Burial
"Other Worlds, Previously Unimaginable"
If I’ve heard the term ‘post-dubstep’ once, I’ve heard it a million times: it seemed more like a term that was thrust upon a cadre of artists that weren’t easy to categorize at the tail-end of the 2000s than it was an actual thing. With Burial, it makes sense if you took the ‘post-’ both in the intended way (dubstep elements but decidedly not dubstep) and as literally as possible: music made for after the club. With a mostly-wordless music that is Burial’s, we have to resort to the song titles for clues and they all confirm the purpose of this music: “Nite Train,” “Night Bus,” “In McDonalds,” “Loner,” “Hiders.” Burial’s music functions as a series of snapshots that we all endured at some point: those blurry hours between 2 A.M. and 4 A.M. The exception that proves the rule: “Raver,” the closer of Untrue, has a title that suggests it might be the upper on an album full of downers, but then it plays like all of the other songs: lost in the city jungle.
Burial’s been on my mind recently for two reasons: the obvious reason is that the Antidawn EP was his first ‘big’ release (still an EP) in a few years, which was also the first major release in January. The second, also obvious reason was that, after watching the abysmal The Matrix Resurrections, I backtracked to re-watch The Matrix and then to re-listen to “Come Down to Us,” which sampled Lana Wachowski’s speech at the 2012 Human Rights Campaign annual gala. It’s impossible not to be moved by that speech, “Years later I find the courage to admit that I am transgender. And that this does not mean that I am unlovable,” especially in the context of the preceding 12 minutes of the song which begins with a pleading child saying, “Excuse me, I’m lost,” and then comforts them through a series of snatches of soulful vocals. “Come Down to Us” was a song I needed in 2013-4 during an awful time in my life, and I regarded it the same as I did Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way: big hug music for a loner like me. It was great revisiting both The Matrix and “Come Down to Us” for the first time in years in both instances (actually, I hadn’t watched The Matrix in full since my father picked up the movie at the Yorkdale HMV in the early-2000s. As a too-young ten year-old, I remember feeling terrified, deeply saddened, and then fucking hype in that order and could never stomach to watch the film in full again). Both did more than merely ‘hold up’; it was like meeting up with an old friend in both cases.
“Come Down to Us” is not that much different than so much of what Burial had been doing for years by that point, which is a deeply emotionally resonant music. Hence the other song titles that I neglected so far: “You Hurt Me,” “Gutted,” “Forgive,” “Broken Home,” “Prayer,” and my personal favourite Burial title, “Shell of Light.” Hence why so many people talk about Burial’s music with such prose, a romanticization of the loneliness of being surrounded by big buildings and stepping outside the club for a cigarette. We, a small select we, loved Burial because he gave us what we all wanted: dance music for lonely introverts, as opposed to Warp/IDM’s dance music for introverts.
I’ll state here that Burial basically single-handedly carried the Hyperdub label for a few years there. For the label’s tenth year anniversary, they put out a series of compilations meant to showcase their ‘deep’ roster but that each and every single one of the Hyperdub 10.X series featured Burial (even when it didn’t make sense; why did his “Shell of Light” lead the R&B comp?) whose material typically stood head and shoulders above everyone else’s. I’ll bump DJ Rashad (Double Cup) and his less-celebrated collaborators DJ Spinn (“Dubby”) and DJ Earl & DJ Taye (“Do This Again”), Jessy Lanza (“Giddy”), LV & Okmalumkoolkat (“Boomslang”), Loraine James (“Sensual”), and Dean Blunt (“2” with Inga Copeland, BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow) any day of the week. But none of them resonate with me as deeply as Burial does. If you missed out on those compilations, there was the previously-unreleased Burial song “Lambeth” which is just a low-key unpretentious banger that itself doesn’t stack up to any song from Untrue but has a nice energy:
Two last things of note. What I admire about Burial is that he signed onto the relatively new label Hyperdub and after putting out two albums to much acclaim, he never made an album again. He never once kowtowed to an audience that valued the studio album as the holy grail of music releases. Put another way, he proved that the album had a place in future garage/dubstep and then implicitly told listeners that the single/EP format was far more important by releasing his best work through them in the series of EPs he dropped in 2012-3.
Finally, it’s a little weird to me that despite Burial remaining anonymous for as long as he did (and continuing to remain elusive afterwards), so many write-ups on him feel the need to go ‘Burial, whose real name is William Bevan…’ or ‘William Bevan, also known as Burial…’ Like…why do that. Just call him Burial. Here’s the guide:
Two songs that’ll appear on his soon-to-come debut album and two songs that you won’t get elsewhere. I would recommend skipping this if you don’t already have it but during the 4-year hiatus between Untrue and Street Halo (with only some collaborative singles to sustain us), we backtracked and grabbed everything we could get our hands on to scratch an itch that frankly no other musician at the time provided. “South London Boroughs” seems to be 4-8 bpm faster than most of Burial’s songs, but it’s not interesting at all - the off-kilter wobble (like a dog going ‘woof’) and the sudden blasts of sound (like a lightsaber being turned on) are lame. “Nite Train” is better, using a sample from the craziest of places (from Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You”) which is emblematic for Burial’s love and incorporation of R&B samples, although the healthy echo applied to distort MJ’s voice is distracting.
I don’t agree with Wire about this one (they said best album of 2006), but I’m happy they chose it as record of the year anyway because it made people pay more attention to what Burial would do next, which was a refinement of this album in every way. Maybe in 2006 this felt like a far greater revelation than it did just one year later, which was a darker take on future garage by emphasizing the bass and echo to the point of wooziness. There’s far more space in the mix compared to the songs on Untrue which lends Burial’s songs more of an ambiguity that I ultimately don’t find interesting. This is highlighted by the words of Hyperdub’s emcee/beat poet Spaceape who gets his own (essentially) solo spot, who explicitly describes the horror aspect of some of these songs with campfire prose: “Covered, smothered in writing tentacles.” (Why is Lovecraft being evoked in my Burial?) Meanwhile, “Wounder” and “Southern Comfort” play like the dark hallways of the best trip-hop (particularly Mezzanine and Maxinquaye), but they’re not a good substitute because the other sounds besides the drums aren’t as fertile (yet). And the drums here are already unique: the metallic shuffle of “Distant Lights” or the interpolation of the beep in the loop of “Broken Home.”
It’s here where I’ll finally praise Burial’s drum programming because he’s clearly very interested in drums as texture and his discography is full of different and beautiful drum sounds, hence justifying any comparisons with Aphex Twin that I don’t see much of anyway (not from a genre or style perspective, just from a quality perspective). The slippery liquid drums of “Archangel,” the warmth of “Shell of Light,” like a heavier hand drum, the boom-bap of “Raver.” I will carry these sounds with me for a long time, and here’s how I know: I fell in love with them when I first heard them and still think of them fondly to this day. The drums typically help distinguish these songs to me even more than the vocal samples which do their part as well. And Burial kept playing around with new drum sounds too: the gentle clacks of “Stolen Dog,” the big boom of “Kindred,” the scuzzy battlefield of “Rival Dealer.” So yeah, it was a big loss when he turned to ambient. Not as great a loss the last time a musician turned to ambient, sure, but still a loss.
The lyrics of “Archangel” are generic as they come, “[Holding/loving/kissing] you / Couldn’t be alone,” lifted from Ray J’s forgotten hit “One Wish,” but the treatment of the vocals reminds me of what Daniel Lopatin as Chuck Person would soon achieve on Eccojams Vol. 1: kitschy original source rendered far more emotional. By pitch-shifting a human voice to sound like a robot, and then further wavering the robot’s voice through different iterations of essentially the same plea, Burial made it feel like this machine has gained sentience and is reaching out. “Etched Headplate” is my favourite for that reason: the delivery of “But it wasn't good enough for you” runs a large pitch spectrum, starting high and going all the way down to a sob. I don’t think this is Burial’s best for the simple reason that he has to justify ~13 different songs all with the same atmosphere and toolkit and similar tempos, which is why some of the songs blur together in my head, and I don’t think “Shell of Light” needed five minutes or the title track needed six. By contrast, “Etched Headplate” could have run for ten and I wouldn’t have minded.
The arrival of Untrue was preceded by the Ghost Hardware single which contains two b-sides that you can’t get on Untrue, neither of which are great but I’d miss “Shutta” if I didn’t get to hear it every so often: a gorgeous if simple little guitar line set to fussy drums and the occasional unneeded burst which makes it feel like a confused piece of machinery. “Exit Woundz,” on the other hand, throbs along like a Burial b-side with more delicate drums.
Around this time we got a few collaborative releases. The first was Moth / Wolf Cub (2009) from Burial and Four Tet (it turns out Hebden went to the same high school as Burial), two auteurs that emerged around the same time and also lost their touch around the same time, who operated on complete opposite sides of the day-night spectrum. There are no stakes in either cut here, and I think it’s a safe bet to say Four Tet handles the colours (because he likes them) while Burial handles the beats and both sound like lesser cuts from the soon-to-come There Is Love In You (“Wolf Cub” = “Circling”). Ego / Mirror (2011) also had Four Tet but with vocals from Thom Yorke. I’d say both songs are around the same level as much the majority of The King of Limbs: Yorke’s lyrics, once really poetic and quotable, are now vapid and obtuse (“What was once opaque / Is now mercury / Thick fog, your face / Filling my heavy dreams”), and while it’s nice to hear him over Four Tet’s slippery bells and whistles (“Ego”) or Burial’s clacking drums (“Mirror”), I just think his voice worked best in Radiohead songs, back when they rocked a little more.
In 2011, Burial returned with Street Halo, a three-song EP that’s good music in isolation but I can’t help but consider it a transition. The songs are longer on average than they were before, with “Street Halo “approaching 7 minutes and “NYC” approaching 8 minutes. In contrast with the longer songs soon to come, Burial’s still working through the stop-start song structures; later on, the stops will be deployed to let the atmosphere take hold and when the beat returns, Burial typically modifies it subtly with different shades: like the great minimalists, the effect feels like repetition but is in actuality, change. But when “NYC” hits the stop at the 2:56 mark (after a little cowbell for good measure), the atmosphere isn’t that interesting and I find myself waiting for the beat to come back. Likewise, neither of the other two songs develop much, and nothing would have been lost by tightening either. “Street Halo” is a far more conventional success, but I look forward to it’s alternating between the pulse and throb; it’s nice that Burial occasionally makes music meant to get you to the club in the first place. And the best is saved for last, “Stolen Dog,” a title harkening back to Untrue’s “Dog Shelter” whose synth pads are simply sublime.
After Street Halo came Four Walls / Paradise Circus, which are Burial’s remixes of two Massive Attack songs, one unreleased and the other from forgettable Heligoland, and both featuring vocals from Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval (no substitute for Elizabeth Fraser). Both remove any trip-hop influence and ultimately sound like what you’d imagine a Burial song might sound like with ‘real’ vocals instead of sampled ones. The best of these collaborations/remixes would arrive the following year in “Nova,” also featuring Four Tet, but no longer feeling like two artists working in separate bubbles but actually collaborating with one another.
My friend and I drove, both U of T students, drove to York university to study, and I had just downloaded this and put it in my iPod, so naturally it was gonna be this one to soundtrack physiology that night. Here’s what I remember: the drum drop happening at the 0:52 mark after a split-second of complete silence and *bliss*. I don’t think I studied at all that night. I think I listened to this EP in full and then listened to it again and again until we called it a night. I believe I barely passed that test I was studying for. “Loner” is deceptive; at a glance, it feels like a synth arpeggiator set to ‘rain’ but I get more out of it than “Kindred” now; note the moody bass-line or the staccato drums that get their own melody (starting at the 2:54 mark). Note the other synth too, buried in the mix (which Burial brings to the fore when he strips out all the other elements, around 2:22), like a buzzing string instrument. “Ashtray Wasp” doesn’t treat its vocals (as much?) which gives it a far stronger emotional power: “I want you…” “I used to belong! to you…” It’s here where Burial will experiment adding worthy little codas at the end of long beats, and “Ashtray Wasp” has the best of them: a little darling of a piano melody, played distantly in the background like it’s coming from the attic. Both Kindred and Rival Dealer are 3-songs EPs that are meant to be listened to in one sitting; in this case, because there’s a stripping away and/or slowing down from one song to the next. All three songs here are radically different, not just from each other, but from anything Burial had ever done before. All three of them rank somewhere in the shortlist of Burial’s best-ever songs. All this to say, this is his best release.
Both songs here are expansive—I count four distinct sections to “Truant”—but also a little amorphous for me: I look forward to moments, truly great moments, than I do their entire songs. “Truant” features more of “Ashtray Wasp”’s touching, full vocals, “I fell in love with you, ‘cause you are the one,” and while the middle section has a unique beat—like the flutter of insect wings magnified and slowed down—it goes on for a little too long. “Rough Sleeper” is better; I particularly love the sustained keyboards rising and falling and building up to the release at 6 minutes in. “You stay…Hey…” And then bells, pure winter bliss bells.
You could say that “Hiders” and “Come Down to Us” get a little sappy. I would respond that I must be a sapsucker, then. These songs give me life. Sure, “Hiders” is dangerously close to M83 territory with the arena ballad tone and chord progression, but the release is out of Anthony Gonzalez’s hands so don’t compare them. A lone light striking through the grey rain for one assuring hand on the shoulder. “You don’t have to be alone.” The deployment on the drums underneath makes the touch real, and as if it weren’t enough, we hear that voice one more time with the drums thickening even more. That section lasts from 2:30 to about 3:10 before the drums dissolve back into the ether, and I swear I must have replayed that section alone 100 times in 2014, and I forgave the song for being too much padding otherwise (i.e. a 40-second section of a near-5-minute song) as I wished the song were either shorter or that section were a little longer. It’s the “Don’t give up, you have friends” that Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush failed to assure me of.
The title track is the one I listen to least; the drums are heady in their jungle rush, but the generous amount of radio static is pretty rote for Burial’s atmosphere-building. I’ve already talked a little about the closer “Come Down to Us” in the introduction, so I’ll embellish a little more: gun to my head, one Burial song, it’d be this one. Because it is a big hug, you see. Because the different voices are all treated with such reverence. Because some of the vocals feel like a small triumph at a time of great hardship (5:40; the voice going ‘-SIDE’ to finish ‘Baby, come on, come on in-’). Because that little record scratch around 7-minutes in that announces a new voice going, “You are a star.” Because that line is delivered as if they’re saying it to themselves in the mirror while a new drum pattern starts. Because of that sitar-like phrase, an unbelievable texture on a Burial song: bright and shimmering and not out of place. And because, yes, that closing speech which is just so incredibly touching: “This world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds, previously unimaginable.”
Similar to he took a hiatus after Untrue, he retreated after Rival Dealer. There was nothing in 2014 (besides the unreleased “Lambeth” that I talked to earlier), and starting in 2015 began a slow trickle of one-off singles, none of which felt essential, and some of which felt like experiments that weren’t meant to see daylight except to satisfy audiences who kept wondering what he was up to. (A PSA that the Tunes 2011-2019 compilation doesn’t contain these loosies despite the fact that most of them were released on Hyperdub which is just so fucking annoying to a completionist like me.) There was the uncharacteristic old-school “Temple Sleeper” (a fun song, not a word one typically associates with Burial, but not worth more than one or two listens, which is exactly what I gave it: one back in 2015, one six years later so I could write this). There was the surprisingly less fun collaboration with Zomby, a 7-minute single that takes forever to actually get going and doesn’t actually sound like the two artists were in the same room (or same headspace) when they created it.
Young Death / Nightmarket was received in the blurry weeks following the US election in 2016, and both songs felt ‘stiff’ and comfortable in Burial clichés. “Young Death” is the logical progression for Burial: years of making atmospheric beat music, here’s now atmospheric practically-beatless music, the switch from SAW 85-92 to SAW Volume II all over again. But everything feels like it’s hitting checklists: a touching sample (“I will always be there for you”), vinyl crackle and/or the aftermath of rain; songs tucked away at the end of other songs. The more mobile synths make me long for “Loner.” Not helping is that the release is shorter than each of his EPs between 2011-2013; even Truant / Rough Sleeper lasted 25 minutes compared to this release’s 13. The slow build of “Nightmarket” doesn’t work, in part because the synth is a touch too slow and vapourous, in part because Burial’s method of stopping the rhythm works against the song here, and when the song finally reaches the climax, I have to justify to myself if the investment was worth it.
At the time, Young Death / Nightmarket was Burial’s most forgettable ‘major’ release, which he followed up with one that I like even less, Subtemple / Beach Fires, two pieces that go deeper into Young Death’s ambient territory. “Subtemple” is the far more evocative of the two, with a little half-finished toy melody and what sounds like a screw being twisted into place. That, and the splashes of water and footsteps all make me think that Burial just finished playing Little Nightmares (*checks release date, oh man, that game was released just one month before!*). Yet at the same time, the piece feels so incredibly stagnant and the atmosphere ain’t that impressive or unique, to say nothing that the tone of that unfinished melody sounds like he’s trying to mine the same territory as the second piece from SAW Volume II (a.k.a. ‘Radiator’). “Beachfires” is more characteristically Burial, but I also get the sense that we’d have landed on it if you took any of the stuff he had lying around from 2012-3 and just removed the beat.
So naturally, he would follow that up with two beat-heavy singles, neither of which were expected. First came “Rodent,” a 4-minute bass-heavy straight up house single with a disaffected vocal; it’s catchy, dancey but also forgettable because why would we expect this club outsider to be able to make actual club music. And then, to prove me wrong, he switched to techno for Pre Dawn / Indoors, a double a-side released on Nonplus+. “Pre Dawn” has a Basic Channel-like elementalism to it—that eerie 3-note ‘hook’ sounds like wind to me—but it’s not heavy enough compared to industrial techno that came before; I’m thinking the EPs released by no wave-inspired Powell or the acid Container. “Indoors” is slightly better, an addicting vocal getting subsumed by the beat.
The real highlight for Burial in the year of 2017, then, wasn’t any of the three singles he released, but the remix he did of Mønic’s “Deep Summer,” whose clean bell tones are more Four Tet than any of the actual collaborations Burial did with Hebden; the only clue that it was Burial’s handiwork were the vocals reminiscent of “Come Down to Us.” It’s one of those remixes that’s much better than the source material.
Burial kept a low profile in 2018; the only things of note are his collaborations with the Bug as Flame 1 and then Flame 2 in 2019, and helping Kode9 with the final instalment of the much-beloved Fabriclive series. Given that both artists are among UK’s most acclaimed dubstep artists, I was expecting more from both singles released with the Bug which are both deconstructed dubstep that’ll get your blood pumping and you’ll forget shortly afterwards.
As for Fabriclive 100, rather than attempting to play end-to-end like so many of the other Fabriclive instalments (my favourite is the Four Tet one), 100 plays instead like another entry into the Hyperdub 10.X: a chance for founder Kode9 to show off the Hyperdub roster. Familiar names like Cooly G, Scratcha DVA and Okzharp are all included, as well as Hyperdub’s extensive footwork line-up. It’s hard to tell what impact (if any) Burial had here despite his name being on the billing; my guess is that Burial contributed the opening song (a no name song by an anonymous artist) which sounds very much like the intro so many of his other songs, and then chose the songs after that that would flow out of it (Klein’s “Hurry” and then Cooly G’s “Magnetic,” both wafty and unremarkable besides), and then left the rest of the set to Kode9. (My guess is that it’s Kode9 on the cover.) I will say that this mix did introduce me to a couple of names that I wouldn’t take note of until later: Hyph11e, part of Shanghai’s deconstructed club underground (who put out the evocative Aperture in 2020) and Finland’s Vladislav Delay who has collaborated with Sly & Robbie to strong effect (check out Nordub which is a Norwegian ambient-dub crossover before you check out 500-Push-Up, which is less effective). Ultimately, it’s the footwork songs in the middle that stand out to me, particularly DJ Phil’s remix of Scratcha DVA’s “Pink 33.”
Both Claustro / State Forest and then Chemz / Dolphinz two years later are different versions of the same thing, which is a consolidation of the now two different sides of Burial: speedy beats on the front, ambient on the flip. Neither “Claustro” nor “Chemz” sound like Burial; “Claustro,” for example, has a coda at the end like did so many of his other songs, but the chord progression is downright cute, not a word I associate with him. And the bass of both a-sides are downright hyperactive in contrast to the slow moodier bass-lines he typically employed thus far, while the vocals are far jumpier. Their b-sides “State Forest” and “Dolphinz” look ahead to Antidawn in their nothing-happening; the former is straight-up drone music with none of his vocals and barely any of his vinyl crackle/tape hiss, slowly opening up to swallow you whole only to close and start again. These two releases feel like Burial further exploring how to move out of the corner he painted himself into fairly early on.
Before Antidawn dropped, there was two more collaborative releases: Her Revolution / His Rope with Four Tet and Thom Yorke again, and then Shock Power of Love with Blackdown. Both “Her Revolution” and “His Rope” recall the somnolent tones of A Moon Shaped Pool which for me was the least-interesting Radiohead album since The Bends, but I absolutely adore the way Thom Yorke sings the word ‘love’ on “Her Revolution” (at the 2:35 mark), flickering into a gorgeous falsetto while piano notes and what sounds like backwards tapes fall carelessly into place around him: it’s a dreamier “Daydreaming” to me.
As for Shock Power of Love, look, I thank Blackdown for releasing two songs from a generally unprolific artist like Burial on his label Keysound, but the two Blackdown songs are both skips for me although maybe the presence of 2-step inspired Burial to release two songs with beats. Even with the cheesy synth tones of the first half, “Space Cadet” is the marginally better of the two because “Dark Gethsemane” is a total wash: the first half is nothing special and then the second half introduces what sounds like a sample of a pastor repeating “We must shock this nation with the power of love” over and over but it doesn’t build to the release you think it would: it finally introduces a weak ass house beat and then promptly ends.
When it was announced that Burial would have a new EP out with a whopping five songs, I had guessed it was going to be purely ambient despite it sporting actual artwork suggesting something different - and I was right. 44 minutes of Burial’s moody landscapes and his increasing predilection towards the occasional syrupy tone (a lot of organ here, but not a particularly evocative organ sound either; someone get him a pipe organ) is a hard pill to swallow, but even at an individual level, I can’t help but think that I’m listening to old Burial songs with the beats removed. The voices of “Upstairs Flat” make me want to listen to “Come Down to Us,” and there’s a moment (3:22 mark) where Burial taps a drum very quietly twice, the spot where he normally would have introduced an uplifting beat to underpin the next vocal (“When you’re alone…”) that I end up missing. Not helping is that Burial’s use of abrupt stops: just as you’re being immersed in these generic rainy London nights, he just swipes the sustained synths out from underneath you only to start again immediately after. Where these stops in his early songs added to the momentum (i.e. “Kindred,” “Rival Dealer”), in an ambient framework, they serve only to disrupt the atmosphere he built towards in the first place.
And that’s it for Burial. I’ll be covering one of my favourite playwrights soon and then another artist with only two albums later this month.