Streetlands - Burial, 2022

Hospital Chapel#

Dubstep-cum-ambient musician Burial’s Streetlands opens with a disconcerting placidity. Slow, sweeping synths flutter, reaching upward and cooing in bliss. There is an airiness to them, a sore-throated aspiration subtly undergirding the chord. The sensation of this breath becomes more encompassing with each repetition, while the pads fly up and away it is exhaling all around us. Synths begin to take on an animalistic quality: This flying leviathan with antennae swaying idly in the clouds, impossibly light despite impossible mass, each of its cries possessing a timbre entirely too high, too human; unbefitting of its considerable size. Wide circles of gold, pupil-less and arachnid, line its body. Its gaze is indecipherable. We are seen. It seems to beckon us. It is out there. We are out there.

It flies away until our vision is pure white, indistinguishable features of clouds in all directions. We float here for a time – how long, we cannot say.

Streetlands#

Gentle rain on pavement now; Slow footsteps, deliberate, unsteady. We walk like a scalpel, tracing carefully across the cadaver. Asphalt bones have been ground into gravel pits, filling with rain and trash and mud, reflecting grey ruins, vermillion skies. Behind us, the glow. We have seen her now.

An angel, an angel of terrifying beauty, our skin is crying out cold tears for her, each bead of sweat confessing a sin for her, we wail in agony that she knows us completely. Every corner of our heart is revealed to her, though we have emptied it for her we are rooted in place by its overwhelming weight. The glow seems to wash over us, she is in us and through us and beyond us now. We have fallen to our knees, unable to bear it. The rain continues, uncaring, matting our hair down our neck we weep. We wish to stay here weeping for an eternity – We must weep to repent for all that she has had to bare.

She is gone.

We are alone again, raw and ugly, we gaze up to the sky. To be unwitnessed is hideous, we cannot believe ourselves now without them. The leviathan, where has it gone? The angel, where has she gone? We plead with the clouds, begging them to come out once more but we know they cannot hear us. Please

Exokind#

Rusted iron chutes yelp as we run across their rivets. There is a transmission – Instructions. Orders, to locusts. The mind of the subordinate wanders. Swarming now, disparate frequencies converge. Cryptids emerge from the crowds in which they blend to announce themselves, mandibles hum like buzzsaws. They are wearing me, wearing us.

How many are there? How many are we?

All that was quiet is loud now, blood rushes through our ears as we run together with ourselves.

Rain comes up from the ground.