Day-For-Nightmarket: Burial and Cinema
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Yesterday, electronic musician Burial, born William Bevan, released another extended play in his extensive repertoire: Streetlands (it’s the second this year alone, following Antidawn). It’s as good a time as any to celebrate one of the best producers of the twenty first century, who is mostly elusive and whose personal life is next to unknown (so there won’t be too much to discuss here). Personally, I adore his two studio albums (his self titled debut, and his magnum opus Untrue), and am a huge fan of many of his individual songs (“Come Down to Us” is one of my all time favourites, and I’ve discussed my love for it before when I did more music journalism), so I am forging my own reason to even bring up Burial on this site, but I do think there is — at least a small — bridge between his releases and film. In short, it is clear that Burial is a cinephile, and there are a couple of dead giveaways.
At large, the majority of his works, especially after Untrue (back when he was making individual songs as opposed to prolonged experiences), feel like snippets of scores for films that don’t exist. Many of his songs now are beat-less: an antithesis of the rolling drum skips and clicking rhythms he was once synonymous with, and I feel like he is trying to scour mindsets and moods as opposed to melodies. His recent output goes beyond just being ambient. If you compare the digital haze of an earlier song like “Dog Shelter” (off of Untrue) with “Streetlands” or “Hospital Chapel” (off of his latest EP), you’ll see that the former is still very musical compared to the latter (collages of sounds, ideas, and sensations, all on top of his signature, artificial vinyl playback sounds). These songs for the last number of years (since at least 2016’s Young Death / Nightmarket) feel like they are meant to accompany narratives, scenes, sequences, or lives that we cannot see. We can only feel them, and imagine what Burial is witnessing. His music is more interpretational than ever; what once felt like the ghosts of British rave music is now the memories of events we didn’t even know ever existed.
Burial’s Untrue album.
As mentioned, he’s dabbled with the idea of ambient soundscapes in a very cinematic fashion before, although his tunes used to be a little more structured in an orthodox way. The reverb-heavy sounds from distant worlds (which very much resemble the midnight hours of our own realities) feel cathartic not just because they resemble yearning and isolation (the music is meant to accompany us amidst our loneliness), but because they are left to linger and allow us to search within them, like a director setting up a scene for us to explore. In fact, “Forgive” — one of my favourite tracks off of the debut album, Burial — samples Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” off of Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (meant to be a score for the documentary For All Mankind), and the song similarly underscores whatever we are observing and presents a sense of beauty and emotion (albeit in a much more fragmented sense than how Eno’s ambient song does). If you cut ahead to the earliest EPs post Untrue, Burial is exploring with lengthy songs that are divided up into acts, as if they have their own narrative structures.
This last part is especially true when you see how Burial used to splice together separate samples to create new sentences and ideas. “Come Down to Us” presents a depressed character that describes their current predicament, where they are “tied down, in the dark; in my mind”, and you can tell that the passages each come from different sources (or are produced to sound as though they are), and yet they speak a cohesive idea: that this person is not in a good place. Because Burial’s songs don’t have a singer recording new melodies and lyrics, they feel less like the output of an artist and more like conversations directed personally to us. In the same song, “Come Down to Us” tells both us and the aforementioned character “You’re not alone”, and you can feel it in the pits of your gut: you are being seen. In Burial’s soundscapes, you are a part of the scenes he creates. It’s worth noting that “Come Down to Us” concludes with Lana Wachowski’s press conference where she publicly announced that she identifies as a transgender female. To me, this wraps up the song with validation that everyone is loved no matter who they are, but it also leads into my final point: Burial is clearly aware of films on some sort of level.
Burial’s Antidawn EP.
Sure, it’s easy to say that Burial may just know Wachowski’s speech because it made its media rounds, but I’d like to think it’s because the producer is aware of the filmmaking side of the latter. That’s because Burial has sampled not only other musical artists (predominantly pop and R&B artists, like Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, and Ray J) but motion pictures as well, ranging from sound/musical passages (Alien 3, Black Hawk Down) to full on lines (Untrue begins with a sample of a pivotal scene from David Lynch’s Inland Empire); the self titled debut has a couple of dialogue snippets from 21 Grams, a passage from Forest Whitaker’s character in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and even a line from The Mothman Prophecies. I cannot complete this article without bringing up the obvious fact that Burial is also a video game fan, with numerous Metal Gear Solid franchise samples and the like present in his songs.
On the topic of films, at least one director has returned the favour: Terrence Malick, with Burial’s song “Ashtray Wasp” being featured in Knight of Cups (you should have seen the idiotic grin on my face when I noticed this in the theatre, and my ears perked up). It fits perfectly in a film about self loathing and the search for importance and life amidst addiction and narcissism: you can’t get more vulnerable than this. Burial’s “Loner” (off of the same EP that “Ashtray Wasp” was released on, Kindred EP), is featured in Elysium. To the best of my knowledge, Burial has only ever written for a film once: the short Night, Peace back in 2012, about London in the dead of night (a project he couldn’t be more fitting for). I’d like to think that he will write scores for more films in the future, but, given his contained way of releasing music, I think that’s presently doubtful.
However, he does write scores for us. These are songs and/or soundtracks to your loneliest moments, crafted by a producer that spends countless hours stripping sounds of their flesh and piecing together mismatched bones to make a new ossein sculpture that tells its own identifiable story. We feel misplaced, but we also feel consoled, whether we’re “In McDonalds” at one in the morning and wondering where the day went, walking home in the middle of a blizzard and lost in both our territory and our thoughts, and staring off into space and in search of an answer. Sometimes Burial provides us with a proper perspective that we can relate to. Occasionally, he provokes us to let our mind wander. Either way, his music enhances our most despondent and secluded states, like compositions to the films, scenes, sequences, and moments of our lives. His songs make us feel like we matter as much as a protagonist does in our most vulnerable and disengaged moments, and that’s quite a special quality to have as a music producer. Burial makes the scores of our lives at their least Hollywood, and that’s when I realized that his music isn’t as chilling and eerie as it may appear on the outside: it’s actually incredibly warm and understanding.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.