Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.
Burial – Near Dark (2007)
I’ve never felt particularly inclined to listen to spooky music around Halloween. Halloween doesn’t feel like a holiday that requires me to honour it that way. As a grownup my role is to drape cobwebs, purchase a pumpkin, saw a gap-toothed smile into it. No part of the day is genuinely scary, besides the cost of runtish chocolate bars. I might cackle at some trick-or-treaters, startle them, but it’s the worst feeling in the world to make a four-year-old triceratops cry.
And yet this week I found myself wanting to be spooked. It was the weather. It was the weather, the place, the time of year. A cold wind rushing through grey streets, faint rain, bare branches like witches’ fingers. Edmonton’s a beautiful and gutsy city, a clutch of neighborhoods shot through by the winding North Saskatchewan River, but on one particular recent evening, in one particular corner of it, under flickering streetlights, billowing skies, with winter coming, I put on a song and scared myself.
Burial’s Untrue, released in 2007, is a magnum opus of a genre called dubstep. For most North Americans today, dubstep means something very different than it did for pioneering English artists like Burial. At 2015’s urban mega-clubs and EDM festivals, the word conveys the wub-wub-wub and bass-drops of Skrillex and Excision – high-energy dance music that is meticulously made and occasionally thrilling but rarely subtle or mysterious. To me that stuff always sounds assembled, acts of engineering rather than works of art.
For Burial and forerunners like Kode9 and Plastician, dubstep was different. Influenced by the U.K.’s 2-step and techstep scenes, drawing further inspiration from drum-and-bass and dub, theirs was (and is) a music full of ghosts. Cold, circling drum patterns mix with obscured vocal samples and bass so deep and unsettling it feels almost occult. While it’s not always sinister, the original dubstep is uniquely capable at evoking secrecy, landscape on the other side of a wall.
Near Dark, like all of Untrue, feels haunted. At first you can just get lost in the beat: a hard, repeating rhythm, like something from the warehouse or boiler room. But gradually you become aware of the rest: indistinct noises, crackles and whispers, bells; monsters turning in their sleep; a distant, angelic choir. The song does have a main vocal – R&B, half-decipherable – but it sounds damaged, like a dying cassette tape or a vanishing memory. And beneath it all that faceless bass: shadowlike, stalking.
This is what gave me the heebie-jeebies on 101 Street. I loved it. I loved it so much. On Halloween or any other day, scaring yourself is rarely about scaring yourself – it’s about the gate that opens at that moment, while your heart skips a beat. “[The] feeling,” Burial explained to The Wire magazine, “[that] only happens to you when you’re out in the cold, when you’re down, [and] this shiver attempts to warm you up, bring you back.” That unbidden shiver, “weird [and] eerie” – it always seems like it’s just for you.