“Like Embers in the Tune”: an examination of Burial’s sample reuse

British electronic musician, Burial, is best known for Untrue (2007), the Mercury Music Prize-nominated album assembled using unorthodox audio editing software and source materials. This paper identifies and examines one of Burial’s production approaches: the use and reuse of vocal samples. Using ‘unmixing’ software to separate vocal ‘stems’, we analyse four sampled sources from Burial’s body of work and their reuse across a period of seventeen years. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theoretical approach to repetition and a model of sonic affect from theorist Steve Goodman, we argue that the redeployment of identifiable vocal samples by Burial is a unique affective tool in contemporary electronic dance music. This paper is pertinent to discourse on sampling and music production as it identifies a self-referential approach that transcends single arrangements or albums and presents ideas and qualities shared across a decades-long body of work. It is significant to broader discourse on affect and electronic music in the digital age, as Burial’s self-imposed limitation in defiance of abundant resources manifests as an affective music production tool.