Burial (Will Bevan) is a British dubstep producer.
Dubstep originated in London (probably in a club called "Forward>>" in 2001)
as a bass-heavy instrumental dance music derived from garage, a sort of middle
ground between two-step and dub.
Unlike grime, that was fundamentally orientated towards the vocals, dubstep
was more about the atmosphere.
Digital Mystikz, Loefah and Kode9 were among the pioneers of the scene,
but it was Skream with Midnight Request Line (2005) that established
it as a major force in dance music.
Burial became the first artist to emerge from the dubstep scene and reach
a broader audience.
The artistic success of Burial (Hyperdub, 2006) owed little to
dubstep proper (Wounder and Southern Comfort,
the former faithful to Burial's austere, modest and sparse aesthetic,
the latter scoured by electronic geysers). Many of the pieces
seemed rather an evolution of the gloomy trip-hop ambience of the 1990s
shaken by post-jungle breaks. For example,
Gutted is a cubistic
deconstruction of a melancholy and jazzy ballad, and Broken Home is
a Afro-bossanova equally decomposed.
A tense and gloomy atmosphere emerged from Distant Lights,
affording a glimpse into the kind of ebullient volcano that lied underneath.
Burial's most experimental moments were ever more daring: the
metallic post-industrial polyrhythms and miasmatic electronics of U Hurt Me,
the lulling musique concrete of Forgive,
the swampy collage of noise, voices and beats of Pirates.
Untrue (Hyperdub, 2007) reintroduced the vocals that Burial had so
successfully disposed with. Basically, Burial married dubstep with soul music.
Archangel is a ballad, not as deeply disguised and not as ferociously
deconstructed as the ones on the first album, so that one can actually hear
the melody.
Instrumentally, the second album is very similar to the first one, an ominous
sign that Burial's imagination is not unlimited.
Micro-symphonies of vocal samples, beats and synths still rule
Near Dark, Homeless, Ghost Hardware, with closer
Raver representing the atmospheric end of the spectrum.
The edgier "songs" are the ones that make creative use of vocals, notably
Endorphin, that spins a child's lullaby inside an electronic nebula,
and Shell of Light, a mantra within a mantra within a spacetime warp.
The three-song EP Street Halo (2011) contains one of his most
straightforward techno pieces, Street Halo, but tinged with the
melancholy and almost ghostly spleen of trip-hop,
one of his slowest ever, NYC, that sounds like the brainy remix of a
sensual soul ballad,
and especially one of his most ethereal and oneiric shuffles,
Stolen Dog.
Each of them is wrapped in elegant arrangements, but this is more a
demonstration of Burial's skills as a producer than a work of art.
Instead,
the EP Kindred (Hyperdub, 2012) contains three suite-length pieces that rank
among his most ambitious attempts at redefining his own style:
If Loner,
propelled by a techno-ish locomotive beat,
is simply another straightforward dancefloor detour,
and Ashtray Wasp is a house-music fantasia that dissolves in a
psychelic molasses evoking loneliness and mental insanity,
Kindred unleashes a creative puzzle of
glitchy soundscape, spastic rhythm, wailing vocals
(hinting at a melody reminiscent of a James Blunt's lament), snippets of female vocals and electronic effects.
The EPs collected on Street Halo/ Kindred (Hyperdub, 2012) contain
the concentrate of spleen Street Halo (hardly dubstep at all) and the
soul ballad Stolen Dog, as well as the acid deconstructed garage of
Kindred and the symphonic crescendo of Ashtray Wasp.
The EP Truant/ Rough Sleeper (2013) indulges in Burial's sonic alchemy.
The 12-minute Truant begins as a relatively straightforward
soul ballad, supported by the melancholy adagio of the electronics; but then
it suddenly restarts as a syncopated cubistic dance jam; and then again
with anthemic orchestral backing and little or no vocals, closer than ever
to the disco-music of the 1970s; and then again and again. Basically, Burial
turned classical music's concept of "variations" into a series of remixes
of the song stitched together one after the other. By the end there is only
an android pulsation.
Similarly, the 14-minute Rough Sleeper begins like
lightweight ambient house but then restarts as something else and keeps
mutating with jazzy saxophone and soul vocals and Afro-Caribbean rhythm,
ending with a coda of aquatic psychedelic ambient music.
The EP Rival Dealer (2013) was instead confusing. The first five
minutes of Rival Dealer is a frenzied orgiastic dance
and the 13-minute Come Down to Us sounds like an Indian or Arab
remix of a sentimental Pet Shop Boys
synth-pop ballad.
The two compositions of the EP Subtemple (2017) sound more like
Aphex Twin
than Burial.
