Tag: UK

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A stylized shot from Terence Davies's "The Long Day Closes", featuring child and mother looking ahead with the text of the film's title.

And Fate Disposes: On Terence Davies’s “The Long Day Closes” (1992)

When you’re a child, everything is your first. Both joy and trauma have equal power in one’s formation, and although the details of each event might slip away or alter, their impact does not. Following you throughout the years, few things remain as indelible as one’s introduction to shame, or the ecstasy of a winning moment, or, when least expected, the most proper song.

Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes involves itself with that period of life when innocence is at ebb tide, but the days have not yet lost their halcyon glow; when childhood still seems never ending and maturity remains but a shade on the horizon. The director has stated elsewhere that the scenes portrayed in the film represent the happiest years of his life. Indeed, from the opening with its rain-soaked, dilapidated alley (with possibly the most inspired use of the Hoagy Carmichael tune “Stardust” since Woody Allen’s in Stardust Memories) to the final shot of faint clouds against the moon as Arthur Sullivan’s “The Long Day Closes” plays in its sublime entirety—the artist seems to be almost in mourning for that vanished epoch. […]

Music by Ethan Pinch
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The album cover for Burial's "Boy Sent From Above", featuring a black X with a white album label.

Angelmaker: Reviewing Burial’s “Boy Sent From Above” (2024)

I’m not sure to what extent the readers of Automachination are familiar with the work of Burial. All things considered, there’s probably a dearth of people on this website with an interest in the UK garage music scene, much less its most esoteric (and aggrandized) figurehead.

Burial is, like Banksy, a kind of pseudo-anonymous mystery artist. When he was nominated for a Mercury prize during the 2000s, popular tabloid The Sun began a national campaign to reveal his name and identity. Unsurprisingly, the artist was unmasked, not as a celebrity pseudonym, but a fairly normal, and recalcitrant young man from Croydon, South London.

Burial’s music is a hybrid of late twentieth century club styles that share a markedly British provenance: specifically jungle, dubstep, acid, drum & bass and UK garage (UKG). He came of age during London’s heyday of urban pirate radio and this perhaps explains the unmistakable overlay of DIY nostalgia in his production style – a kind of bittersweet sentimentality that permeates every part of his work. Listening to a Burial track often makes one wistful, or forlorn. […]