Providence, 2008
The Third Perfect Listening Space
It’s been pointed out that Burial’s Untrue ought to be listened to at some point after 3am. ________ In UK time it’s 2.50am, so New York is sat somewhere around 9.50pm. ________ Maybe two hours of this flight left, straddling time zones, never really 3am until long after I touch down.
The album, playing in one ear, takes me – fuckingturbulence – takes me out of the aircraft and into two distinct and perfect listening points: back to the loft of Bradley Road, drinking cheap Scotch alone and trying to tie plans and paper and plots and polaroids into something lasting; out in Finsbury Park, getting a bus to meet Esther in winter dark though black lit streets. This is the third perfect listening space then: Thousands of feet up in the night air. ________ The album is drawn to the colder moments of 2008, the lonely points at which I’m aware, keenly, of the threat to me that the world beyond my control poses. – theplaneshudders – Looped themes play out across Untrue in a manner that reminds me of the best poetry. Untrue is still about home, the darker shades of it, and it reminds me of the hidden industry of my capital city, making ghosts of the top layer and ripping away the tangible, forcing them it blend into the landscape. Nothing is more important than the common themes: Darkness, Lonliness (voices in isolation), Drive, Depth, Connections (lost and broken, but there).
Instruments bounce – bouncejoltfuck – bounce around this lost space, the album builds walls for echo and distortion and repetition that don’t dilute or damage the source but do, certainly, degrade it, degradation the natural result of the passing of time on all things.
Untrue is a washed out as I feel now, and then. Untrue is drunk. Untrue is lost in memories, built both to house them and to make something new of them. Untrue doesn’t need me.
© Matthew Sheret, 2008
