, wherever he is, gave us a text – we were left to interpret it. So we thought about the muffled, half-remembered moments of the clubs of yore; we talked about arterial roads shrouded in a clammy combination of mist and ennui; we realized that very few musicians had the power to generate a very real, very genuine sense of sadness within us like Will Bevan could. This was the perverse joy of Burial: yes it sounded sad, with those gaseous, amorphous washes of minor chord fug, the ceaseless patter of rain, the knock-knock of boots down shrouded alleyways late into the night, but this sadness wasn’t prescribed, wasn’t commanded. Burial records spoke to us without lecturing.

He doesn’t lecture us during the course of Rival Dealer, but he hints, he prods, he uses those voices, with the ambiguous androgyny that’s become as much of a Burial trademark as shells hitting concrete and the wub-wuuub-wub-wuuub burbling of bass, to tell us something that nearly amalgamates into a story. The ‘story’ fits with the mythos he’s been building over the years – Burial’s music is about displacement, otherness, existing in liminal and marginalised spaces. His songs are rife with people abruptly coming to terms with change, with the fact that life isn’t what they thought it was. Think of the moment of sheer heartbreak in In McDonalds when out of the Raster-Noton-glitchy-blue, after a sweetly vibrating voice – the disembodied voice of Aaliyah – has told us that “once upon a time it was you I adored”; a gruff, syruped up voice flatly intones, “you look different.” You look different. That’s heartbreak, that’s the sound of a world ending, the total dissolution of something that could have been perfect. On Rival Dealer, he deals head-on with issues of gender and sexuality.

Prior to this EP, as we’ve established, mystery was pivotal to the Burial experience. His mutated, pitchshifted vocals negated gender. Even when you knew the source of the sample – be it Ray J on Archangel or India.Airie on Etched Headplate – their manipulation instilled a sense of otherness within them, forced us to reconsider and reevaluate them. In some, possibly over-literal sense, the transgendered, or least pangendered, declarations and intonations –

and this writer could talk for hours about how Burial’s use of samples represent a form of communication that reveals the essence of what language is and how language works and how there is nothing in this world without language and how this knowledge is always fatally tempered by the acknowledgement that language is a construct, that language has no physical presence, that language is unstable and prone to failure, to sending out incorrect or misunderstood messages –

were always an implicit exploration of what he’s made explicit. Throughout the EP, voices, sing-speaking, reveal their confusion, comment on the difficulty of asserting an identity and asking the world to accept the choices we make. A ‘female’ voice on Rival Dealer repeatedly tells us, flatly, that “This is who I am”, followed by a male voice saying, “It’s about sexuality, it’s about finding the person who you are.” Hiders offers hope, a distorted voice telling that “I’ll always protect you”; another reminds us that “you don’t have to be alone.” Come Down with Us ends with the most audacious moment in the Burial back catalogue yet. With only the most minimal of manipulation, possibly a smudge of reverb here and there, he presents us, largely a capella, with a portion of a speech given by Lana Wachowski, a section which bears transcribing.

“Without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head – that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable… Years later I find the courage to admit that I am transgender and this doesn’t mean that I am unlovable… So that this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds previously unimaginable.”

To a cynic, it might seem that Burial’s literalisation of the latent disorentaion and marginalisation that his music has always dealt with is sensationalist, troubling, problematic; a hijacking of important issues that only really leads to articles like this. This writer doesn’t buy that, this writer thinks that the clarity that Burial’s brought to his vision on Rival Dealer is worthy of exploration, worthy of praise. There’s always been something that felt like more-than-music to his output, something that spoke of the hidden depths of the contemporary, something special and total. Rival Dealer is magesterial. There is no one in the world like Burial. Embrace it.

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Words: Josh Baines