Untrue

If you know the true identity of London dubstep artist Burial, consider yourself a member of a very exclusive circle. Steve Goodman, who runs London's Hyperdub label, knows-- he cuts Burial's royalty checks, after all-- but if anyone else does, no one has yet had the temerity to out Burial's inner Peter Parker. Read an interview or two with the artist himself, and you'll quickly figure out why he's chosen to remain anonymous. Burial's decision not to let a backstory be a part of the music doesn't come across as a strategy calculated to maximize hype, but just the opposite: a means of keeping the music pure, faceless, answerable only to itself-- a closed system.

The critical success of Burial's self-titled first album threatened to derail the project's mystery, however. A collection of tunes recorded at home on a low-tech setup over the course of many years, Burial-- moody, brooding, by turns supple and sullen-- shot to the top of many critics' best-of lists last year. To judge from a recent interview with Burial posted on the Hyperdub website, the attention was more distracting than gratifying. "The first [album] got slightly out of where it belonged," he says, "and I found it a bit difficult to just block things out and make tunes in a low key way again, and it took time to just get back to doing that, and liking it, and doing it fast, and not trying to be a perfectionist. Just trying to dream up tunes again without worrying what people were going to think."

Credit: Pitchfork