It's great to discover something really profound and intellectually stimulating while bouncing around the internet catching up on gossip, new music and viral videos. That's how it worked when we read this incredible review of the new single from UK Bass producer Burial and found a link to the fascinating and in-depth Place Hacking site.

Run by a doctoral student named Bradley L. Garrett, the site is devoted to urban archaeology, of the renegade variety as well as more formal, academic explorations such as Garrett's recent look at the area surrounding London's 2012 Olympic Village, The Olympic Waterscape. What initially began as a short film depicting changes to London's inland waterways has since grown into a something much larger, inspiring a school curriculum taught at 500 schools around the UK. As with Burial's music, which wraps twenty years or so of UK underground sounds in a wash of street sounds, wind, rain and static, Garrett's urban archaeology is also fixated upon "a human need to connect very directly with the history of our own environments."