wk9 – chrissie's blog

BURIAL: UNTRUE – week nine

  William Emmanuel Bevan, known as Burial, born in 1979, is a British electronic musician, who explores genres of future garage, dubstep, ambient, 2-step, ambient and pop. He works anonymously and in isolation, doesn't do DJ gigs, live performances or radio shows, rarely does interviews and only a few photos exist of him, taken by the photographer Georgina Cook, though in these, his face is not apparent to conceal his identity.

It’s just the way I am. I can’t step up, I want to be in the dark at the back of a club. I don’t read press, I don’t go on the internet much, I’m just not into it. It’s like the lost art of keeping a secret, but it keeps my tunes closer to me and other people,”

he states. His privacy stems from a fascination with what he describes as the "dark light" of UK club culture, where people enjoy music more the less you know about its makers. Burial was brought up on old jungle tunes and garage tunes that had lots of vocals in, but him and his brothers loved intense, darker tunes too. Vocals that would come in that were cut-up and repeating instead of ‘proper singing’, and executed coldly and the dark basslines was what he was interested in. It was like a ‘forbidden siren’.

I love that with old jungle and garage tunes, when you didn’t know anything about them, and nothing was between you and the tunes. I liked the mystery; it was more scary and sexy, the opposite of other music.”

His own music, though, isn't really made to be listened to in clubs, rather,

it’s more about when you come back from being out somewhere; in a minicab or a night bus, or with someone, or walking home across London late at night, dreamlike, and you’ve still got the music kind of echoing in you, in your bloodstream, but with real life trying to get in the way.”

It’s like a pure UK style of music, and Burial’s aim is to make tunes based on what UK underground hardcore tunes mean to him, wanting a dose of real life in there too, something people can relate to.

I would go out, wait for it to get dark, and then I’d go back and work on it, sort of hypnotise myself. I love that feeling when you know that almost everyone in your city is asleep, or you go out and listen to your tunes in someone’s car at night. It’s like hibernating.”

  Bevan claims that he uses SoundForge, a digital audio editor, for nearly all his music. With this being a digital editor rather than a DAW, this would make the production process more difficult. This leads to a swing to the drum groove and also introduces timing variance since it is not set to a metronome and cannot be quantised. Therefore, he essentially eyeballs his work, but with his ears. And as he describes the process in an interview, "Once I change something, I can never un-change it. I can only see the waves. So I know when I’m happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone. When they look just skeletal as fuck in front of me, and so I know they’ll sound good."

  “Burial decided at the outset to avoid at all costs the rigid, mechanistic path that eventually brought drum 'n' bass to a standstill. To this end, his percussion patterns are intuitively arranged on the screen rather than rigidly quantised, creating minute hesitations and slippages in the rhythm. His snares and hi-hats are covered in fuzz and phaser, like cobwebs on forgotten instruments, and the mix is rough and ready rather than endlessly polished. Perhaps most importantly, his basslines sound like nothing else on Earth. Distorted and heavy, yet also warm and earthy, they resemble the balmy gust of air that precedes an underground train.” – Journalist Derek Walmsley, 2009, stated in The Wire.

  Because of his use of an audio editor instead of a DAW, this resulted in off-kilter rhythms in his tracks. From Burial’s Untrue, when using vocal samples, he tended to pitch shift until they were almost unrecognisable. “I like pitching down female vocals so they sound male, and pitching up male vocals so they sound like a girl singing. It can sound sexy as fuck.” In the track ‘Archangel’, the main string sample is taken from the soundtrack for the video game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (“Opening Infiltration”), which was a game he often borrowed sounds from, including the sound of bullet shells falling to the ground, which is heard in multiple of his tracks. He took samples from different artists, including pitch-shifted samples of Ray J's "One Wish," where Bevan edited single vocal lines into entire melodic phrases. In addition, the pitched-up "oh no"s towards the end of the track are sampled from a Christina Aguilera a cappella performance on Saturday Night Live. With Burial’s interest in cut-up vocals, he has included this in ‘Archangel’, where he edited samples from mainly Ray J through taking multiple different samples and repeated different segments from the. Though most of the samples used have been edited beyond recognition, there are some that were left raw and unprocessed.