The formerly anonymous Burial may have unmasked himself, but a partial veil falls back upon his latest release, a joint venture with Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) released on Hebden's own Text label.
It's unclear wither the black-sleeved, limited-run 12" single-- sans cover art, sans text of any kind, ironically enough-- is a split or a collaboration; one would assume the latter, given how much these tracks sound more or less like you'd guess such an effort to sound. But just as, in theory, the vinyl-only release should be motivating us all to go out and buy the wax (as does, I might add, the lo-fi rip that's floating around right now, which includes the YouTube streams below), the lack of specific information, like who's doing what, or even which track is which, suggests we should at least allow for possibilities beyond the garden-variety collab. Consider it a thought experiment akin to fantasy baseball, but with semi-confirmable results. What if this were a split EP? Who would you guess was behind each track? Or try this one: What if, just what if, Burial and Four Tet each agreed to produce a solo joint in the other's style-- and how would that make you think differently about your guesses?
Whatever your theories, the track I believe is "Wolf Cub" (the Juno sample has it as Track 2) certainly bears both artists' signatures, with clanging mbira-inspired sounds weaving a loose, metallic net across spindly stick-figure rhythms. That bell-heavy shimmer has long been one of Four Tet's trademarks, particularly in recent collaborations with Steve Reid; the hazy overlay, including wispy female vocals that emerge fully only in the last 60 seconds of this nine-minute adventure, is pretty typically Burial. It's tempting to guess that the elliptical, two-steppy beat comes from Burial as well; no one else has rimshots like these. As in both artists' work, accidental rhythms and agglomerated harmonics abound; a kind of field-recording vibe evokes the textures you might encounter in a hands-on exhibit in a science museum: pumice, oyster shell, features.
__Burial/Four Tet: "Wolf Cub"
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"Moth" is more surprising, in the sense that it less immediately evokes either artist; it also sounds a little more conventional, setting a gauzy, happy-sad chords to a housey, 4/4 rhythm generously imbued with the swing of UK garage. The textures still stand out-- it sounds as if the drum machine were wrapped in gauze, for starters. But the song inescapably reminds me of "Xtal", the opening cut on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85–92. (That's hardly a bad thing; both are gorgeous.) Consider it the artists' homage to one of the masters of techno facelessness.
__Burial/Four Tet: "Moth"
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Update: Kieran Hebden has confirmed that he and Burial did indeed collaborate on both tracks.
