NASA scientist identified as sample on Burial’s ‘Rival Dealer’ EP

Category: EDM NEWS

Just over one year ago in December 2013, the ever-elusive Burial delivered an early Christmas gift with the surprise release of Rival Dealer, a three-track EP stretching three tracks across 28 minutes.

One track, “Come Down To Us,” piqued our interest with its inclusion of dialogue spoken by a mysterious female. Just recently, one man managed to track it down… to NASA, of all places. Yeah I Got scored an interview with Melissa Dawson Higgins, the NASA Earth Scientist whose voice was sampled – unbeknownst to her – on the thirteen-minute opus; the sample was taken from a 2012 interview (found on YouTube) in which she talks about her role with the company.

According to the interview, Higgins only found out about the sample when she received an inquiring email from someone in Denmark. “Once I had found out about the song, I dug around a little and gave it a listen,” she said. “It was certainly not an unpleasant discovery, but more a perplexing discovery.” She also points out that, while “Burial made my voice sound better,” the dialogue found in the song (namely “…come down to us”) is also heavily edited, which she found “quite strange.”

You can hear the track and its sourced audio for yourself below – Pitchfork mentions that YouTube commenters have identified the time codes at which Higgins was sampled: 0:41, 1:29, 2:45, 2:56, 3:21, 5:28 and 9:50.