Burial

Burial is the debut studio album by London electronic producer Burial, released in 2006 on Kode9's Hyperdub label. Considered a landmark of the mid-2000s dubstep scene, the album's sound features a dark, emotive take on the UK rave music that preoccupied Burial in his youth, including UK garage and 2-step. Critics have variously interpreted the release as an elegy for the dissipated rave movement and a sullen audio portrait of London. Burial received critical acclaim, with The Wire magazine naming it the record of the year in its annual critics' poll. It was also ranked the year's fifth best album by Mixmag and sixth by The Guardian. It has been ranked among the best albums of the decade by Fact and Resident Advisor, and in 2013 it was ranked number 391 on NME's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Production and composition William Bevan was very much into drum and bass and jungle as an adolescent, and listened to these types of music on his way to school. When he heard the song "Special Mission" by producer Digital from the first Metalheadz box set released in 1997, that's when he realized that, while he wasn't really a "musician", and even as of 2006 he didn't consider himself a musician, he could make tracks like these without having to be one. Burial was produced from 2001 to 2006 using the program Soundforge. Bevan began sending Steve Goodman (a.k.a. Kode9) letters and CD-Rs of his home-made music around 2002, having been a fan of the music featured on Goodman's Hyperdub website. In 2005, the label released the South London Boroughs EP, which collected tracks recorded by Burial for several years prior. As Burial describes the recording 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." He also said that he didn't use a sequencer, because if his drums were timed too perfectly, they would "lose something" and "sound rubbish". The drums were a major focus of his while making the record, saying that, "I don’t find melodies catchy, I find drums catchy. When you have a bassline in your head for a day, you’re fucked. You can’t think." He also recorded himself drumming in case he forgot a beat he thought of, as he would often get kicked out of class for drumming on tables. He went as so far as to call musicianship an "enemy of my tunes".