You know, it’s one of my few many weaknesses, but like any weakness, it’s rooted in pleasure, however dubious. People sometimes ask why I feature video-game-style chiptuning artists with such gleeful abandon on ANBAD, and the simple answer is that I can’t help it.

Plenty of listeners don’t get this kind of music – they think it all sounds the same, or that it is too basic and punctuated, or that it is simply reductive. And to an extent, these are the exact reasons why I like music such as Tristram Burfield‘s.

At least that’s what I thought. Tristram is a musical polymath, you see. And while I like his NES-sourced cheep ‘n’ cheerful chiptunes, it was his other songs that I discovered via them that made my hairs prickle uncontrollably.

Tristan Burfield // Do Walls Have Ears?

Do Walls Have Ears? is the sound of an orchestra tuning up, but one that is forever lost in the simple beauty of it’s own loose sound. Droning, ebbing, flowing, arcing through time, songs like these are less about structure, and more about feeling.

Perhaps that’s why I like it so much. The disconnection with standard procedure and the empathy with the confusing realities of emotion is evident in songs like this. In the realms of new music, this is akin to an out-of-body experience.

Do Walls Have Ears? is timeless in every respect – it’s also placeless, faceless and could easily have stretched on for another hour and I would still have listened.

Tristram releases his songs on floppy discs. Take that, vinyl fetishists. Now that‘s retro.

http://tristanburfield.com