In his 2007 interview with The Wire, Burial confirmed that he made Untrue in Sound Forge, editing waveforms without a conventional sequencer. He described recognising drum patterns by how they looked, arranging them into irregular, skeletal shapes rather than aligning coloured blocks on a grid. Some percussion came from video games, falling shell casings and the small ignition sound of a lighter.
The method explains something that technical analysis can miss. The rhythms do not feel loose because timing was neglected. They feel loose because each sound was placed inside a visual and emotional judgement rather than corrected against a fixed rhythmic display. Soft garage drums thread the voices and atmospheres together. They do not need to dominate the mix to establish motion.
There is no useful lesson here about expensive tools being bad or primitive tools being automatically more authentic. Sound Forge simply narrowed the available actions. Burial could cut, move, layer and listen, but he could not rely on a familiar sequencer to display the music as an orderly arrangement. That limitation encouraged a private notation made from waveform shapes, memory and feel. Untrue sounds carefully constructed, yet it never seems completely pinned down. Its precision belongs to the ear rather than the grid.
https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedited-transcript
