Burial makes a vital sonic pilgrimage with Tunes 2011 to 2019, a carefully curated collection that inhabits past, present and future

Damon Lindelof’s radical reinvention of Watchmen for television introduces the concept of Nostalgia pills, which allow an individual to relive sections of their past as lived-in-the-moment memories. It would seem advisable to take small doses at a time and never to take another person’s pills. Nostalgia as we know it – under a multitude of guises, but not of course literalised in pill form – might not be as immediately dangerous, but is nevertheless potentially damaging in the long-run.

That’s not to say that personal histories should be ignored. In terms of music, it can be particularly powerful to revisit artists, labels and scenes that once consumed you. Experiencing the music again in fresh ways – as a different person years further down the path – rather than simply retreating into it as a comfort would seem to be the key here. With his ghostly manifestations of rave, Burial is able to interact with the past as if it were a living thing. Listening to the results is like taking someone else’s Nostalgia pills without getting completely fucked up on them; just the right amount of fucked then.

Tunes 2011 to 2019 is itself a collection straddling past and present. Burial has programmed a startling sequence of tracks from the 12”s he has put out since his second LP dropped. It’s a two-and-a-half hour journey into the interior on CD rather than a string of EPs casually re-bundled only for easy further consumption. Was this an act of joining the dots after the fact or was there greater collective purpose to these compositions from the outset? It hardly matters when experiencing the whole feels so vital.

The collection laterally brings to mind DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing in its gauzy soundscapes and the sonic treatments of Burial’s mining of the past. The crackle of the before bleeds through the now, filtered out through dreamlike beathead reconstructions. Warehouses repurposed once more, now as luxury apartments, with stone tape recordings picking up echoes of illegal parties as recorded by sonic psychic researcher Burial. “Night Market” is particularly astonishing in this regard. Ravey synth stabs fire up out of the soup of uncanny background noise, the push-and-pull between coming up and breaking down. Five minutes into its seven-plus minute runtime and on comes the synth-and-stalk, John Carpenter a momentary phantom on what was once a dancefloor. Drawing parallel lines here might lead you – albeit briefly – to Pye Corner Audio circa Sleep Games, which is an album that really speaks to my six-year-old. As does Tunes, the haunted hands-in-the-air rave transmissions of “Night Market” in particular. What is it about Burial’s ghosts of raving past that my son connects with? He didn’t live through rave and doesn’t inhabit a dubstep present, but all it took was a certain Burial track to allow him access to the hardcore continuum. For Burial has a unique ability to bottle up what’s gone before so that it doesn’t have the toxic side effects of nostalgia.

burial.bandcamp.com

Stewart Gardiner
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