Sodium Streetlamp Aesthetic
"They're tearing up the streetlamps on my road."
The first off-piste thing I ever wrote for a publication other than my own now-defunct blog was about Burial, and the changing shape of my world as his music lay glowing in the centre of it. That line, the one about the streetlamps, was the first sentence.
At the time of writing that first piece, in 2011, sodium lights were being replaced with LED, and I was lamenting the extinguishing of that distinct yellow haze that captures drizzle in the dark so perfectly. It was my private space to listen to Burial in, I said, and walking the wet, black streets, or on the top deck of a bus, lit up by glowing amber, I felt closer to the sounds, the musician. Back then I lived in a tiny cottage in Leeds, one of those really old houses that’s been built around over time, until it seems odd that it exists alongside pebbledash and concrete bollards. Like the stone and cobbles are the anomaly in the picture. I live in one again, years later — a cottage that had terraces built around it on both sides more than 100 years ago, a stranger on its own street. I don’t do it on purpose. I guess I just find them, these relics.
Burial likes relics too. In his new EP, which I’m finally absorbing now, he has placed sounds from the past in amongst new shapes and textures, to be spotted and collected as you move forward into the night. Exokind is my favourite track on the whole release. It’s full of insects and desolation, and 80s gothy synths — sound effects from the past evoking nostalgia in the unfamiliar. It makes me think of the after effects of a glacier, the massive shifting of time and place, so slow and imperceptible at the time, but unstoppable, powerful. Somehow those sonic touchpoints are comforting in the vastness of the space he’s created.
The website I wrote the piece for doesn’t exist anymore, and when it closed I chose not to republish it. Things change. It’s not so bad. I can still remember that colour, that feeling, even if I can’t see it anymore.
Other Stuff
Tom and I have been listening to this tune a lot recently. Here is a great write-up about the artist, For Those I Love, and a different artist (Fred again..) doing similar but different things. I liked the juxtaposition.
I’m really interested in slacker generation x stuff, and about how it culminated in the years 2000-2002 being basically just people hurting themselves on TV. This piece on Jackass in Rolling Stone is pretty good if you’re also bafflingly into this stuff. Did you know Jackass was only on air for 3 seasons over a year and a half? It feels like it took up my whole life for decades.
A lovely piece on foraging for wimberries by Steph Shuttleworth for Pellicle.
Reaper’s Melody by Shambhavi - a sculpture about farming, society and power.
I’m eating a lot of soup at the moment. Here’s a story from 1989 about one of the all time greatest soup guys.