Burial, “Come Down To Us”

Even though a decade has passed I can remember everything about the night I first heard it, the sound of the twenty-first century. I was married. We went to a party. Our friends were busy with cocaine and I was bored, bored of the drug’s effects on the men we knew, bored with my own efforts to situate myself among the intellectuals. The previous century had gone long, lasting by my calculations until the spring of 2012 when the dragon’s year began and I moved to Manhattan, only to discover that the New Age eschatologists had gotten it half-right—the world went on, but wasn’t the same. Standing at the edge of the scene in Red Hook I had the sinking feeling again, the feeling of being an arriviste sitting on a deck chair with a disconcerting tilt, watching as time slides out of mind. 

So I was alone until I realized there was somebody next to me, handing me a lighter to replace the one I was evidently, cigarette in mouth, trying to find in my tote bag. I turned, it was a friend of my friend, don’t ask me his name or his face but everything else I remember, like he was nice and he had in wired headphones and he handed me one without speaking, for which I felt grateful, and then he pressed play.  

The song he played was by the electronic musician called Burial. Possibly “song” is not the right word. It lasted thirteen minutes, during which time I re-experienced my entire life: bus rides, ice skating, Satie on the piano, a dream where I couldn’t stop running, hiding in the coat closet, pages from my diary on fire, the cold lake at night, at the hospital saying it was an accident. Snow started falling before my eyes, although it was July and I was wearing a slip dress. When it was over I felt electrically shocked.   

Think of the difference between a grid and a piece of mesh, with the grid being vivid on a screen and the mesh being pressed into yielding skin. That is the difference between the electronic music I knew before, music I would broadly describe as fractal, and the music of Burial, which I would describe as filamentary and/or anfractuous, woven from fine chains of signification, gleaming strangely. I read on the Wayback Machine an interview he did with Mark Fisher in which he named as “destructive” the process of editing beats, loops, and samples into a single waveform, which he said ideally gives fishbone. Instead of a sequencer, he uses a single-channel program that seems akin to working on cassette tape. “Once I change something,” he said, “I can never un-change it.” Like in life.

Burial’s characteristic sampling practices make me think of an old commonplace book, unearthed and waterlogged, hard to “read.” In “Come Down to Us” the story sounds clearer. One sample particularly is crystalline, and is placed near the end to serve as coda, almost exegesis: a clip from a speech given by the filmmaker Lana Wachowski when in 2012 she accepted an award for being herself. Since I am not historically a self-helping person, I remain confused by my feeling for this frankly motivational message, all the more so since it begins with her remembrance of not having role models. (I am cisgender so you would think I would have all the mothers in the world.) “Without examples,” she says of her childhood, “I began to hear my voices in my head, telling me I was a freak, that I am broken, that I will never be lovable.” Of course, since “alien” is another word for a biological subject without a historical context, this makes sense; as it does when in the next part of the sample, she speaks of her cinematic mission as giving access to “other rooms, other worlds previously unimaginable.”

I will say a few things, at the risk of overstretching etymology. One, it seems to me that sampling is a way of recovering the exemplary from the past, and of redetermining precedence—a word for the important, as well as the previous—by dubbing over the new with the old. If this song sounds like the twenty-first century, it’s because the dominant impulse of our time is toward recuperation. Go back in time, unearth a new timeline. Find where we lost the future. Hence the popular misuse of “unprecedented” as a descriptor for the inevitable.

Two, there is something wilfully lossy about the particular way Burial produces and reproduces sound, such that its operative sensation is of time being extremely compressed. So I was wrong only a moment ago, because it is not as simple as overwriting the old. Different kinds of time, including historical and memorial time, sound simultaneous. But—I will also note, or maybe you have already noticed, that from the point of quotation I started thinking through related or abstracted questions to avoid saying simply that I relate. Meaning that like a lot of people who grow up striving for beauty, I do feel broken. 

A promise: I have never played Burial for anyone I wasn’t going to love. Maybe I have played “Archangel” for a passing crush, or “Ashtray Wasp.” But “Come Down to Us,” no. This might be because it’s so wintery, right away from the first exhalation that takes a shape on the track as pronounced as a sigh in freezing air. It’s a track for the end of the lunisolar year, but also for the end of a night, a long night, about to break into dawn: decorations left up in February, broken strings of lights, slush outside. And it also sounds of course like coming down, whether from on high or a high. Yet strangely, when I used to play it after the rave, no one was ever thrilled. It’s too emotional. “Love this one feeling,” Burial said to Fisher, that “only happens to you when you’re out in the cold, when you’re down, this shiver attempts to warm you up.” That feeling is love, and with it the special pain of coming un-numb. Though lately I have felt disinclined to suffer, it is with pride that I remember certain love matches that generated so much heat, I felt as endangered as an astronaut seeking re-entry.  

For instance. Once I did brush with kismet. High on life I walked into the home of my lover, this being before I was divorced, and, when she asked what I was listening to, I put it on speaker. I have to say it was predictable she looked bemused. Maybe she expected me to be listening to something happier, given our ignorance of what we would do to each other. Later she said I want to show you my favorite movie, Liquid Sky. Actually I hadn’t heard of it. Two decades between us. Halfway through the film, the androgyne says to the alien: Who are you? Why won’t you come to me? Which, as perhaps you’ve taken the time by now to discover, are the exact lines sampled at 12:48 in “Come Down to Us,” the last lines in fact that you hear.

I think this is why I can’t believe in soulmates, because mine would be either my ex (the one reading this) or the YouTube user who, in the summer of 2016, uploaded a montage of 9/11 television footage set to the first seven minutes of Burial’s tune. The most sublime images of my lifetime, set to the most sublimating music. I am being serious here. In the comments, replying to someone who questioned this aesthetic-ethical choice, the user wrote: “No one will ever understand how I feel about this song.”