When I awoke today I rolled over and wondered “is the heat on?” Being a naturally warm person who lives on the top-floor of a tenement building and traditionally sleeps under a cozy comforter I’d normally pose the question “why is the heat on?” But since it’s getting chilly in New England after a warm early-Fall, and my aforementioned blanky needs replacing, I wouldn’t have been disappointed to find my radiators hot-to-the-touch on this grey morn. Sadly, the radiator in my bedroom proved cold, and as I retreated beneath the sorry-ass fleece passing for my blanket until I replace my comforter I thought “well, I guess it’s time to write about some cold-weather-music.”
When I copped London-based Dubstep producer Burial’s “Ghost Hardware” 12” this Summer the last thing on my mind was cold weather. Even though it recalls the dark, cold, medieval style of production favored by RZA (whose work on Liquid Swords encapsulates the chill of Fall and Winter in the city for me) and 4th Disciple during the Wu-Tang Clan’s mid-’90s reign of terror, it was the middle of Summer and the tune’s knocking 2-Step drums and inky atmosphere made me think of sweating on the dancefloor of a nightclub with a heavy sound-system as lights flashed and an industrial fan blew more than anything. A few months later, the temperatures are dropping, dead leaves are everywhere, and Burial’s sophomore LP Untrue (out now on Kode9’s Hyperdub Records) is (much like Liquid Swords in ‘95) the official soundtrack of my cold-cold nights.
More surprising than its seasonal synchronicity though is where Untrue takes Dubstep. Yeah, the bone-rattling bass and cavernous reverb that connote the genre are here, but there are no stuttery, Grime-esque half-speed beats or languid Reggae vibes. The tempos remain high throughout, driven by Burial’s stumbling 2-Step and Garage-influenced drum-programming. What’s more, Burial’s use of clicks, clunks, snaps and jingling-bells give his compositions the air of musique concrète-style sound-collage, not unlike the Micro-House of Matthew Herbert, or certain forms of experimental IDM and laptop music. But it’s really his use of vocals, taking snatches of sung phrases and manipulating their speed and pitch to create eerie new melodies, which sets Untrue apart as a rhythmic deconstruction of contemporary R&B. Tunes like the title track, “Archangel,” “Homeless,” “Raver,” “Etched Headplate” (boasting a refrain that sounds a lot like one of my lady-friends saying my name) and “Ghost Hardware” take Club music, avant-garde Electronica, and traditional Soul music, forces them into a blender and then pours the resulting mixture through an echoplex, into your brain.
Listen to “Archangel”
If you’ve heard the “Live Garage” mix of Roy Davis Jr. and Peven Everett’s “Gabrielle,” imagine it chopped-and-screwed, but still played at high BPM’s and you sort of have an idea as to what Burial’s doing. And I wish I could say it’s “the future of Pop music,” or that the people making dancefloor-friendly R&B were brave enough to make their records sound even remotely similar to this. But it would probably be more accurate to call it “Pop music from a future that won’t ever happen,” and since the mainstream didn’t pick up what Roy and Peven were putting down in 1996, I doubt they’ll pick up on Burial now.
-El Keter
