Sampling and spectrality: revisiting Burial’s sophomore album, ‘Untrue’
Every so often, a sample breakdown of ‘Archangel’ by Burial does the rounds on social media. It shows how the producer took vocal elements from ‘One Wish’ by Ray J and overlaid them with a haunting composition from a Metal Gear Solid video game soundtrack. Distilled into a clip lasting less than a minute, it makes it look so easy, like such an obvious selection of tunes. Really, it’s exactly the kind of ingenious sampling that makes Burial such a singular figure in the UK electronic scene.
Following the release of his self-titled debut in 2006, Burial, also known as William Emmanuel Bevan, wasted no time returning to the studio. By autumn 2007, he was ready to offer up his sophomore record, though he still wasn’t willing to share his name. Untrue was unveiled under the same alias, keeping ambient enthusiasts and even friends and family guessing about his identity.
This choice would protect Bevan’s privacy, but it was also an essential element of his artistry. “I want to be in the dark at the back of a club,” he told The Guardian at the time. A fan of clubbing culture before the dawn of social media, he sought to maintain that same sense of obscurity.
“I love that with old jungle and garage tunes when you didn’t know anything about them, and nothing was between you and the tunes,” he explained, “I liked the mystery; it was more scary and sexy, the opposite of other music.” The secrecy surrounding him was also the perfect match for the album it accompanied, which walked a similar line between scary and sexy.
The record would be unshrouded by details of his personal life, while elements such as the album name and artwork seemed just as controlled and considered. Untrue as an album title already encapsulated the uncanny but sensual quality Bevan was going for, a word that immediately evokes uncertainty and doubt.
The cover art was equally ambiguous, a concrete-like pencil sketch of a closed-eyed coffee-drinker Bevan had been drawing since he was a child. It provided the only face for listeners to attach to the project, a ghostly, grey man who won’t even look you in the eye. Could it be a self-portrait? Could this be Burial? No one was quite sure, but that was always the aim anyway.
With its surrounding lore – or lack thereof – in place, all that was left was for the music to be deserving of it. From the opening moments of the record, Burial proved that it was.
Untrue begins with the fittingly named ‘Untitled’, a tiny piece that sets the hauntological sample-fuelled album into motion. It samples David Fincher’s Alien 3 and David Lynch’s Inland Empire, evoking otherworldliness and experimentalism over gentle electronics. The opening track holds back on Burial’s penchant for fluttering drums, but it kicks off the sampling and spectrality of the record, the hauntological elements and ghostly hardware that lie within.
As the album progresses, those ghostly cultural callbacks become more and more prominent. From Hans Zimmer to Ryuichi Sakamoto to Beyoncé, the record is littered with samples from Burial’s cross-genre peers and predecessors, as well as non-musicians, but they’re always shrouded in layers of ambience and percussion. Chopped up, changed, and spliced together in Burial’s software of choice, Sound Forge, they’re barely distinguishable in the final product.
The result is an eerily familiar collection of songs equally fit for misty forest walks and dark dance floors. It’s entirely predicated on samples and spectres of pop culture past and present, but it never feels reliant on them. It borrows them to subvert their original meaning, to create new atmospheres and ambience.
Though Bevan would reveal his name to the world a year after the release of Untrue, the record is no less impactful for it. It’s been almost 17 years since the record was first released, but it’s still one of the most revered and referenced entries into the UK electronic sphere. While artists like Honesty clearly take inspiration from the producer, Burial has also turned from sampler to sampled in tracks like ROSALÌA’s ‘CANDY’.
Untrue remains a sparkling work of sampled spectrality, indecipherable in its sound and in its peripheral details. Revisit the record below.
