Listening • No Take Backs

Four Tet is actually Kieran Hebden, a post-rock/electronic musician from London. Dubstep producer Burial, after a great deal of speculation, finally owned up to being William Bevan. Hebden and Bevan are mates, as they say across the pond, which is why they collaborated for the two tracks on a super cryptic, just-released-last-week 12-inch called Moth/Wolf Cub.

Since this is post-rock—or whatever—it’s recommended that you listen to the tracks from this new collaboration while in a state of altered consciousness. If you’re cool, man, you will achieve this altered state by doing drugs. This isn’t disco or pop, so using coke, amphetamines, speed, ice, glass, crystal, crank, or study drugs won’t be necessary. We rather recommend weed, marijuana, pot, opiates, opioids, barbiturates, benzos, lysergics, dimethyltryptamines, psilocybins, Sherman Helmsley, Kojak, Bob Hope, trollers, strollers, slowmos, goofballs, screamers, squeamers, porkers, dorkers, fudgies, huffers, gaggers, gassers, poopers, ‘ludes, scrudes, ‘tudes, dudes!, doobles, triple doobles, no-take-backs, mulligans, double taps, chicken feet, fire drills, bus stops, spanks, cheeseballs, cheez-its, meesters, menthols, shmegenoids, or wet sticks. Or all of the above.

For you “proud to be drug free” types, there are plenty of other ways known to induce hallucinations: Try taping ping pong balls to your eyes, eating fish, spinning around really fast, meditating on a koan, or taking one in the jewels. The best non-pharmacological way to generate a preparatory altered state for listening to this Burial and Four Tet collaboration, however, would be to listen to this Burial and Four Tet collaboration. For an added consciousness boost, try listening to this collaboration at the same time, i.e., play the song linked below simultaneously in multiple browser windows. It’s hard to get synced up, but well worth the mind-blowing difficulty.

And a final note: As diligent readers no doubt have noticed, there has been a dearth of recent activity here on the Digest. This is due largely to the editors being involved in the development of new projects; as such, the Digest as we’ve known it will cease to exist, and this is the final post. We hope you’ve enjoyed it, and that you’ll come back to see where these new developments take us. We heart you. —Erik Bryan, May. 13, 2009

» Listen to Moth/Wolf Cub at My Old Kentucky Blog

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Listening • Field-Tested Dub

It took a visit to New York and the combination of disorientation and fatigue to allow me to really enjoy the recently unmasked British musician Burial. I think you really have to listen to his music in the right place, in the right frame of mind, to enjoy it properly. My first view of New York, from the air, was obscured by an evolutionary biologist who described the scene below as “soupy”—I was unimpressed.

A better view, early this summer, was later that afternoon in a friend’s echoey apartment in which we agreed that the rooftop party might have to be cancelled due to the weather. The atmosphere was made much more memorable with the introduction of Burial to the scene; he soundtracked blank stares out of huge windows as a lightning storm was passing over the Brooklyn Bridge, and dismissal of the storm’s severity was punctuated by a lightning strike too close for comfort. Friends washed up off of the streets into the tense, humid warmth that complements Burial music so well.

Burial is perhaps the best-known representative of dubstep, a genre that swiftly evolved in the last decade. Above being a descendant of dub-reggae and two-step, “Archangel” is gray, stormy, and silhouetted, painted with long strokes of treble and bass. Burial respects the sparseness of every city at night and presents a ghostly and almost Gothic space—somehow this is glorious. Burial, and dubstep, continues to win fans and he deserves to be favorite for the U.K.’s Mercury Music Prize for his latest work, Untrue. —Mike Smith, Aug. 19, 2008

» Listen to “Archangel” at Can You See the Sunset From the Southside?

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