Style and composition
AllMusic described Burial's recordings as "gloomy, dystopian soundscapes" which blend "fractured breakbeats with mysterious, pitch-shifted voices and loads of vinyl crackle, rainfall, and submerged video game sound effects". His work is inspired by British dance music such as garage, jungle, and hardcore, while his first album was one of the first prominent dubstep albums. He was associated with the mid-2000s hauntology trend, in which British artists explored elements of "spectral" cultural memory.
Bevan claims to compose his music in Sound Forge, a digital audio editor, and to eschew the use of trackers and sequencers. As he describes in an interview, "Once I change something, I can never un-change it. I can only see the waves. So I know when I’m happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone. When they look just skeletal as fuck in front of me, and so I know they’ll sound good." He also said that he didn't use a sequencer, because if his drums were timed too perfectly, they would "lose something" and "sound rubbish". Discussing his rhythmic affinities in an interview with Mark Fisher, Burial explained:
Something happens when I hear the subs, the rolling drums and vocals together. To me it’s like a pure UK style of music, and I wanted to make tunes based on what UK underground hardcore tunes mean to me, and I want a dose of real life in there too, something people can relate to.
Of his production techniques, journalist Derek Walmsley wrote in The Wire:
Burial decided at the outset to avoid at all costs the rigid, mechanistic path that eventually brought drum 'n' bass to a standstill. To this end, his percussion patterns are intuitively arranged on the screen rather than rigidly quantized, creating minute hesitations and slippages in the rhythm. His snares and hi-hats are covered in fuzz and phaser, like cobwebs on forgotten instruments, and the mix is rough and ready rather than endlessly polished. Perhaps most importantly, his basslines sound like nothing else on Earth. Distorted and heavy, yet also warm and earthy, they resemble the balmy gust of air that precedes an underground train.
Burial's music features heavily in the work of documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Curtis places Bevan's emotionally saturated sound within the context of a possible cultural revival of the spirit of Romanticism. Discussing the song "Come Down to Us", used as a motif in Bitter Lake, during an interview with music and pop culture magazine Dazed, Curtis lionises the song as a work of "genius" going on to explain:
It really sums up our time... That song is saying, it's really frightening to jump off the edge into the darkness. Both when you fall in love with someone, and when you want to change the world. And it depends whether you can live with the fear or whether you really want the thrill of it. Or whether you retreat into the world you're happy with. And I think that's why it's a work of genius. He's got it, it's the mood of our time that we're waiting for. He's way ahead of our time, an epic emotional artist.
