Burial

Dubstep originated in London (probably in a club called "Forward>>" in 2001) as a bass-heavy instrumental dance music derived from garage, a sort of middle ground between two-step and dub. Unlike grime, that was fundamentally orientated towards the vocals, dubstep was more about the atmosphere. Digital Mystikz, Loefah and Kode9 were among the pioneers of the scene, but it was Skream with Midnight Request Line (2005) that established it as a major force in dance music. Burial became the first artist to emerge from the dubstep scene and reach a broader audience.

The artistic success of Burial (Hyperdub, 2006) owed little to dubstep proper (Wounder and Southern Comfort, the former faithful to Burial's austere, modest and sparse aesthetic, the latter scoured by electronic geysers). Many of the pieces seemed rather an evolution of the gloomy trip-hop ambience of the 1990s shaken by post-jungle breaks. For example, Gutted is a cubistic deconstruction of a melancholy and jazzy ballad, and Broken Home is a Afro-bossanova equally decomposed. A tense and gloomy atmosphere emerged from Distant Lights, affording a glimpse into the kind of ebullient volcano that lied underneath. Burial's most experimental moments were ever more daring: the metallic post-industrial polyrhythms and miasmatic electronics of U Hurt Me, the lulling musique concrete of Forgive, the swampy collage of noise, voices and beats of Pirates.

Untrue (Hyperdub, 2007) reintroduced the vocals that Burial had so successfully disposed with. Basically, Burial married dubstep with soul music. Archangel is a ballad, not as deeply disguised and not as ferociously deconstructed as the ones on the first album, so that one can actually hear the melody. Instrumentally, the second album is very similar to the first one, an ominous sign that Burial's imagination is not unlimited. Micro-symphonies of vocal samples, beats and synths still rule Near Dark, Homeless, Ghost Hardware, with closer Raver representing the atmospheric end of the spectrum. The edgier "songs" are the ones that make creative use of vocals, notably Endorphin, that spins a child's lullaby inside an electronic nebula, and Shell of Light, a mantra within a mantra within a spacetime warp.

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