Burial: Unedited Transcript

Burial: I don’t know if it exists any more at all. A lot of those old tunes I put on at night and hear something in the tune that makes me feel sad, - a few of my favourite producers and DJs are dead now too - and I hear this hope in all those old tracks, trying to unite the UK, but they couldn't, because the UK was changing in a different direction, away from us. Maybe the feeling of the UK in clubs and stuff back then, it wasn't as artificial , self-aware or created by the internet. It was more rumour, underground folklore. No mobile phones back then. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out. Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren’t running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away from them. In club culture, it all became like super-clubs, magazines, trance, commercialized. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs. It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that point. That era is gone, now there's less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. You can't hide, the media clocks everything. The internet or whatever, but DMZ and FWD have that deep atmosphere and real feeling, the true underground is still strong, I hear good new tunes all the time.

Wire: Kode9 says that the new album has a feeling of ‘downcast euphoria’, whereas the first one was just downcast.

Burial: When I listened to these old tapes, I took what these jungle MCs were telling me seriously. Rolling a tune out, I took it as a commandment about how to make a tune: roll it out, do it fast. I was into old hardcore, darkside, trying to do a properly dark record. Not this new, pumped up tech sound. I liked the old tunes, properly darkside like finding a body in a lift shaft: dank moody tunes, suburban tunes. I want to go back to that hardcore era of darkside someday, which would be rugged, film samples just pitched up and down with strings. It wasn’t just that pure monochrome thing, it was something else, it sounded like tearing through an empty building. But the thing is, I had this bunch of tunes for my 2nd album that were dark tunes, and I just scrapped them. I took ages on them. I was worrying, because after my first album I felt a bit of pressure to follow it up. I worked for hours on these tunes, and I was trying to learn these programmes. These tunes were darker, more technical, all the tunes sounded like some kind of weapon that was being taken apart and put back together again. But then I got sort of sick of them, because I spent so long on them, I was moody about other things. So I wanted to make a glowing record, I wanted to cheer myself up. Instead of doing those dark tunes that took ages and were really detailed, I wanted to make a record fast. Something warm, glowing, junglist and garagey. I was listening to these Guy Called Gerald tunes. I wanted to do vocals but I can’t get a proper singer like him. So I cut up acapellas and made different sentences, even if they didn’t make sense but they summed up what I was feeling. I love those Foul Play and Omni Trio tunes where it was just the girl next door singing, So I got a lot of those quite low-quality vocals and started to pitch them up and down. You can do it really fast. I sort of did the whole album in about two weeks. Most of it in the final week. When I made this a lot of things were wrong. It was nice to say, ‘fuck this’, I’m just going to make it well fast. So I’m quite defensive of it. When you’re making a tune and it’s really late… I heard this thing on EastEnders about burning the candle at both ends with a flamethrower, I was making tunes in the middle of the night, if I didn’t have the vocal to keep me awake, like singing a lullaby, trying to hypnotise myself so I didn’t fall asleep

Wire: It’s like a reverse lullaby in a way – instead of sending you to sleep, it’s keeping you awake! With the first album, it felt like the references were early-mid 90s jungle, whereas with the new one, it’s as if things have moved on two or three years, to UK garage and 2-step.

Burial: I love UK garage, I love 2-step and Todd Edwards. For a long time I felt that no-one liked it, some music people cussed it because they're stupid, but its music for real people, those tunes still sound better than most stuff when you’re out. I don’t know many people who like tunes but I had one mate who had a car and let me test my tunes, I always liked deeper nighttime tunes, a bit more rolling - garage, dubstep is half pulse, half sway, so it sounds good in a car at night.

I wanted to make a half euphoric record. That was an older thing that UK underground music used to have. I think that type of euphoria is a British thing, like UK tunes, old rave tunes used to be the masters of that, for a reason, to do with the rave, a half smile, half human endorphins and half something hypnotized by drugs. It was stolen from us and it never really came back. Mates laugh at me because I like whale songs but I love ‘em, I like vocals to be like that, like a night cry, an angel animal. Old hardcore tunes would throw these sounds in, anything to create the rush, descent into another world, like Papua New Guinea by Future Sound of London. love this one feeling, it only happens to you when you’re out in the cold, when your down, this shiver attempts to warm you up, bring you back. For a moment you get this weird, eerie distant feeling like it’s just for you, you get taken out of yourself. Certain tunes just nail that. So I had to do that, but have cut-up vocals and have that slinky bumping feel to it, and not get weighed down in big drums and the big snares. With Garage the drums are taken back, they’re quite soft, it’s more about being slinky. They’re like a fishbone, a spine, an exoskeleton that cradles the sounds. It’s not about the deepest kick or the biggest snare. The drums are more about trying to thread sounds and vocals together, they flicker across the surface of the tune, it circles around you, its not just chopping you up, its not about the sounds being big.

Wire: That’s the part of the reason you’re not happy with using sequencers?

Burial: Also because I don’t know how to use them!

Wire: Yeah, but you could learn! But things often sound sequenced when they are.

Burial: That’s happened to a lot of music. It's detailed in a boring way. I’m not into big intros, because if you’ve got a big intro, the rest of the tune is forever the rest of the tune, and the intro’s forever the intro. You can never get lost in it, you know where you are in most tunes, and that just takes away the only reason a tune should exist to me, I can't relate to grey music. I like tunes that just dive straight in, there’s a jump off and once you’re in it, the awareness that you’re two minutes into a tune, or four minutes into a tune is gone. That’s how I like my tunes. Or something like Robert Hood, just pure presence, shark-like, elements woven together. You can sense them sitting there rolling out the tune.

Wire: Your tunes are like being in a fog, it’s diffuse, but it’s all around you.

Burial: Then a couple of sounds might come up, glow, the rest of them sink down and burn out.