Browse by Artist: BURIAL

Artist:	BURIAL
Title:	Burial
Label:	HYPERDUB (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HDB 001CD

Repressed and heavily in demand --one of the true signature albums of 2006. This first album on Kode9's Hyperdub label comes from the mysterious Burial. On this stunning self-titled CD debut, Burial carves out a sound which sends the dormant slinky syncopations of UK garage, via radio interference, into a padded cell of cushioned, muffled bass, passing through the best of Pole's Berlin crackle dub. Burial explores a tangential, parallel dimension of the growing sound of dubstep. Burial's parallel dimension sounds set in a near future South London underwater. You can never tell if the crackle is the burning static off pirate radio transmissions, or the tropical downpour of the submerged city outside the window. In their sometimes suffocating melancholy, most of these tracks seem to yearn for drowned lovers. The smouldering desire of "Distant Lights" is cooled only by the percussive ice sharp slicing of blades and jets of hot air blowing from the bass. Listen also for a fleeting appearance from Hyperdub's resident vocalist, the Spaceape unravelling his crypto-biography. In its loud quietness, Burial takes his kitchen crackle aesthetic neither from the digital glitch nor merely from a nostalgia for vinyl's materiality. Instead, as "Pirates" suggests, Burial's crackle mutates the tactile surplus value of pirate radio transmissions. Burial's mix is haunted. Echoed voices breeze in and out, on road to another time. Pirate signals from other frequencies stream in. This is a tidal wave of noise submerging all but the crispest syncopations. The noise is not violent, but caressing, tickling, exciting the ends of your nerves. Utterly seductive.

Artist:	BURIAL
Title:	Burial
Label:	HYPERDUB (UK)
Format:	2LP
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	HDB 001LP

Now finally bowing to widespread and sustained demand, Hyperdub now issues a specially re-tooled vinyl edition of the amazing Burial album, available for a strictly limited period. A continual seller ever since release in April 2006, demand for Burial's roundly praised debut has rocketed, following a swathe of superlative appraisals and high rankings in the various year-end review sections. With the DJ in mind, optimum sonic integrity has been maintained by removing the CD version's beatless opening and closing tracks, and the remaining 11 tunes have been re-sequenced and re-cut to allow those 4 that have until now not appeared on vinyl to be presented in newly-mastered 12"-standard audio across the first two sides. With both the South London Boroughs and Distant Lights EPs now out of print and likely to remain that way, this limited edition two-wax pack offers the only way to get your Burial fix in club-ready configuration, but it won't be around forever, as the ever-elusive producer is near to completing his next opus, at which point this changes tense from present to past.

Artist:	BURIAL
Title:	Untrue
Label:	HYPERDUB (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	HDB 002CD

This is the second full-length release on Hyperdub from the UK's mysterious and much-acclaimed Burial. Of all the artists past and present who claim to let their music do their talking for them, Burial is one of the elite band of whom this truly is the case. In fact, so reluctant is he to engage with the cult-of-personality hoopla that surrounds almost every modern producer and musician of merit, that he remains a genuine recluse; he has never appeared live, only one obliquely-angled publicity photograph is known to exist, and the number of interviews he has given can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Yet despite this, his music speaks loud and wide, and the world has been listening ever since his South London Boroughs EP debut on Hyperdub in March 2005. His eponymous album, which began life as a low-key release in May 2006, is now widely-regarded as the benchmark release of the ever-widening dubstep genre, picking up unanimous critical acclaim along the way, and ending the year heavily featured in many "best of" polls. Now Burial returns with Untrue, a new record of weird soul music, which lovingly processes spectral female voices into vaporized R&B and smudged 2-step garage. Vocal lines are blurred, smeared, pitched up pitched down and pitch bent until their content is cast adrift from their original context and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void. The album continues with the debut's crackle-drenched yearning and bustling syncopations, haunted by the ghosts of rave, but also reveals some new Burial treats with a more glowing, upbeat energy. Kicking off with the skittering 2-step syncopations and vocal science of "Archangel," "Near Dark" and "Ghost Hardware," before long it descends into a space of radiant divas and ambience. Where Burial first was humid, suffocating and unrelentingly sad, Untrue is less sunless. Many of the tracks are so sweet they become toxic, underscored by the almost geological rumbles of growling bass lines. Unlike the overpoweringly melancholic prevailing mood of before, Burial's sound is now better defined as a downcast euphoria typified by the epic, muted optimism of the album's last track, "Raver." Forget central heating -- the radioactivity of this album is all that you'll need to keep you warm this winter. Untrue is available as a full 13-track digipack CD, including recent underground hit "Ghost Hardware," and a 9-track DJ-friendly double vinyl set, from which some of the beatless pieces have been edited.

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