The experimental producer believes music is a political weapon, sampling everything from the sound of bullets to pigs. His new album The Shakes goes back to his house roots, but this is a pop record packed with serious ideas
To say that politics plays on the mind of Matthew Herbert would be something of an understatement. When I arrive at his beachfront recording studio in Whitstable, Kent, he gives me a tour of his studio, pointing out that the mixing desk sits on a raised platform to safeguard it from global warming-related flooding. Next door is a venue that hosts wedding parties, which has had the unfortunate effect of forcing Herbert to view romance as he would any other industry: “Every couple ask for the same ‘individual touches’,” he notes. Earlier, Herbert had picked me and the Guardian’s photographer up from the station in his 1971 Mini van – the perfect vehicle in which to bemoan the way capitalism has conspired to diminish build quality in modern cars.
Nowhere does his relentlessly questioning brain work harder than on his inventive records. Under various guises, Herbert has made music out of everything from a pig’s life cycle (One Pig, for which he received death threats) to a day’s edition of the Guardian. He’s snuck into the Houses of Parliament to shake matchboxes next to John Major, and driven a tank over the site where Nigella Lawson once cooked a meal for Tony Blair and George Bush. On his studio wall is a framed apple pie tin, complete with bullet holes. “We shot that with Nazi weaponry, an SD officer’s 1939 Luger,” he notes. “Normally gunshot sounds are recorded from the position of the gun. This was recorded from the pie, so in terms of perspective that’s actually what it sounds like to be shot. Which means the natural audience who might recognise that sound will probably have been killed.”
In an era of Donald Trump and the Daily Mail there’s something profoundly important about shutting up
Continue reading...by Tim Jonze via Electronic music | The Guardian
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