brettworks

Burial, “Night Bus” (2006). The music of producer Burial (William Bevan) is a class in ambiance, aura, texture, and pacing. As famous for his anonymity as for using the bare bones audio editor Sound Forge, Burial makes emotionally heavy music. “Night Bus” achieves the feat of compressing a film’s worth of mood into two minutes. It sounds like the music is soundtracking a scene with no protagonist. The music doesn’t seem to be about itself, it’s just observing.

The track uses few elements: rain soundscape, keys, a woodwind-like lead, and drenched-in-delay voice bits that appear occasionally, like memories. The 1-minute structure repeats once and within this the elements’ points of repeat are arranged just so, as if misted over. The effect is a gentle pulsing; the parts breath together. “Night Bus” is remarkable for its concision: it conjures a narrative out of a minimalist construction, conveying a lot with a little. In an interview Bevan once said the music he prefers is “something like Robin Hood, just pure presence, shark-like, elements woven together. You can sense them sitting there rolling out the tune.”