k-punk

1. The new Scott Walker, which is as good as everyone worth listening to says it is.
2. Brilliant dubstep mix by Paul Autonomic, which establishes that he was absolutely right to correct me for my peremptory dismissal of the genre in my first piece on Burial. I find this gripping and tense in a way that I used to find dubstep empty and uninvolving.
3. Forthcoming EP by Blackdown. Deeply hauntological, and sharing some similarities with Burial (who brilliantly remixes one of the tracks, ‘Crackle Blues’). Like the Burial LP, the EP makes highly evocative use of plaintive, wounded vocal; also like Burial, Blackdown’s deploying of muffle, reverb and crackle gives his tracks a somewhat underwater quality. ‘Lata’, its vocals lifted from Indian classical music, is oneiric, achingly gorgeous, the stolen melody floating through a drowned world of languorous tabla. ‘The Danger Line’ sounds similarly waterlogged; its vocal samples, taken from a black American prisoner in the 1960s, have an eerie, spectral authority which is somehow reinforced by their being dubbed to the edge of decipherability. ‘Crackle Blues’ submerges a sepia-tinted Delta blues vocal sample under a drizzle of Burial-like surface noise to conjure a phantasmatic Deep South of ‘rain-drenched swamps, spectre-haunted mirrors and scratchy 45s’. It sounds like a record Mickey Rourke would play in Angel Heart…