Blackdown soundboy end of year review: Burial

2005 according to Burial

"2005 - the only thing I remember properly was at 9am on the 7th of July. I was walking across London crossing from south into central London. I usually get Northern Line but had to go a different way 'cos the underground was fucked. I had headphones on; I was listening to tunes, just lost in it but I could tell vibes around me were offkey and weird. You could feel it. So I took the headphones off and overheard people saying all this stuff. People were ringing me but getting cut off."

"I spent the next hours like everyone watching TV, hearing rumours, telling family I was OK, then getting upset and angry. Then I walked out... you could feel in the air, the streets were empty. I began to walk three hours south back home. People were like refugees walking back, police everywhere telling us to get back at Vauxhall."

"It was weird because I've only ever seen bits of south London and the west end and you don't ever get a feel of London around you. You only usually get this when you're in a car going through it at night or something. I tried to listen to headphones on way back but couldn't."

"That day was like this big trek across my city and you could feel it like it had been hurt, you know: these were like other Londoners. It was horrible, people from work were on bombed trains, people they knew were killed. It was just fucked. I was listening to a compilation I'd made a few days before. Just a bunch of random tunes. I'd made this CD for me to listen to on my way back into London from my girlfriend's house. It was meant to be this kind of deep nighttime London tunes."

"The compilation had some amazing tunes on it, but I didn't listen to anything for weeks after. The tunes I was listening to were various stuff. Some Digital Mystikz, Skream and Rinse mixes, but also some sort of big club tunes, like vocal things, It had this Seba and Paradox tune on it 'Move On'. I was listening to that when I first felt it."

"I've always had a love-hate thing with London but now I thought 'I love this place.' I was also like 'fuck these people who did this.' It was the underground, on the bus... I can't think about it. The music just got sad to me, I was also listening to 'Hold Tight London' by the Chemical Brothers - that tune runs deep for a commercial tune. All the dubstep and jungle shit became like comfort music: the sorrow just came out of it. I felt the music deeper from that point on."

"Space and my surroundings in London have got into my music a lot. I spent my whole train journey to school busting around listen to jungle. Those Photek tunes, they were like nighttime train music to me! I tried to do some artwork for a Burial album recently. I did a figure in a landscape, just standing there in London. It's part of it."

"The space in my tunes is like ... the vocal bits and sound echoing across the surface of it, across the drums... distant buildings, empty streets, a nighttime world ... and that's how London pirates sound to me. Eerie far off ... the tunes I love on the best pirates sound like that.

"A burial album would sound deep and hypnotic at the start. Just like someone picking themselves up, fixing up, getting by. The middle of the album would be proper underground more rolled out and then the end would be club tunes, like 'he made it out of there,' like a celebration of UK d&b dubstep jungle rave garage party tunes."

"But the whole thing would be sad. I can't help it. London feels sad to me, but there's uplift in there, even if it rinses you out. It's something about where I live maybe. I only know south but I know how it feels in my area, always has since I was a kid I never moved far."

"I make tunes in a room looking out of this window and I've got this mad light almost like a gaslight outside. I live next to a prison so that’s half of the view from my room, the other half is prison land. I think where gallows used to be but I dunno, doubt it. The rest is a fucking massive dual carriage way all the way from Streatham down towards the Thames. You can see for miles all the way to the river, past the river and when it’s foggy like it was today, it’s a mad view.”

Tunes Burial loved in 2005

1. Digital Mystikz "Misty Winter"
2. Loefah - everything by Loefah
3. Omni Trio "Torn"
4. Foul Play "Being With You Remix"
5. Digital Spirit "Cool Out"
6. Plastikman "Contain"
7. Speedy J "Tesla"
8. Robert Hood "Stark Reality"
9. Skanna "All you wanted"
10. Husker Du "Chartered Trips"
11. Teebee "Let Go"
12. Chemical Brothers "Hold Tight London"
13. Paradox & Seba - "Move On"

New Burial tunes and what he was thinking about when he made
them.

1. Brutal Deluxe
"I was thinking of food, McDonalds and Speedball on the Amiga."

2. "YearOne LP"
"I was thinking about ... loads of things."

3. "Prayer"
"I was thinking about my brothers."

4. "DistantLights"
"I was thinking of the kind of shit I want to hear that isn't studioboy weak fucking clumpy drum fake tunes. I was wanting to sound like old jungle and 2step ...."

5 - "Sarcophagus"
"It's first tune on the long lost never to be released Burial album. I was in a bleak mood, bad minded, so..."

6 "U Hurt Me"
"I wanted to do a tune for my brothers to hear, something different. A 'me against the world' vibe tune, but it kind of turned out an uplifting tune, not heavy and moody because that was boring me. Like a fucking party tune, but with a sad vocal. I sort of dream they'd somehow play it at DMZ."