Burial has long occupied the space between words and ambience. On Antidawn, the cult producer’s latest five-track EP, lonely phrases drift through sparse soundscapes to create an eerie resonance that, as the EPs accompanying statement puts it, reduces sounds “just to the vapours”. Telling the tale of a wintertime city, fragmented melodies make time slow down, as if trapping the listener in a neverending no-man’s land of before-dawn – or Antidawn.
“I’m in a bad place/ With nowhere to go,” the title track reminds us. The crackles of static only enhance the feeling of entropy. Drawing on the chilling ambience of open-world videogames, haunting vignettes of disembodied songwriting evoke the sensation of drifting across pixelated vistas. But set within a world where the sunrise is always out of reach, happiness is forever an arm’s length away.
Elsewhere, PC Music’s CARO♡ shares a dreamy remix album, Gupi levels up on a glitching solo release, and deep house pioneer Soichi Terada pulls out the old hardware synths for his first full-length recording in six years.
