William Emmanuel Bevan – also known as Burial – is a South London music producer who was born in 1979. A reclusive producer who received critical praise for ‘Untrue’ in 2007 after its release in November of the same year.
It was best said by Dan Hancox in The Guardian as to how reclusive Burial was, “Burial doesn’t do DJ gigs, live performances, or radio shows, and only a few photos exist of him, taken by the photographer Georgina Cook, and obscured to conceal his identity. ‘Only about five people outside of my family know I make tunes, I think. I hope,’ he says.” (Hancox, 2007). Burial himself has also said that he has a belief that the less you know about an artist the more you connect with their music.
Without live performances and interviews, Bevan hid behind his producer persona until he was ‘outed’ by the Independent in an article in February 2008. He confirmed that this was true via his MySpace page (MacNeill, 2018) as remembered by Kyle MacNeill in Vice on the 10th anniversary of Bevan’s identity reveal.
Notwithstanding his dislike for the spotlight, his music speaks volumes. Bevan claims that he uses SoundForge, the digital audio editor, for his tracks. As a digital editor, not a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), it would make the production process more difficult. This leads to a swing to the drum groove. It also introduces timing variance in that it is not set to a metronome and cannot be quantized. It was essentially eyeballed but with his ears. 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.” (Kottle, 2007).
“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 quantized, 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.” (Warmsley, 2009)
Off kilter rhythms abound because of the use of an audio editor rather than a DAW. As stated by Romney in his paper a digital audio editor “does not provide the non-destructive editing that makes a digital audio workstation so liberating. As a sound editor, it relies on destructive editing that alters and degrades the original sound file from the moment it is opened in the program.” (Romney 2017). This kind of destructive editing has added to the groove and feel of the work on Untrue. To listen to the difference between the tracks on Untrue and the one track that Burial completed with a DAW, Unite. The difference in the drums is stark, the tracks on Untrue feel more human and have a groove. Unite on the other hand feels clinical. Still musical but does not feel as authentic as his other tracks.
Bevan’s frequent use of samples from video games (Metal Gear Solid, was used extensively) – most of the percussion being sampled from Metal Gear Solid. With most of the samples treated beyond recognition, however some are still raw and unprocessed. 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.” (Fisher, 2012). He has sampled Beyonce, Christina Aguilera, Sarah McLachlan and others. For Beyonce, he pitched her down as to be unrecognisable, except though her lyrics (Hawthorn, 2017).
Overall though I had listened to this album before I can say that I did not see the complexity of the album previously and the amount of effort taken to create these great tracks.
References:
Fisher, M. (2012) Burial: Unedited transcript – the Wire, The Wire Magazine – Adventures In Modern Music. Available at: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedited-transcript (Accessed: November 21, 2022).
Hawthorn, C. (2017) Burial’s untrue: The making of a masterpiece ⟋ RA films, Resident Advisor. Edited by S. Misrahi. Available at: https://ra.co/films/3102 (Accessed: November 21, 2022).
Kottle, J. (2017) The making of burial’s untrue, kottke.org. Available at: https://kottke.org/17/12/the-making-of-burials-untrue (Accessed: November 21, 2022).
Romney, A. (2017) Beyond audacity: Supporting Sonic Futures through the Digital Audio Workstation, Communication Center Journal. Available at: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ccj/article/view/1590/pdf (Accessed: November 21, 2022).
Walmsley, D. “Dubstep”, The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music, ed. Rob Young, London: Verso, 2009, p. 92.