SUSO

TRULY UNTRUE

I am Burial. No, really, I am. Not. Burial himself was once told, in no uncertain terms, that he was in fact a girl. Someone had met her, you see. He isn’t of course. He’s a man. A young one - in his early twenties. And that’s about as much as we know.

A few weeks ago I was in Manchester to see Underground Resistance live at the Warehouse Project. For those that don’t know, UR are a Detroit-based musical collective and record label (and entirely deserving of their own post here - anyone?) who have continued to pioneer the sound of techno ever since their humble beginnings in the late 80s. They have always been keen to conceal their identities - not so much these days but certainly earlier on - and up in Manchester each of them was wearing a mask. Drexciya, a duo who released on Underground Resistance, went to similar lengths to conceal their identities. The idea was to put the music first, meaning people’s appreciation of it would not be tarnished by what they knew about them as people. It’s music for music’s sake, and in today’s climate of almost fetishistic obsession with the artist (however worthy) rather than the art, in which people have become slaves to the cult of personality, that’s quite refreshing.

But it can have an inverse effect, and Burial is a case in point. So good has he been at keeping his real world identity from the hungry masses - only a handful of people know he makes tunes - that his new album, Untrue, took on an almost mythical status even before its release. This meant that, as I clambered into my car last Monday evening (is there a better place to get one on one with music than in the car?) and slipped the new album into the CD player, I felt like I’d almost have to like the new album as a matter of course. It was as if it was no longer a case of music at face value.

That was until the wonderfully awkward vocals of Archangel began to drift in and out of that unmistakable swamp of skippy percussion, hollow snares and tear-inducing melodies, all smothered, like an Impressionist picture, in a thick impasto of trademark crackle. There and then, only a minute into the album, I forgot the hype and I belonged to the music. I was submerged, and I didn’t come up for air until the 4x4 rhythms of Raver had subsided into the long and distant crackle. The legitimacy of the hype had been confirmed.

Burial is routinely talked about as dubstep. But he’s not really is he? Dubstep is incredibly diverse, but it’s becoming increasingly self-referential as its popularity continues to boom and, as a consequence, a little unoriginal. You can’t say that about Burial (or, for that matter, Hyperdub, the label he releases on - check their latest 12 by Quarta 330). It’s the mark of a great musician, as it is with a great painter or writer, that you recognise their work in an instant. That’s how it is with Burial. And, on top of all that, he does it all with a battered PC and an aging audio editor, as if substantiating our own belief that you don’t need external resources to do great things. You just need a little imagination, creativity and determination.

Burial has them in spades.

www.undergroundresistance.com

www.hyperdub.com

http://www.myspace.com/burialuk

Categories Music Tags Burial Dubstep Hyperdub Underground Resistance Untrue

By on 13/11/07