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.
