Twenty years after its release, dubstep pioneer Burial’s self-titled debut album sounds like a hauntological premonition of the pandemic years to come
“There’s nothing worse for a human being than to see a face where it doesn’t belong,” Burial (Will Bevan) told Mark Fisher in 2007. The writer and academic is one of only a handful of journalists to have interviewed dubstep’s feted pioneer, who voluntarily vaporised from public view after the release of his second album, ‘Untrue’, seemingly never to be seen again.
During the conversation, he and Fisher – who committed suicide in 2017 – mined a remarkable symbiosis that reached far beyond the parameters of agreeably forward-thinking electronic music. One of these connections centred on the works of author MR James, who was famed for the spooked, proto-horror tales he wrote in the early 1900s.
“The one that fucked me up when I was little was ‘Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’,” Bevan explained. “Something weird happens with MR James, because even though it’s in writing, there’ll be a moment when the person meets the ghost, where you can’t quite believe what you’ve read. You go cold, just for those few lines when you glimpse the ghost for a second, or he describes the ghost face. It’s like you’re not reading anymore.”
This particular story details an unsettlingly supernatural trip to the English seaside taken by Parkins, a University of Cambridge professor, who is stalked by a ghastly spectre manifested by a single blast on a bronze whistle, unearthed in the fictitious sand dunes of Burnstow.
Fisher was living in Felixstowe – the real-world setting for much of this 1904 tale – when he passed away, having made his name via the K-punk blog launched in 2003 to considerable acclaim and audience. Writing across culture while teaching at Goldsmiths, University of London, Fisher was a fervent Burial acolyte, describing his self-titled debut – released in May 2006 – as “the kind of album I’ve dreamt of for years”.
He was entranced by the musician’s sulphurous presence and the bewitching emotional and physical qualities of his output. Indeed, Fisher reasoned that we were in the presence of the 21st century embodiment of hauntology, first proposed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1993’s ‘Specters Of Marx’ and a central plank in his revered work within cultural studies.
“Burial makes the most convincing case that our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological,” Fisher stated, heralding Kode9’s first signing to his Hyperdub label. “The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened – futures that failed to materialise and remained spectral.”
Two decades after the release of ‘Burial’, little – famously – is known about William Emmanuel Bevan. He reportedly attended Putney’s Elliott School comprehensive, like Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), and was described by Fisher in The Wire – who named ‘Burial’ 2006’s album of the year – as “an elfin, quietly intense presence who speaks in a low whisper”. The following year, Dan Hancox, author of ‘Inner City Pressure: The Story Of Grime’, conducted what has become renowned as Burial’s “last interview”.
In this vacuum, Bevan has adapted Aphex Twin’s obfuscating template and malleable visage, building an unequivocally mythical image populated by a handful of press photos and illustrations. However, musically, he’s responsible for a back catalogue which nails this visceral sound – a singular, cinematic recalibration of UK garage, jungle and 2-step, twilit by the afterglow of rave – to a geographic ground zero far beyond any visual representation of art and the creatives behind it.
Burial’s first extended transmission came via 2005’s ‘South London Boroughs’ EP, a prescient title foreshadowing the hyperlocal focus of what followed. The defining role of these evocative environs were again directly communicated with the debut LP’s aerial cover shot of Wandsworth. Acting like a Batman-style overlook atop Gotham City, we can imagine Burial scanning the metropolis, retreating into a cavernous studio facility/his bedroom to craft sonic soliloquies for the disenchanted souls below.
“Burial’s London is a wounded city, populated by ecstasy casualties on day release from psychiatric units, disappointed lovers on night buses, parents who can’t quite bring themselves to sell their rave 12-inches at a car boot sale, all of them with haunted looks on their faces, but also haunting their interpassively nihilist kids with the thought that things weren’t always like this,” Mark Fisher wrote, pinpointing the “3D depth of field” of these “schizophonic” soundscapes.
What gives ‘Burial’ such a microscopic, atmospheric sense of place? The thrumming momentum of urban infrastructure hits from the first beat of ‘Distant Lights’, a dislocated, archetypal percussive loop rotating like mechanised machine music. In all its post-millennium tension, this is the sound of the city.
“What you momentarily thought was muffled bass turns out only to be the rumbling of tube trains,” Fisher observed.
Elsewhere, the distant signals of ‘Wounder’ seem to emanate from a Drexciya-style civilisation camped in the depths of the River Thames, and ‘Southern Comfort’ is like pre-dawn time-lapse CCTV on the Old Kent Road, capturing the illuminated push and pull of illicit nocturnal traffic. Meanwhile, ‘Prayer’ sonifies the blades of a circling Met Police chopper surveying potential targets. In these vivid snapshots, Burial frames the grey menace of South London in the same way the hazy neon drama of Nicolas Winding Refn’s LA was depicted in the transportive synthpop soundtrack of ‘Drive’.
This psychogeography is central to both Burial and Fisher, as Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter – makers of a new documentary, ‘We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher’ – contend.
“We’ve both lived in that part of London,” Poulter says. “Burial’s sound art is very spatiotemporally located. It’s not generic music from a studio session but music that tells you about the place it was made.
“The same thing is in play with Fisher – how we make things about a location. He is to Felixstowe as Burial is to South London. There’s the same intense connectivity. But what’s interesting is that this placemaking is almost imbued in their work to a level of uncomfortability.”
Mellor suggests an alternative terminology – “placehaunting”.
Burial’s use of samples is also pivotal. The weaponised FX of ‘Distant Lights’ come from the Metal Gear Solid video game series – a recurring source – while the repeating vocal line is lifted from ‘Emotion’ by Destiny’s Child. Bevan has a predilection for disembodied, pitch-shifted “half-boy, half-girl” samples, likening them to “something not human I’ve got chained up in the yard” to heighten the dread tenor.
Alongside other more conventional and familiar mainstream samples – Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ pulse on ‘Prayer’, and the “drop” in ‘U Hurt Me’ from Nas’ ‘Represent’ – he leans into totemic pop cultural texts to build the hauntological vibe, most notably in the rain-drenched canvases.
“Burial’s music conjures urban scenes under ‘Blade Runner’ perma-drizzle,” Fisher suggested, reflecting Bevan’s self-confessed obsession with a scene in 1982’s original movie, when Harrison Ford’s Deckard eats noodles during a downpour. It’s an apposite point. In 1959, Philip K Dick released his novel ‘Time Out Of Joint’, perhaps hauntology’s defining conceptual phrase, which actually originated 350 or so years earlier – “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!” – in William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’.
Crackle is another liberally deployed atmospheric device. In this context, Fisher referenced Pole, The Caretaker and Tricky, calling it “the audio-correlate of hauntology itself”.
“In veiling the past, crackle also makes the dimension of time audible,” he continued. “It is through this scratching of the scanner-lens that we can hear the time-wound, the chronological fracture, the expression of the sense, crucial to hauntology, that ‘time is out of joint’.”
Elsewhere, a sense of 21st century ennui is made more apparent in tracks like ‘Gutted’, which quotes Forest Whitaker in 1999’s ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of The Samurai’.
“Me and him, we’re from different, ancient tribes / Now we’re both almost extinct / But sometimes you gotta stick with the ancient ways.”
Thousand-yard stare memories of acid house colour ‘Burial’ as they do ‘Untrue’, which culminates in the majestically downcast ‘Raver’. Again, the DNA is hauntological.
“I’ve never been to a festival, a rave in a field, a big warehouse or an illegal party,” Bevan told Fisher. “My brother might bring back these records that seemed really adult to me and I couldn’t believe I had them. It was like when you first saw ‘Terminator’ or ‘Alien’ when you were only little. I’d get a rush from it… I was hearing this other world.”
Fisher called the soundtrack to ‘Terminator’ “epochal”, highlighting how “its vocal samples talked of time paradoxes” and pinpointing a flooring line uttered by Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor.
“You’re talking about things that I haven’t done yet in the past tense”.
In 2014’s ‘Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures’, Fisher defined this central disjuncture as “that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)”. He also called Burial’s music “a work of mourning rather than of melancholia”.
Applying this analogy to the serenely bleak ‘Night Bus’ and also ‘Forgive’ (a recalibration of the uncanny ambient dimensions of Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II’ – see also Untrue’s blackhearted ‘In McDonalds’), it might be argued that what we actually witness on ‘Burial’ is the harbinger of an approaching global tsunami, an unwitting soundtrack for the inescapable news footage of eerie and deserted cities that accompanied 2019’s Covid pandemic. Or, as Fisher put it, “A drowned world catastrophe leaking back in time”.
Burial’s music is often deployed as the aural backdrop for the dystopian documentaries of Adam Curtis. The 2021 BBC series, ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, was originally named after the inscription on the whistle found by Perkins in ‘Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, which reads, “Who is this who is coming?”. The original working title chosen by Curtis was ‘What Is It That Is Coming?’.
“Burial’s sound evokes what the press release calls a ‘near future South London underwater. You can never tell if the crackle is the burning static off pirate radio, or the tropical downpour of the submerged city out of the window’,” Fisher wrote after first hearing ‘Burial’. “Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and – most keeningly – what could still happen.”
Was it a near future South London underwater he foresaw? Or perhaps under lockdown?
‘We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher’ outlines Italian Marxist philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s theorising on “the slow cancellation of the future”. Onscreen, this eventuality also references Banksy, describing “the ones you have promised, but never received – the job, the house, the holiday, the life. We’re sorry. The future you ordered is out of stock”.
At screenings, Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor – who cite Fisher as central to Burial’s myth – have grown accustomed to meeting Gen Z audience members who, post-pandemic, foresee little to look forward to.
“More people have entered into the realm of the lost futures over the last 20 years,” Poulter says, highlighting another influential Fisher text, ‘Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?’. “It’s actually quite a depressing read in many respects because for a lot of people it doesn’t offer solutions. If you are of a certain generation, you might be thinking – as we have discovered – that this book describes exactly what you’re experiencing in 2026.
“We’ve gone from the early internet and inspirational DIY period to the global crash, where banks were too big to fail and were bailed out, while everybody else paid through austerity. The working class and those in precarious living conditions had to pick up the bill, which is what Fisher said. Then we come through to another generation, which is not just picking up the bill but paying in advance for a future that might not happen.”
“It’s this time of permacrisis,” Mellor adds. “It’s not just the pandemic, it’s also Brexit, Trump and the climate emergency. We’ve got one crisis after another – the public luxury we were used to has gone and it’s never coming back.”
Writing about Fisher and Burial’s duality in 2018, author and cultural critic Simon Reynolds was struck by the “mutually intensifying feedback loop between the music-theorist and the music-practitioner”, describing the former as “possibly the last of a disappearing breed – the music critic as prophet”. With ‘Burial’, Will Bevan fused the circle forever connecting these two visionary figures.
‘We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher’ is currently on tour. For more information, see closeandremote.net
