WED., JANUARY 31, 2007
Kode 9 and the Spaceape
In This Feature
Magazine Archives:
Dubstep
by Philip Sherburne
If you were paying much attention to the various year-end summaries that capped 2006, you might have noticed one unfamiliar name cropping up again and again on lists that otherwise held little in common: Burial.
No wonder: Burial's self-titled debut album comes like a bolt from the blue, sounding fully formed in a way that electronic full-lengths seldom do, and speaking with the kind of universal voice that albums deeply rooted in a specific genre seldom possess. A concise 51 minutes long, Burial offers a sustained mood: it's dark, dense and sorrowful. It feels somehow wet — but not wet like a swimming pool or a glass of water, more like a bus window pressed flat against your cheek, in mid-winter, as you leave an ex-lover's city for the last time. (Track titles like "Night Bus" and "Broken Home" don't exactly dissuade one from such slightly maudlin flights of fancy, but seriously: listen to "Forgive" and tell me you don't get the same thing.)
Despite its uniformity of mood, Burial is also an unusually varied album. Its focal tracks, like "Distant Lights" and "Southern Comfort," are ostensibly dancefloor cuts, all bass wallop and scissoring hi-hats, air-raid sirens and careening rave stabs; but the album's flow is as carefully channeled as a series of river locks, with short, beatless interludes offering breathing room between bangers. Burial mixes up his rhythmic intensities so that no two tracks move in quite the same way. "Spaceape" steps like cat burglars in point shoes; "Southern Comfort" somehow manages to fuse martial maneuvers and a courtesan's languid gestures.
So far, Burial's identity remains a mystery; the London-based artist will confirm only that he isn't known under any other aliases. (Early on, some listeners suggested that Burial might be a side project of Kode 9, whose Hyperdub label released the self-titled album along with two equally fine EPs, Distant Lights and South London Boroughs, that preceded it.) What little is known about Burial comes principally from an interview the artist gave to London music journalist Martin Clark's Blackdown Soundboy blog in March of 2006. Burial professes to be something of an outsider belonging to no particular scene; like many talented electronic musicians, he is an autodidact with no formal musical training. Growing up on drum 'n' bass, he grew infatuated with drum programming, and as UK garage began injecting UK breakbeat music with an unprecedented degree of bump and swing, he started experimenting with beatmaking himself.
Reading Burial talk about rhythm, you sense an almost mystical reverence for the perfect beat. Of garage producer El-B, one of Burial's early idols, he says, "The thing about [his] drums: they're still the future. It's not a lost art — people still don't know how to do those drums. It's an unknown thing. It's like the last fucking secret left in music: how you do those drums. I've tried. I've locked myself away and tried. And the thing about garage is: the more you look at it like some tech-boy producer, the less you get it." He calls it "rollage": "It's just the spirit of it, the roll of it. The drums, they're slinky. Cold sounding. They could go anywhere."
More often than not, Burial's drums do. His beats are without a doubt the centerpiece of his music: all those billowing chords and crackling tone clusters would be mere window-dressing without the rib-rattling pulse he gives them. His sense of time is downright peculiar, imbuing his tracks with a rolling, snapping, elastic sense of give-and-take. It sounds not quite like anything else out there, which goes some way towards explaining why Burial has attracted such a diverse group of listeners.
Fortunately, Burial isn't entirely sui generis; he's rooted in London's dubstep sound, and while his music remains distinct from the more club-oriented output of that genre, it provides an excellent entry point.
Dubstep emerged as an offshoot of UK garage around the turn of the decade; you can hear it roots in spacious, bass-heavy cuts like Sticky's "Boo" and Zed Bias' "Time Out" on the Sound of the Pirates compilation. For the early part of the decade, dubstep took a backseat to its cousin grime, a lyrically-inclined genre that found success in artists like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and the many MCs (including Lady Sovereign) showcased on Run the Road and Run the Road Volume 2. But while grime grew to sound more and more like hip-hop, dubstep's adherents — old hands like Kode 9 and Horsepower Productions, and new talents like Skream and Digital Mystikz — fashioned dubstep into an incredibly focused, forceful sound.
At the heart of dubstep is its approach to fusion: the genre is a careful balancing act between dub reggae's lazy skank, jungle's rhythmic wizardry and techno's timbral futurism. In terms of pure sonics: just listen to the way Kode 9 manages to utilize seemingly every point on the spectrum on "Quantum," from chest-caving bass to the icicle clatter of the high end. Dubstep can feel as heavy as the heaviest metal — just check Boxcutter's "Brood" for proof — but this is the opposite of Motorhead's concept of "everything louder than everything else." In dubstep, every sound seems to know exactly when and how to make room for the next. (Dubstep may be the most polite — certainly the most precise — form of heavy music there is.)
Long a London thing, dubstep achieved new levels of exposure in 2006 — thanks in part to artists like Burial, but also to a groundswell of interest online, bringing the hermetic dubplate culture outside its usual stomping grounds for the first time. Much of the scene's output remains perniciously difficult to procure, but a few larger independent labels are beginning to pick up some of the slack. At the forefront is Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu: once known for outsider genres like breakcore and drill 'n' bass, Planet Mu seems to have re-energized itself since discovering dubstep. MRK1's brand new Copyright Laws, like Kode 9's album, displays a particular affinity for rocksteady rhythms, the clipped precision of vintage hip-hop, a tinge of Eastern instrumentation and the starry effects of dub reggae. Both Boxcutter's Oneiric and Vex'd's De Generate, released last year, offer more twisted takes on the form, marrying low-end wobble to violent percussive outbursts. (Boxcutter, like Burial, has his sensitive side, which he betrays on comparatively gentle cuts like "Gave Dub" and "Silver Birch Solstice.")
The XL label, which signed Dizzee Rascal and Wiley, has waded into dubstep with Various (aka Various Productions), a confusingly named artist whose masterful album The World Is Gone lends dubstep's snarling, synthesized bass to the filigreed guitars and melancholic vocals of English folk music. It doesn't always work, and even when it does, Various can feel a bit like merely a contemporary update of Tricky or Portishead. But tracks like "Hater" show that dubstep needn't be a resolutely underground music, either: when that bass is paired with the right voice singing the right melody, the results are pure pop, in the best way possible.
No wonder: Burial's self-titled debut album comes like a bolt from the blue, sounding fully formed in a way that electronic full-lengths seldom do, and speaking with the kind of universal voice that albums deeply rooted in a specific genre seldom possess. A concise 51 minutes long, Burial offers a sustained mood: it's dark, dense and sorrowful. It feels somehow wet — but not wet like a swimming pool or a glass of water, more like a bus window pressed flat against your cheek, in mid-winter, as you leave an ex-lover's city for the last time. (Track titles like "Night Bus" and "Broken Home" don't exactly dissuade one from such slightly maudlin flights of fancy, but seriously: listen to "Forgive" and tell me you don't get the same thing.)
Despite its uniformity of mood, Burial is also an unusually varied album. Its focal tracks, like "Distant Lights" and "Southern Comfort," are ostensibly dancefloor cuts, all bass wallop and scissoring hi-hats, air-raid sirens and careening rave stabs; but the album's flow is as carefully channeled as a series of river locks, with short, beatless interludes offering breathing room between bangers. Burial mixes up his rhythmic intensities so that no two tracks move in quite the same way. "Spaceape" steps like cat burglars in point shoes; "Southern Comfort" somehow manages to fuse martial maneuvers and a courtesan's languid gestures.
So far, Burial's identity remains a mystery; the London-based artist will confirm only that he isn't known under any other aliases. (Early on, some listeners suggested that Burial might be a side project of Kode 9, whose Hyperdub label released the self-titled album along with two equally fine EPs, Distant Lights and South London Boroughs, that preceded it.) What little is known about Burial comes principally from an interview the artist gave to London music journalist Martin Clark's Blackdown Soundboy blog in March of 2006. Burial professes to be something of an outsider belonging to no particular scene; like many talented electronic musicians, he is an autodidact with no formal musical training. Growing up on drum 'n' bass, he grew infatuated with drum programming, and as UK garage began injecting UK breakbeat music with an unprecedented degree of bump and swing, he started experimenting with beatmaking himself.
Reading Burial talk about rhythm, you sense an almost mystical reverence for the perfect beat. Of garage producer El-B, one of Burial's early idols, he says, "The thing about [his] drums: they're still the future. It's not a lost art — people still don't know how to do those drums. It's an unknown thing. It's like the last fucking secret left in music: how you do those drums. I've tried. I've locked myself away and tried. And the thing about garage is: the more you look at it like some tech-boy producer, the less you get it." He calls it "rollage": "It's just the spirit of it, the roll of it. The drums, they're slinky. Cold sounding. They could go anywhere."
More often than not, Burial's drums do. His beats are without a doubt the centerpiece of his music: all those billowing chords and crackling tone clusters would be mere window-dressing without the rib-rattling pulse he gives them. His sense of time is downright peculiar, imbuing his tracks with a rolling, snapping, elastic sense of give-and-take. It sounds not quite like anything else out there, which goes some way towards explaining why Burial has attracted such a diverse group of listeners.
Fortunately, Burial isn't entirely sui generis; he's rooted in London's dubstep sound, and while his music remains distinct from the more club-oriented output of that genre, it provides an excellent entry point.
Dubstep emerged as an offshoot of UK garage around the turn of the decade; you can hear it roots in spacious, bass-heavy cuts like Sticky's "Boo" and Zed Bias' "Time Out" on the Sound of the Pirates compilation. For the early part of the decade, dubstep took a backseat to its cousin grime, a lyrically-inclined genre that found success in artists like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and the many MCs (including Lady Sovereign) showcased on Run the Road and Run the Road Volume 2. But while grime grew to sound more and more like hip-hop, dubstep's adherents — old hands like Kode 9 and Horsepower Productions, and new talents like Skream and Digital Mystikz — fashioned dubstep into an incredibly focused, forceful sound.
At the heart of dubstep is its approach to fusion: the genre is a careful balancing act between dub reggae's lazy skank, jungle's rhythmic wizardry and techno's timbral futurism. In terms of pure sonics: just listen to the way Kode 9 manages to utilize seemingly every point on the spectrum on "Quantum," from chest-caving bass to the icicle clatter of the high end. Dubstep can feel as heavy as the heaviest metal — just check Boxcutter's "Brood" for proof — but this is the opposite of Motorhead's concept of "everything louder than everything else." In dubstep, every sound seems to know exactly when and how to make room for the next. (Dubstep may be the most polite — certainly the most precise — form of heavy music there is.)
Long a London thing, dubstep achieved new levels of exposure in 2006 — thanks in part to artists like Burial, but also to a groundswell of interest online, bringing the hermetic dubplate culture outside its usual stomping grounds for the first time. Much of the scene's output remains perniciously difficult to procure, but a few larger independent labels are beginning to pick up some of the slack. At the forefront is Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu: once known for outsider genres like breakcore and drill 'n' bass, Planet Mu seems to have re-energized itself since discovering dubstep. MRK1's brand new Copyright Laws, like Kode 9's album, displays a particular affinity for rocksteady rhythms, the clipped precision of vintage hip-hop, a tinge of Eastern instrumentation and the starry effects of dub reggae. Both Boxcutter's Oneiric and Vex'd's De Generate, released last year, offer more twisted takes on the form, marrying low-end wobble to violent percussive outbursts. (Boxcutter, like Burial, has his sensitive side, which he betrays on comparatively gentle cuts like "Gave Dub" and "Silver Birch Solstice.")
The XL label, which signed Dizzee Rascal and Wiley, has waded into dubstep with Various (aka Various Productions), a confusingly named artist whose masterful album The World Is Gone lends dubstep's snarling, synthesized bass to the filigreed guitars and melancholic vocals of English folk music. It doesn't always work, and even when it does, Various can feel a bit like merely a contemporary update of Tricky or Portishead. But tracks like "Hater" show that dubstep needn't be a resolutely underground music, either: when that bass is paired with the right voice singing the right melody, the results are pure pop, in the best way possible.
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