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Burial Worked Outside the Grid

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

#Burial #Untrue #UKGarage #MusicProduction #SoundForge

Burial Worked Outside the Grid The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music Burial: Unedited Transcript - The Wire In his 2007 interview with The Wire, Burial confirmed that he made Untrue in Sound Forge, editing waveforms without a conventional sequencer. He described…

Burial Made Rhythm Without a Grid

One of the strangest details behind Burial’s Untrue is that its unstable rhythms were not the result of an elaborate generative system or some secret piece of sequencing software. Burial said he deliberately made the album without a sequencer. He assembled sounds directly in an audio editor, forcing pieces together by ear rather than arranging them against a conventional beat grid.

That explains something I have always liked about Untrue. The drums often seem to be remembering a rhythm rather than executing one perfectly. Hits arrive slightly early or late, voices float across bar lines and the whole structure seems capable of falling apart without ever actually doing so.

In a modern DAW it takes almost no effort to make time perfect. Turn on the grid, quantise the drums and duplicate eight bars. Burial’s method removed that convenience.

The limitation became part of the music.

It makes me wonder how much of an artist’s sound is produced not by the equipment they own, but by the functions they choose not to use.

A perfectly capable computer can become an experimental instrument simply by refusing to let it behave efficiently.

Burial, Untrue

#Burial #Untrue #UKBass #ElectronicProduction

Burial Made Rhythm Without a Grid Hyperdub Burial, Untrue Redesigned for Hyperdub's 20th Anniversary by Burial and Optigram, Untrue gets a new look, stripped down artwork and new labels and inners on clear vinyl, which is available to buy exclusively from us, The CD and Digital remain the same .