Yes, from listening to the 'South London Boroughs' EP (and the Radio 1 Mary
Anne Hobbs Breezeblock Mix), you do get that sense of someone who's working
within a 'situated' position of 'knowledge' sort of *within* the
(sub-)genre pushing outwards, rather than someone on the outside
opportunistically reaching in and and nabbing some bits they like the look
of to embellish their own differently-spirited little vehicle.
Agreed on Boxcutter, I see his position vis-a-vis dubstep as more analogous
to Squarepusher's relationship to jungle/d'n'b. It's appropriating and
remodelling. Like you say, the maximalism that comes from his more 'IDM'
sensibility means that he loses the tension that comes out of the
sparseness and feeling of 'withholding' of what is almost there but never
gets stated (see e.g. Pinch's 'Qawwali') - a kind of 'spectral' quality
that's present in 'genuine' dubstep.
Interesting that Burial had never heard BC/R&S - I thought there might have
been some degree of allusiveness there in the name (cf. R&S's 'burial
mix'). There ya go.
Still haven't ear'oled the album, alas. OOC, where'd you pick it up from...
Warpmart?
alan
--On 24 May 2006 15:08 +0100 David Sim <pmxds@nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:
quoted 38 lines Yeah, I liked the 'South London Boroughs' EP too. Burial was introduced
>> Yeah, I liked the 'South London Boroughs' EP too. Burial was introduced
>> to me as the dubstep artist most likely to appeal to "you Basic
>> Channel/Rhythm &Sound types". And in the same breath characterised as
>> "not really out-and-out dubstep". I guess that's why I find him the
>> most intriguing of the acts I've heard. Same with Boxcutter. They're
>> drawing from the template and cutting it with other genre substances.
>
> The Burial album arrived on my doormat this morning, and the initial
> impression is that it really is fantastic. I love the way that as well as
> having some distance from dubstep and its ancestors, garage, jungle and
> hardcore, he's got a really deep understanding of them - something that's
> normally missing from 'genre but not really genre' records.
>
> I'll give Boxcutter a bit more of a listen, but I've not been too
> impressed with what I've heard so far - he seems to go a bit maximalist
> and lose that incredible meditative atmospheric sparseness - sort of like
> a Rothko painting made out of bass - that makes dubstep so unique and
> exciting. At the moment, 'cutting dubstep with other genre substances'
> seems a bit like watering it down. Unless you're Burial, in which case
> you can get away with murder because you're gifted.
>
> Apparently he'd never heard anything like Basic Channel until Kode 9
> played them to him, though - he just arrived at a similar sound directly
> from garage.
>
> David
>
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