The nights are drawing in and the weather outside is frightful, so it’s the time of year to reach for an old favourite – no, not just Michael Bublé but Burial, the south London producer whose tracks remain the perfect accompaniment to a moody illicit joint in the snow at your parents’ house over Christmas; the sound of cloud covering a 4pm dusk.
His two albums in 2006 and 2007 caused a sensation with their spectral, sentimental inversions of speed garage, jungle, R&B and grime. Muffled and haloed in static, and coming from an anonymous creator, they invited whimsical interpretation: were these snatches of ghost pirate radio, as if transmitting from the Mary Celeste? The dream-memories of a sleeping raver 50 years hence? Unmasked as Will Bevan in 2008, Burial has never released another full-length, but rather a steady series of 12-inch releases that are collected and resequenced over two CDs here (well, most of them – there is no room, sadly, for straightforwardly raving tracks such as the deep house roller Rodent or techno beast Indoors).
If he was previously picking up haunted versions of Kool or Rinse FM, it’s as if he widened the bandwidth on his receiver. Hiders is like a Coldplay epic heard on Smooth Radio in a taxi at the bottom of a canal; Come Down to Us like a Europop ballad raggedly filtering over from Moldova. The third track from the same 2013 EP, Rival Dealer, is a breakbeat masterpiece that introduces another flavour: industrial, also heard in the extraordinary sample on Ashtray Wasp, where the Stone Roses’ Elephant Stone is pitched down into a kind of thrash line. It’s as though the receiver can’t even detect rhythm on ambient tracks such as the superb Beachfires, a slow chorale of warning signals finally reaching Earth (Burial’s work also seems to invoke science fiction).
The constant crackle of static suggests intercepted transmissions, but perhaps damaged vinyl, too. This invites a bigger myth: his work could be recordings from an entire parallel universe of pop, where the flotsam that Burial samples – video games, acceptance speeches, keyboard demo videos – became the mainstream. He remains one of the most evocative, instantly recognisable voices in contemporary British music.
