Antidawn EP by Burial (Hyperdub, 2022)

I know. This is two years late. When it was released, it was too fresh for me to write about. There are times when I get so enamoured by art, I’m overwhelmed. Then there was the media frenzy, more than any other of Burial’s post-album projects.

The January 2022 release date was perfect: the soundtrack of winter. This is the historical point that has to be made. Antidawn dropped while the UK was still recovering from its lockdowns. It’s hard not to see the EP’s emptiness in contrast to the albums’ communality. These responded to social concerns (chief among them escalating reports of London gang violence - “We’re from different ancient tribes…” - the sound of a heart broken by collapsing in on itself) whereas Antidawn seemed to respond to a lack of social interactions. It could be a concept record, with a lone hooded protagonist wandering snowy pavements.

Such imagery is reinforced, as with “Strange Neighbourhood” where the lyric “Walking through the streets….” reverberates through field recordings of police sirens and dripping water. The record feels very EXT. LONDON HOUSING ESTATE - NIGHT, or like a psychogeographic audio journal. Maybe - this is a lockdown experience I relate to - the sensation of reencountering one’s hour-long walks in a dream.

The overall narrative’s emotional tone is, first and foremost, melancholic. The title track lingers for nearly three minutes, with minimal variation, on the sentence, “I’ve been a bad place… With no where to go…” The implication: the narrator’s residence no longer feels like home. “Because you are one of them…”

The exceptions to social distancing intersected with domestic narratives. As Boris had announced, we could leave our homes if, “Fleeing from abuse.” Hearing the EP in an external urban context (putting aside the above exception) I wonder if this reading can be expanded to include the impact lockdowns had on working class communities.

A full social commentary is beyond the scope of this post. Book-length, even. There are other ways into Antidawn. The synth loop that follows the 5:15 mark of “Shadow Paradise” could be broken from a late 90s Ministry of Sound trance compilation. This is something I’ve wanted to write about for ages: rave music after the death of rave. The sound of one airhorn in an empty warehouse.

It’s as if the end of rave - that is, moving beyond static genres to a music built from referents: techno bass, 2-step beats, old school hardcore samples, ambient synth pads - coincided with social degradation. This is a statement that can be made about Burial’s music as a whole. Likewise his peers such as Actress, Demdike Stare, Zomby, The Bug... They work with the scraps of rave history. This is distinct from, say, jungle, which sampled music outside of rave let alone before it had a history. And, it must be noted, the music by a lot of the aforementioned artists sounds broken. Decay is the creative substance.

I remember social media going into melt down over the last track, “Upstairs Flat”. It’s my favourite too. If this is a concept record, it’s like the protagonist is standing outside and looking at the light behind closed curtains, imagining what story could be unfolding. This cuts through the cliche, Music tells a story, by treating the listeners and narrator as separate subjects and then creating common ground between them. We, too, are imagining a story with the narrator but we’re in separate locales. Yet, in sharing this, we get to be alone together. This is the immaterial of Antidawn - detachment, misremembering, liminality - but not to sever emotions. They are emotional resonances in and of themselves.

If Burial’s eponymous debut and Untrue were heartbroken laments for London, Antidawn is what comes after. As ever, this is the hard but genuine medicine of life’s saddest moments: it continues. The sound of a van driving past after that diagnosis; from a window, the trail of an airplane during a redundancy consultation; sunlight slowly growing behind a blind after you learn they don’t feel the same way: after after after. Everything aftering itself. This is the good news. Despite it all, there is life. Abundant life.

Although the EP was met with excitement upon release, I can’t help but wonder if Burial will forever be overshadowed by those two decade-defining albums. In a way, Antidawn’s fluid ambience is its justification. It allowed itself to be a snapshot of time without being ephemeral. Its dreamy loneliness breaks and remakes me two years on.

Listen on Spotify here. Tracks in order by clicking on YouTube below.