PUTTING BURIAL IN ITS PLACE

Burial edited his legendary homonymous debut in 2006 and its continuation, Untrue, just a year later. Suddenly, the London subsoil, that musical sewage system from which so many genres have emerged, would again expel from its entrails a mutant creature which critics would name as dubstep. And Burial was there, not so eager to take on the responsibilities of precipitated paternity, but being repeatedly designated as the main figure of a genre that took the old school accelerated 2-step garage and envolved it into a spectral echo, like a ghost town in the midst of the fog.

Then, the unexpected happened: that, suddenly, the world decided that dubstep wasn’t what Burial was making, but what Skrillex was. And, knowing how the Yankees are, cunning in their marketing practices, in the end, it turned out that that was the idea that prevailed. In fact, to this day, it is fundamentally considered that dubstep is that Skrillex-created genre that continues to be so popular in the States. It might be that, for that reason, or maybe because he wanted to keep a low profile, Burial hasn’t published an album since that far away 2007.

Well, for that reason and because, even before John Talabot but after Daft Punk, this was one of those artists that decided not to show his face because what was important here was his music, not him. During the years, he managed to keep the mystery, feeding different urban legends among which the most widespread implied that the person behind this alias was none-other than  Kieran Hebden (Four Tet). But no. It was William Bevan, an anonymous guy who finally came under the public eye in 2014 and who, however, hasn’t been very prodigious in the decade that we’re about to close off. Without ever actually disappearing, from time to time he has let a hydrogen bomb drop in the form of a single or an EP, which has always managed to surprise us for some particular reason. Especially when, in 2013, his triad of bangers under the name of Rival Dealer anticipated two of the trends that would eventually arrive: the revival of the rave sound and well-understood new age touches.

Be that as it may, here we are, in 2019 about to be 2020 with the Hyperdub label about to crown its 15th anniversary with the launch of Tunes 2011 To 2019 the following December 6, with a compilation album of everything that Burial has been doing in this decade from the dissidence and the margins. Which, inevitably, warned others in the music industry and begged the question: do we find ourselves before a compilation that marks the end or, by contrast, is this Bevan’s way of telling us that this is how he’s closing off the decade (in his own way, through EPs and singles) to start off a new era in which we’ll finally see –and hear– the longed-awaited return of the continuation of Untrue? Nobody really knows. But what we do know here is that it’s very clear that the newer generations that grew up thinking that dubstep was Skrillex need to correct this error immediately. And it just might be that even Generation Z will embrace Burial.