steve wrote:Dishonest? Is the artist (wholly, specifically, or generally) a charlatan? Does he misrepresent himself IN HIS ART somehow?
Well, ignoring that he obfuscates his person (which can only be construed as misrepresenting himself), I don't have any idea. He treats the public side of his music (and interest in him as a person) like a game, in the manner of Julian Schnabel or Jeff Koons or Mark Kostabi. All them are cunts, so I'm inclined to think mister anonymous grime dubstep is a cunt too.
I think that's a bit harsh, and that it's slightly more complex than that, but really we're both just guessing.
My hunch'd be that there are a couple of major motivations; firstly, the tininess of Britain, and coming with that a desire to screw with the media (nowhere to the specialist press to the mainstream press in twelve months, which - I get the impression - doesn't happen as much in the US, though Pitchfork seem to be trying hard to import it), and secondly-and-more-importantly an aspect of the same vein of nostalgia he's mining with his sound.
Burial's music feels intensely nostalgic and very redolent of a very particular place and time. It's a ghostly, hollowed-out version of a deeply London, very pirate-radio, turn-of-the-century sound (UK/speed garage, and before that the dark/tech end of d'n'b), a lot of which was made by anonymous producers - often the same few people working under many pseudonyms - outwith the mainstream music business. I reckon his refusing to put a name to his work is a deliberate nod to that facelessness. It's a very anti-rock aesthetic, almost dehumanised in a way. A lot of electronic music - Autechre, for instance - is starting off from artificiality and abstraction, which is about as far as you can get (in attitude) from a singer with a guitar, isn't it?
Actually, it kinda feels, to me, that comparing rock and electronic music (avoiding the tocharian-vs-the-world thread) is comparing apples and spanners; one's an attitude and approach, one's a technique. Say, a record like
Caribou's Andorra - is it electronic? It was made on a computer in his back bedroom, so it's electronic music in method, but it doesn't really sound like that to me - it
feels like an (indie) rock album. There's a big grey area. Boards of Canada are somewhere in there too, I guess; they record and resample themselves heavily. A lot of the Morr Music/CCO bands (the Notwist, Ulrich Schnauss et al) are somewhere in that indie-rock-by-electronic-methods space too. It might be sold as dance music in record stores, but it isn't
really, not in intent, any more than Eno was/is.
And, maybe, there's sampling and
sampling too - lifting single hits, mangling them, and resequencing them into something new doesn't feel the same as lifting entire chunks of someone else's performance. It's got nothing in common with playing the instrument, but it doesn't feel plagiaristic/referential in the same way. Maybe that's just me projecting, though.
Sorry to intrude!