Burial Sampled a NASA Employee on His "Rival Dealer" EP

In December of 2013, Hyperdub released Burial's Rival Dealer EP, featuring a tune entitled "Come Down To Us." One of the most memorable parts of the 13-minute track was the dialogue from an unidentified woman.

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Complex Original

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In December of 2013, Hyperdub released Burial's Rival Dealer EP, featuring a tune entitled "Come Down To Us." One of the most memorable parts of the 13-minute track was the dialogue from an unidentified woman. Check out the tune:

I guess we hadn't realized that wanting to find out who this woman was was a thing, but Yeah I Got was so intrigued that they actually ended up tracking down the woman behind the voice: Melissa Dawson Higgins, an earth scientist at NASA. The audio is taken from an interview with Higgins from 2012:

Now it looks like Burial didn't take full sentences; some YouTube sleuths have pointed out the timecodes from her interview, in which Burial that reconstructed to suit what he was trying to deliver on "Come Down To Us." Higgins received an email from a Burial fan in Denmark, and while she wasn't upset by her voice being used, she did note that it was a "perplexing discovery," feeling that it was "quite strange to have [her] words shifted around to make it sound like [she] said “…come down to us." She'd never heard of Burial's music before—she notes Aerosmith and Pharrell as being acts she enjoys—but did end up digging the more upbeat "Hiders."

Finally, for those wondering, Burial is not in any legal trouble for this sampling. As Higgins explained, "[a]ll NASA media is funded by the public and is therefore able to be used freely, with the hope that NASA is given due credit. It would have been nice to be given a heads-up that my voice was being used, but it’s open to the public since it was a NASA TV interview."

Maybe we should add Burial to our list of DJs who should get to go to space before David Guetta?

(Pitchfork)

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