Music The Time For Burial
posted by on January 2 at 15:33 PM
Cultural theorist Steven Shaviro selected Burial’s Burial as the best album of the year 2006. I would go as far as to call it the best album since Tricky’s Maxinquaye, which brought post-colonial Britain to the point of dusk, the verge of the aftermath. With Burial we are in “the land of the aftermath.” But above all that, above the post-Thatcher ghost town, what in the end I felt and learned from Burial’s genius this year, the year that begins him, and what has changed forever how I understand music and value it, is his sense of, and emphasis on, drumming. Drumming is the art of timekeeping. The drummer’s sense of timing is what matters most. A drummer with a weak sense of time has little or no impact on us, the listeners; a drummer with a strong sense of time changes everything about us, because everything about us happens in time. Elvin Jones, the greatest drummer on record, is the reason why we can say we always hear what Nietzsche called “new music” when we are listening to the albums by John Coltrane’s classic quartet. The experience is “Out of This World” because we hear a time, we move to a system of time, that is not of this world. We are transported. We are transformed. We return to our ordinary, diurnal state rich with new moves, new steps, new turns. Burial’s music is also like “Out of This World.” It is the meter of, the movement in, a time that’s somewhere not here.
Nice, insightful post.
I recently purchased a compilation of tracks by five drone-based experimental artists called "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space" (the artists are Taurpis Tula, The Skaters, My Cat Is An Alien, Jim Haynes, and Number None, the comp. was released in 2005 by the label Rebis). [link]
It suggests that drone can do something similar to what drumming does on Burial's album, which is to place the listener in a "system of time that is not of this world." While Burial's (and Jones') drums do this by emphasiszing timekeeping and the passage of time (using syncopation, layered rhythms, etc to disrupt the listener's perception and expectation of time as a metronomic, regular procession of moments), drone transports the listener by dilating time into a perpetual NOW... we do not anticipate the next beat, we simply listen...
The liner notes to the "Time" compilation are a bit silly and New Agey, beginning with this sentence: "When the Second God first made available the choice between Objective and Subjective Time, it was not immediately obvious to the people of Earth what benefists this transciritcal bifurcation held, so the Second God sent a series of agents to display a few of the new marvels." I would say that Burial and Jones are agents of these new marvels as well as the artists on the "Time" comp.
Make of all that what you will, what I'm trying to say is that I'd be interested to hear what Charles would think of contemporary drone-based music.
I think you're out of touch. Your list does not include The Knife.
since maxinquaye? really?
even better than dookie?
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