Burial and Art as Experience

Will Bevan – the artist known as Burial – appreciates omission, the same way as so many great writers. His songs give you enough to wonder, but not enough to know – and this forces you, as the listener, to fill in the gaps. This strategy is one of the most potent weapons an artist can wield, and he does it well. His best songs insist an idea but offer inconclusive evidence. They can be sort of infinite, in their own way.

When I listened to Burial’s most recent EP – Rival Dealer – I was floored. I knew I was listening to the same artist – you can hear it in the songs’ composition, timbre, and mood – yet, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. And, well, I could wax poetic about the songs themselves – the impression they left on me, et cetera, but that would not be the point. Importantly, it occurred to me that Rival Dealer may contain much less for someone who had not heard Burial’s previous work. Yes, it seems to me that the EP is, to a significant degree, a sort of riff on the expectation of what Burial is – meaning, if I am right, that the music may fail to speak to someone who has not listened to him previously and thus has not constructed those expectations.

There is a theory in the world of art that states that a work should stand for itself, and should not be colored, or distorted, by things outside the work, such as the artist. We should judge an artist’s works, therefore, without regard to the fact that we may not agree with the artist as a person, say. This principle appeals to me in a very fundamental way; however, I could not immediately reconcile it against my experience of Burial, and my belief that his new music is better when taken in the context of his old music. Surely the experience of his prior work should not color my experience of his new work, right?

I think the way to reconcile the two comes from Brian Eno, who has offered that what we call ‘art’ is best understood not as the thing itself, but as the interaction between the thing and the experiencer. This, he says, solves a bunch of problems encountered in the theory of art. It certainly, in my mind, solves the problem I described, because the idea of Rival Dealer will be different to someone who has heard Untrue and Kindred than it will be to someone whose nearest point of reference is, say, Skrillex. Note, for what it is worth, that this doesn’t require that you jettison your preconception of the artist as a person – though, I honestly think that doing so is just a good idea, and doesn’t require some strict rule to justify it.

So, what of Burial, and Rival Dealer? Burial songs often seem to me like the impressions of people adrift in the nighttime in an unknown city. They are intense and yet elegant. Many of them work in clubs, and yet they are all better than any club. They also seem hallucinatory – not in the cheap method of "fiction," but in the manner of true hallucinations, whose hallmark is that they can only be distinguished from reality slowly, through the process of coming to detect where their composition diverges from reality.

The final two songs of Rival Dealer are like the eponymous Burial protagonist remembering having stumbled through a back-alley door in the rain, into a gymnasium where a prom is occurring. No, wait: better yet, he is simply recollecting some substrata of his youth, almost certainly long gone, connected to feelings we commonly give to prom - that juvenile longing, wishfulness, incomprehension. These songs are the sum of a hundred collected memories of a certain past that you can almost, but not quite, understand – it is Will Bevan omitting just enough, again. The spoken-word portion at the conclusion of the album suggests a certain keyhole but doesn't require it. It is enough, for what it's worth, to give subsequent listens a different context, but I like to think of it as optional. I suspect it was included by him because the subject inspired him and is important to him, but it might take away more than it adds to the album.

I have had dreams that have come, I am certain, from the song Hiders. I can’t readily recall another musician that has made me dream. Will Bevan is pretty amazing, and I look forward to whatever he does next.