Burial on "that ramshackle thing":
Yeah, I admire people who understand complicated programs or whatever. But I’m not that into tunes that are so sequenced that all you can hear is the perfect grid, e ven on the echoes. With those kind of tunes, sometimes I just hear Tetris music, i always know where i am in the tune so i cant get lost in it, no rough edges in some tunes even when they try hard to sound rough. I want to learn one day how to make tunes properly , but I wanted to do a tribute to my rubbish, dying computer. It starts smoking sometimes and the screen flickers like a strobelight, it mashes your eyes. The tunes are made where they’re made, somewhere in my building, the roof or wherever, but not in some airtight studio. Loads of the album was made with the TV on. I wish i could make technical proper music one day but people who want technical music maybe won’t like my new tunes but its not for them.
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What I realised is I don’t know what he does … quantised them… he’s got kit I don’t have so I started covering everything in crackle, to hide it, bury it, so I could do those drums I love. I didn’t have the equipment to make it sound like Photek-fucking-sculpted, proper heavy, El-B heavy. So I had no choice but to put the crackle on it and get away with it.
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It’s not the drums, it’s the impression of the drums. I’ve done bare drums I love – but then they fall apart when some studio boy says “oh your snare’s too loud.” But that’s the pirate sound… just rollage. Not an individual drum sound, it’s something else. It’s just the spirit of it, the roll of it. The drums, they’re slinky. Cold sounding. They could go anywhere. And I know some of that stuff sounds well dated, but I love it.
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So I had to do that, but have cut-up vocals and have that slinky bumping feel to it, and not get weighed down in big drums and the big snares. With Garage the drums are taken back, they’re quite soft, it’s more about being slinky. They’re like a fishbone, a spine, an exoskeleton that cradles the sounds. It’s not about the deepest kick or the biggest snare. The drums are more about trying to thread sounds and vocals together, they flicker across the surface of the tune, it circles around you, its not just chopping you up, its not about the sounds being big.
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That’s happened to a lot of music. It's detailed in a boring way. I’m not into big intros, because if you’ve got a big intro, the rest of the tune is forever the rest of the tune, and the intro’s forever the intro. You can never get lost in it, you know where you are in most tunes, and that just takes away the only reason a tune should exist to me, I can't relate to grey music. I like tunes that just dive straight in, there’s a jump off and once you’re in it, the awareness that you’re two minutes into a tune, or four minutes into a tune is gone. That’s how I like my tunes. Or something like Robert Hood, just pure presence, shark-like, elements woven together. You can sense them sitting there rolling out the tune.