MATTHEW HERBERT TALKS ABOUT HIS NEW ALBUM, DEDICATED TO BREXIT AS WELL AS HIS FARMING LIFESTYLE, FAVORITE COLLABORATIONS, DARK TIMES IN HUMAN HISTORY AND PAYING DEBT TO THE PIG COMMUNITY
Matthew Herbert is certainly one of the most interesting modern composers. He started his musical career in the 90’s. His first musical project, Wishmountain, was inspired by Musique concrète – an approach which creates music based on sampling and using the sounds found in our everyday environments, which lately have become the backbone of most of his works. During the 90’s, Matthew had a lot of artistic alter ego’s like Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy, Best boy Electric and The Music Man. After releasing his classical album “Around The house” in 1998 he became one of the highest rated dance music producers who showed a new way of creating house music, based on Musique concrète techniques and adding jazz structures into house tracks. “Around The house” was responsible for the birth of this new style – microhouse, that was adopted and developed by big names in dance electronic music like Ricardo Villalobos and many others.
In the 2000’s, the limits of being an electronic music producer became too narrow for such a forward thinking person like Matthew Herbert. He started to record albums with his jazz interpretations and to tour all over the globe with a big band set up.
Throughout his musical career he has done some unique things when searching for new sounds – recording beneath the sewers of Fleet Street with Vietnamese coffee beans, inside industrial pig and chicken farms, he taped 3500 people biting an apple at the same time, recorded inside the Houses of Parliament and in the lobby of the British Museum. All these sounds were carefully selected, sampled and used in his music. His latest works balanced between jazz and his vision of modern pop music like in the albums “Goodbye Swing” “Scale”, “The Shakes” and those more strange and experimental works – “One Club’, “One Pig”.
Besides this experimental approach in recording, Matthew Herbert is known for bringing strong political messages and many other ideas in to his music, based on a protest against corporate globalism and threads of climate change, Brexit and many other modern world difficulties.
Matthew found time in his super busy schedule to talk with All Andorra about his latest, just finished album and many other interesting themes. Talking with such an influential musician with a wide cultural background, English sense of humor and open minded view on modern reality was a pleasure and a really interesting experience.
Interview: Dmitry Tolkunov
Hi Matthew, thank you very much for finding time to talk with us. It took a while to make it happen. As I understood you were very busy working on a new album that you finished just a few days ago. Can you please tell us about this work?
Sure. The record is called “The State Between us” and it’s a new big band record for me, the main theme of it is based on Brexit, it will be released on March 29, the day when the UK will leave the EU. Around a thousand people all across Europe took part in creating it. It involved some serious production work, I was working on it for the last 3 years. We did many fun things during the recording – I paid a swimmer to cross the La Manche channel – to swim from the UK to France and we recorded this journey, we recorded a person crossing the UK –Northern Ireland border, at a sheep farm and in the air in the German World War II plane Tiger Moth. And on top of that we worked with around 400 musicians and 700 singers, so it was a really big job. The idea of the album is that it is meant to be a kind of requiem for the UK leaving Europe, I really think it’s a big disaster for the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment