Burial is a British music producer and has been a pioneer in the dubstep music genre, being a very influential figure for his use of interesting production techniques, such as pitch shifting and time stretching vocal samples, within his music. ‘Untrue’ was his second album and was met to great critical acclaim; this was a dubstep album with obvious UK garage, hardcore and ambient influences. It was even called ‘the most important electronic album of the century so far’ by Pitchfork. Burial himself explained the album title to critic Anwen Crawford in 2007 as follows: ‘It’s like when someone’s not acting like themselves. They’re off-key, something’s wrong, an atmosphere has entered the room’. This description also captures what the album sounds like, if it is anything it is atmospheric; dragging you into its dark and unsettling ambience. In another interview Burial also said he liked to test his songs out by driving around South London in the middle of the night, this was to see if they held the quality of ‘distance’ he wanted them to. With the use of intense reverb and almost subliminal real world sound effects twisted with audio effects this album conjures that ‘distance’ as he wanted, feeling as if it transports you to an eerie new world which looks much like a shadow of our own.
Burial builds the tracks on this album mostly through sampling and audio editing techniques, he does also employ some synthesis; his music has such a specific and familiar feeling of nostalgia and atmosphere that it has been associated with ‘hauntology’ which is a genre of music that evokes aesthetics and cultural memory of the past. His signature skipped drum patterns, canned sounding strings and intentionally lo-fi audio editing are all present on this record and when combined with the processed and layered samples and dark synthesised sound it creates an unmistakable signature sound overall. The most prominent production technique that Burial used to build these tracks was sampling vocals, he took these samples from old R&B tracks, TV shows and also sampled his friends singing a-cappella over the phone; he manipulated these samples extensively, so much so that most are unrecognisable. Throughout they are pitched up and down, time stretched and cut up; he used vocal science to edit individual words into sentences and used audio effects to change the sound of the vocals entirely. Decontextualised like this they create a certain sense of eerie ambience, with some only vaguely resembling human voice; he intentionally transposed samples to make them sound androgynous and digitally imposed melisma and rills on some of the vocals to add more depth.
He also sampled sounds such as rain, vinyl hiss and incidental sounds from movies, such as the sound of car keys; the use of these samples helped build the unique darkness in his music, interesting because it is so disconcerting yet firmly grounded in reality. The synthesis present in his tracks is full of depth and mostly present in minor scales, used to build heavy basslines, dripping wet with audio effects, and also to create lighter, beautiful pads. He also made heavy use of reverb on this record, with the extensive use of it on every track working to trap the reader in a sort of haze.
Overall this records heavy use of sampling works to create an incredible experience. To me personally it sounds like walking through London at night, the feeling of tiredness and sadness the city holds; its the sound of all the lonely people adrift in the city trying to make sense of their lives. It is a lament, grounded so firmly in reality yet numbed and heightened all at once; it sounds like another realm leaning into our own, a shadow world so close you could reach out and touch it.