2007年 Apr 14日 Saturday, 11:19

Hmmm … now I bought the Burial album on mailorder from boomkat when it first came out last year. I've been listening to dubstep for some years now, mainly off 10 and 12 inch vinyl (eg Horsepower Productions, Hyperdub and so on), and the big hype around the Burial album really sucked me in at the time. I already had the South London Boroughs EP, which the album is very similar in feel to.

Now I'll have to admit that when I bought the album I didn't see what the fuss was about. I thought it was good … but not that good, to, you know, warrant all the hype. I mean I was just comparing it against the stuff that I know Kode9 had produced (Sine (Of The Dub), Kingstown, Nine Samurai etc), Skream and Benga, whom I regard as the best of the best dubstep producers that I've heard. But, Simon Reynolds and the others who hyped the record last year, they would have been well intimate with all this output, so I just had to think "ehhhh" and chalk it down to my typically contrary tastes.

But, then, tonight I finally "got" Burial.

Well, normally I listen to music on relatively expensive speakers - either my Aussie-made Krix in the loungeroom, or the M-Audio Studiophile BX8 active monitors in the studio. Both of these speakers have deep and rich response, the Krix being a lot more delicate and revealing and the Studiophiles having fantastic weight and drive with the excellent clarity as you'd expect from a mid-price studio monitor. Usually both are excellent speakers for listening to (or making) electronic music.

Yeah and normally I'd stream the music to the lounge room via my Slim Devices Squeezebox, but tonight, I had installed a new server upgrade and was mucking round with the settings. So to test the setup of the new SlimServer, I was using the Softsqueeze Java player on my Macintosh, rather then the Squeezebox, to avoid annoying Lisa who was working on her lecture for next week in the loungeroom.

So, on the cheap and tinny laptop speakers … the genius of Burial's track Southern Comfort, finally comes through to me, what, nearly a year later.

Yep, always mix for the crappiest speakers I reckon.