소리 Soli
burial
“The music was sent through PS5”: that’s Harmony Korine, director of Baby Invasion, describing his collaboration with Burial. Honestly, that has to be the most Burial sentence imaginable. He is invisible, obsessive, and somehow stranger than fiction.
I think the first time I heard Burial was in Grand Theft Auto V. It was the song “Hiders,” and something about it stopped me. I didn’t know music like this existed — dark, grainy, emotional, like it had been found in a broken hard drive under someone’s bed. I looked it up and landed on the Rival Dealer EP: “Come Down to Us,” “Hiders,” and “Rival Dealer.” That was my entry point. It didn’t feel like a record — it felt like a world. The textures, the ghost voices, the foggy drums. It was harrowing, but comforting. Like it knew something about me I didn’t know how to say.
A few years ago, I fell into a real Burial fixation. I started listening to everything — Untrue and the self-titled Burial. But when I got to Tunes 2011–2019, something changed. That compilation… it’s probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard. Not an album, not a playlist — more like a 2.5-hour transmission from another place. A collection of songs I’ll be dreaming about forever. Songs I want to hear in clubs, in restaurants, in films, at 3am, in the rain. I don’t even DJ, but I think about what it would feel like to drop a Burial track in a set. It’s that powerful — it makes you want to become someone else just to share it.
And yet, the man behind it all — William Bevan — barely exists in public. No live shows. Barely any photos. No interviews since 2012. When I found out he once sent an entire film soundtrack through PS5 chat, I knew: this is exactly the kind of artist I’m drawn to. Invisible, obsessive, mythic. His music isn’t just something I hear — it stares back at me. Like the abyss. Like a dream I didn’t know I had until it ended. Anonymity in the age of oversharing feels radical. His rare interviews read like diary entries from another dimension. In the 2012 Wire transcript — one of the only unedited interviews he’s ever given — you can hear him struggling to explain what his music even is. He doesn’t make tracks for the club, he says. He makes them for people walking home alone. For headphones. For when you’re feeling a bit lost. That tells you everything.
What stands out in that 2012 interview is not just his vulnerability, but how un-media-trained he is. He stammers, he drifts, he apologizes. There’s no branding in sight. He talks about ghostly female vocals like they’re remnants of someone he loved and lost. He says he makes tracks hoping “someone who’s having a sh*t time might find something in it.” That might be the most honest artist statement of the 2010s. It frames Tunes 2011–2019 not as an album but as a shelter — a psychic underground for soft boys, quiet girls, anxious minds, anyone who ever cried on public transit. And the way it’s sequenced — you can feel the care in how each track bleeds into the next — turns it into something more than a decade’s worth of singles. The order becomes a kind of drift, a long walk through different weather systems, sometimes clear, sometimes choking with fog. This is what makes Burial’s legacy weirdly spiritual. He’s not an icon. He’s a presence. His music is religious not because it worships anything, but because it creates space — space to feel, to unravel, to grieve gently, to remember people we’ve never met but somehow miss. Tunes doesn’t announce itself with a grand concept; it just… unfolds. You press play, and let the songs find you. And when they do, they arrive like echoes of your own inner monologue, filtered through crackle and hiss. Messy, but beautiful. Broken, but reverent. Music for the margins.
And then, as if summoned, he returns. No alert. Just two tracks: Comafields / Imaginary Fields. When I pressed play on “Comafields,” I felt that chest tremor again — the city at 3 AM, rain-soaked, throbbing with memory. It opens with mournful tumbling synths, vinyl crackle, the fragile echo of a voice: “You put your arms around me,” drenched in reverb like weary angels proffering relief . It’s elegiac, haunted, a lullaby from another plane. The intro of Comafields reads like ambient tragedy morphing into grace.