Burial’s Untrue: The Sonic Power of Evoking Emotion

Written by Veronika Sanada-Kailich

Edited by Will Schumer

Night-time activities have historically been viewed as socially deviant and morally decadent; however, recent cultural discourse around the nocturne focuses on urban melancholia and its ability to spark emotional, nostalgic responses. London-based electronic producer William Emanuel Bevan, who goes by the alias Burial, produced his second studio album Untrue (2007) solely in the dead of night. Burial’s music is recognized for its power to resonate with a wide audience; its soundscape of mournful noises commemorates London’s underground rave scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Untrue embodies a profound night-time aesthetic in its dark, emotive take on the UK rave scene, a quality that was previously unprecedented in the dubstep genre. Classified as a dubstep album and an homage to UK garage, its abstract style is marked by its fusing of syncopated dubstep sounds mixed with pitch-shifted, time-stretched vocal samples and skipped drum patterns. 

Burial produces his own melodies using a primitive digital audio-editing software called Soundforge. Contrary to more sophisticated programs, Soundforge is not a DAW (digital audio workstation) and does not adhere to a grid-system in the production process. Since the software only presents tracks as a visual soundwave form, he states in an interview with The Wire that he knows that his tracks are complete once they resemble a “fishbone” structure. This method gives the album its distinctive swing of jungle and garage genres and the sensation of slipping in and out of time [1]. Rather than creating sounds from scratch, Burial pays tribute to the older, analogue medium by integrating crackles. These serve as sonic reminders of how memories and time etch themselves into vinyl records, referring to a past of underground rave parties centered around vinyl. 

The UK underground rave scene in the 1980s and 1990s served as a sanctuary for local communities to celebrate their social differences against the mainstream. Thatcherism and New Labour policies under Tony Blair endorsed large-scale privatization projects that swept the UK in a systematic reversal of the Post-war consensus [2]. This new economic structure neglected laborers in support of the global financial elite, eventually resulting in monstrous inequality levels. Backlashes against these policies were highly reflected in the country’s music: in attempts to counter jungle’s dizzying tempos, clubs in the 1990s set up ancillary rooms for DJs to spin slower, R&B-inspired music, which came to be known as UK garage. UK dubstep slowly emerged from garage as production sounds became gloomier and more elusive to fit the street-styled aesthetic, characterized by syncopated beats and basslines with low frequencies [3]. Thus, UK dubstep originates from the dark alcoves of south London, tuning into the bleak sense of urban alienation. British conservatives saw this music scene as a threat to society and in 1994 pushed forth the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, designed to crack down on raves [4]. Tobias Van Veen describes this dematerialization of UK raves in the 1990s as being concurrent with the proliferation of corporate club culture, “mutating raves into a profitable clubbing activity,”[5]. This left ex-ravers longing for the grittier, hardcore sound they once enjoyed. Thus, when Untrue was released, rave culture had already been a ghost of its past. 

Media historian David Hendy argues that night-time listening distinguishes itself from daytime listening by providing the audience with greater intensity and intimacy. When listening in the dark, a “special bond” is formed both among listeners and between each listener and the musician who are “making it through the small hours together,”[6]. Harvard historian Daniel Lord Smail touches on our evolutionary tendencies towards the “neurophysiological legacy of our deep past,”[7]. In his studies, he discusses the capacity of the human brain to be constantly re-molded by both sensory and cultural information. These traces from the past are retrieved through current mental tropes induced by an aural medium. Importantly, cultural critic Susan Douglas argues that when there is no visual disruption, listening in a dark environment—particularly the night-time—becomes a “primal experience fusing pleasure, activity and desire,”[8]. Thus, darkness creates conditions that facilitate mental time travel. This deep nostalgia for the past achieved through nocturnal listening is what Burial attempts to tap into through Untrue. 

In an interview with artist Blackdown, Burial discloses that in his youth, he tested the soundscape of London’s southeast suburbia by driving around late at night. Referring to this method as “the Car Test,” which he claims added a “thousand-year stare” effect to his songs, Burial blasted particular songs on the car stereo at night to assess its sound’s potency [9]. In Untrue, Burial attempts to deliver the feeling of being engulfed by the night. He states, “it’s a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer - like it’s just for you. Like hearing rain or a whale-song, a cry in the dark, the far cry,”[10].

Burial addresses his intention to evoke a scene in which partygoers on their walk home still hear “the echo of their night out in their heads… a memory of a tune,”[11]. In its hypnotic rhythms, Untrue creates a mental image of people raving on a continuous loop. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes Burial’s genre as “hauntology”—music concerned with the “disjunction in which presence is suspended by the ghost which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive,”[12]. He compares the sonic experience of listening to Burial to “walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves’ past,”[13]. Untrue constantly references supernatural phenomena, as in the titles “Archangel” and “Ghost Hardware.” Thus, Burial’s acoustic interpretation of London is filled with modern ghosts of hauntological melancholia – the future is lost to modernity and appears as a ghost of rave’s past [14]. His yearning for an authentic underground scene untouched by capitalist interests put forth by New Labor policies creates an eerie space that beckons a proverbial night-time of socialist values. Thus, the “lost” night is conveyed in the rave-echoes in his songs, remnants of an inexpressible past and lost futures’ liminal states.

Upon close listening, the mixture of crackles and what appear to be human utterances—breathing, wailing, or murmuring— reduces the song to its most raw sonic element [15]. He conflates artificial and organic sounds to avoid ascribing definitive categories, emphasizing the ambiguous identity sounding like “a night cry, an angel animal,”[16]. This subdued echo of voices, extended over eerie background frequencies, produces a nocturnal atmosphere of entrapment. Repetitive echoes of lyrics such as “holding you, couldn’t be alone” in “Archangel,” or “dark angel, fall from the heavens above” in “Etched Headplate” delineate this. “In McDonalds” is the only title with an explicit physical location, while the other songs feel as though they take place in liminal spaces, which adds a layer of resonance. The song conjures the experience of having the 3 AM blues in a fast food restaurant, seated beneath the neon light of a 24-hour McDonalds, suspended in a reality divorced from daytime. 

Burial alters UK garage’s conventionally cheerful pianos for ambient synths that evoke raw emotion, and he is not restricted by tempo, which gives his music a distinct swing. His distinct nocturnal sound creates a cold, industrial image but is conveyed with warmth and comfort through oceans of washed out synth-tones. Untrue allows its listeners to viscerally visualize grimy, inner-city South London at night through a tapestry of sound: distant vinyl crackles, subterranean bass-tones and drum echoes, wailing vocals, overwhelming reverb, and low-fi rain sounds. These off-kilter rhythms produce an air of isolation that pervades the entire album, eliciting a desolate landscape. The songs come together to generate an experience of mental weightlessness. 

As previously mentioned, Untrue is permeated with hauntological urban melancholy [17]. While dubstep at the time had increasingly taken on a corporate quality, Burial took an alternative route by producing sounds that evoked heavy emotion from disembodied female vocal samples and old video games. Since R&B largely influenced UK garage in the 1990s, the very use of sampling this genre presents a nostalgia for the past by recalling audio-specters of musical precursors, such as Beyoncé, Ashanti, Erykah Badu, Usher and D’Angelo. Burial’s heavy use of pitch-shifting through a low-pass filter enhances his songs with echoes, reverb, and manipulations that make them sound ghostly and disembodied. By both fragmenting and stretching the vocals into new phrases and melodies, he obscures the identities and sources of the singers. This loss of identity is demonstrative of the larger feeling of existential isolation that accompanied London’s night-time activities. 

The vocals, supercharged with emotion, create a distant spectral quality that remove the listener from the source. For example, the beatless interludes in “Endorphin” and “In McDonalds” highlight the isolated vocal samples built upon ambience. In “Archangel,” Burial features an action-and-adventure video game series entitled Metal Gear Solid by sampling the intro theme song, where the protagonist jumps off a bridge in the middle of the night with his arms spread out like an angel [18]. In “Near Dark,” Burial builds percussion using sounds from the same videogame – chopped snares and hi-hats from guns reloading and shell casings – that are reworked.

Ultimately, the political context in the UK surrounding Untrue’s release date includes New Labour policies’ state down-sizing and privatization of services such as the Royal Mail and the NHS. In the album’s production, Burial hones into the forgotten socialist values of a shared acceptance of London’s bleakness, and mourns the “lost” night of the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Its raw quality and emotional value reveals itself through Burial’s abstract take of several genres such as jungle, garage, and dubstep. By rejecting musical conventions, Burial allows his contemporary listeners to viscerally experience what London nightlife was like before capitalism infiltrated its streets.

Endnotes

1. Fisher, Mark. “Burial: Unedited Transcript - The Wire.” The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music, December 2012.

2. Edwards, Chris. "Margaret Thatcher's Privatization Legacy," Cato Journal 37, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 90.

3. “Understanding EDM Subgenres: The UK Scene - Spin Academy.” Spin Academy Understanding EDM Subgenres The UK Scene Comments, May 6, 2016.

4. Doward, Jamie. “What Worried 1992's Tories? Not Maastricht – but Raves.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, December 30, 2018. 

5. Veen, Tobias C. Van. “Technics, Precarity and Exodus in Rave Culture.” Dancecult 1, no. 2 (2010), 30.

6. Hendy, David. “Listening In The Dark.” Media History 16, no. 2 (March 30, 2010), 217.

7. Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago Press, 2009, 8.

8. Douglas, Susan Jeanne. Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005, 30.

9. Blackdown. “Soundboy Burial.” blackdownsoundboy, March 21, 2006.

10. Hancox, Dan. “Elusive Dubstep Star Burial Gives a Rare Interview.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, October 25, 2007.

11. Hendy, David. “Listening In The Dark.” Media History 16, no. 2 (March 30, 2010), 70.

12. Gallix, Andrew. “Hauntology: A Not-so-New Critical Manifestation.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, June 17, 2011. 

13. Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014, 98.

14. Kolioulis, Alessio. “Borderlands: Dub Techno’s Hauntological Politics of Acoustic Ecology.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 7, no. 2 (2015), 67.

15. Hendy, David. “Listening In The Dark.” Media History 16, no. 2 (March 30, 2010), 68.

16. Ibid.

17.  “Understanding EDM Subgenres: The UK Scene - Spin Academy.” Spin Academy Understanding EDM Subgenres The UK Scene Comments, May 6, 2016, 65

18. Advisor, Resident. YouTube. YouTube, November 6, 2017.