Burial
William Emmanuel Bevan, recording as Burial, is an anonymity-shrouded South London producer whose 2007 album Untrue redefined what electronic music could sound like — chopped, pitch-shifted vocal fragments drifting through vinyl crackle, rain, and cavernous sub-bass, built from UK garage and 2-step's rhythmic DNA but stripped of their dancefloor function. Signed to Hyperdub, he remains one of the most influential and least publicly visible figures in 21st-century electronic music.
Burial has named American garage producer Todd Edwards among his favorites, and Edwards's technique of chopping vocal samples into tiny, stuttering fragments and reassembling them into new melodies is a direct forerunner of the vocal-collage technique Burial built Untrue around.
listen forEdwards's 'Saved My Life' cuts a vocal into rapid-fire micro-samples that function almost like a percussion instrument; Burial slows and darkens that same chopped-vocal technique into the ghostly fragments on 'Archangel.'
El-B (Lewis Beadle), a founder of the pioneering garage duo Groove Chronicles, is widely credited as a primary architect of the moody, minimal '2-step' sound that bridged UK garage into dubstep — territory Burial explicitly cited as formative listening.
listen forEl-B's 'Buck & Bury' strips garage down to a brooding, spacious bassline with almost nothing else; Burial's own 'Ghost Hardware' pushes that minimalism even further into ambient, near-beatless territory while keeping a faint 2-step pulse underneath.
Burial has pointed to Manchester producer A Guy Called Gerald's early jungle and acid-house work — tracks that could feel 'warm, glowing, junglist and garagey' at once — as part of the lineage of British dance music he draws his own hazy, bass-heavy atmosphere from.
listen forGerald's breakout 'Voodoo Ray' fuses a warm acid bassline with eerie vocal samples; Burial's own 'Loner' carries that same fog-and-bass atmosphere into slower, more melancholic, rave-haunted territory.