Matthew Herbert Interview

A modern day composer working within the realm of the electronic avant garde, Matthew Herbert is a name synonymous with huge innovation in the expansive domain of sound production. Operating under various aliases such as Dr Rockit and Radioboy, he has forced originality through self imposed restrictions, such as his Personal Contract for the Composition of Music.1 While he has limited himself in a variety of ways, he has also opened new doors in a multitude of others, creating albums from samples as varied as the sound of food packaging, to noises emitted by human bodily functions. With ideals as strong as his desire for complete originality, Herbert has also set about creating a new virtual country, where people are bound by morals rather than geography, and he aims to generate a population large enough to enact global change. Big goals? Maybe, but with a career that has grown as large as his fan base, these are missions that Herbert looks set on accomplishing. Lifelounge caught up with Herbert to chat about his new album Scale, and the state of the modern world.

LL: Congratulations on Scale it’s a beautiful soulful record, and harks back to the playfulness of Bodily Functions. What would you say is the major theme running through the album?

MH: I definitely wanted to return to more of the song writing side of things. On the last record I was very limited in what I allowed myself to use to make music, and this time I really wanted the freedom to sit at a piano and enjoy melody and harmony again. The basic themes are roughly the same as they have been, like the world is going in the wrong direction because people are actively working very hard to make it go in the wrong direction. It’s not some sort of inevitable process. For example, if the amount of money spent on advertising new cars was spent on researching new technology to run those cars, it would be a very different place.

LL: Were there any interesting methods of recording that you put into practice on Scale that were different from previous albums?

MH: Generally, with this one I’ve been a little less explicit about where I’ve gotten sounds from; I certainly haven’t associated particular sounds with particular tracks. The biggest difference is in the drums. When I did the big band album I had to have a drum kit because the band just wouldn’t play the same if it didn’t have a drum part. With this one I only wanted to use drums in a particular point and in a different way. So it’s in keeping with the theme of scale, with this idea of distance and the idea of balance, and the experience of the very big and the very small. I decided to record the drums in underground caves and in a hot air balloon at two thousand feet, and at one hundred miles an hour in the back of my car, and underwater. So that was probably the biggest location recording that I did.

LL: So how did the sounds vary with those locations?

MH: The biggest one was certainly the hot air balloon, because you could die doing that! It was quite scary, even though there wasn’t anything much to be scared about. For all of us it was our first time going up in a balloon, and it seemed to be quite a flimsy piece of equipment. But the interesting thing was there were no reflective surfaces for sounds to hit and reverberate from, so consequently you have quite a dry sound, it’s one of the driest drum sounds I’ve ever heard, incredibly crisp and punchy, whereas underground in caves the decay and reverb is really quite enormous. So the way that you play the drums varies enormously because you have to compensate for different circumstances.

LL: What has been your favourite sound making object that you have worked with to date?

MH: It’s difficult because sound to me is not like a fixed point or a fixed thing, it changes as my world changes, and it changes as I change, so consequently over the years I developed a very different sort of relationship to sound. My favourite sound in the last couple of years would probably have to be the sound of a thousand people biting into an apple at the same time, which I used on Plat Du Jour. In the end I managed to record 3500 for the album, but I did go on to record 10 000 over a period of shows. It’s quite an amazing thing to hear a sound that no one else has heard before, it’s an interesting position to be in.

LL: So was that one of the aims you had for the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music, to create sounds that no one has heard before, or to make them accessible to people?

MH: I think that’s part of it. Also don’t forget that I’m working with very mundane sounds. For example, I might also work with just the sounds of breakfast cereal, which is a sound that people would hear every day of their life. So its not just about extraordinary sound, it’s about the democracy of sound. The main purpose of the contract is to stop myself from ripping anybody off. I want to be original and not use anybody else’s work as my starting point. Not to take the easy way out, but to actually consider every stage of the creative process as a possibility to be original.

LL: Tell me a little about how the idea for the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music actually came about.

MH: Well, first of all, technology was developing in a very particular way. If you load up a copy of Reason for example, the first thing you have is a drum machine, then you have a sort of acid thing, then you have a couple of synths with some effects, and it’s really encouraging people to write music with a narrow range of sound. I wanted to make sure that when I went into the studio I was going in on my terms, rather than on terms dictated to me by a Japanese programmer or a German software company.
The second thing was seeing how the Dogma movement in film, with Lars Von Trier and others, formalised an approach that led to some interesting creative works. I like the idea of being structured and disciplined within a genre that has very much come out of a world of hedonism, and creating for the moment.

LL: Are there any contemporary artists, musical or otherwise, that you have been influenced by in your work?

MH: I’ve always liked the approach that Matmos take, they did an album made from plastic surgery sounds and have made tracks out of cows uterus’ and all sorts of things. I really like their approach to sound. It’s clever, funny and very important, but it’s also silly as well, which I think is a nice perspective for what is essentially quite serious work. They’re about it when I think about artists actually working with sound. I find the sounds of most other artists to be quite conservative.

LL: Do you feel there is less value in music that hasn’t been produced entirely from scratch?

MH: I don’t think there’s less value. I think that’s a judgment call Certainly if ten million people like Moby’s record, and less than one per cent like one of mine, who am I to say that they are wrong? But I do think it’s less original. It comes from a less original perspective. The building blocks and the foundations of it are not ones you can take full responsibility for.

LL: The idea of responsibility is obviously very important to you.

MH: Yeah it’s about responsibility. It’s something that I find very disappointing in life generally, how unwilling people are to take responsibility for their actions, and how willing people are to do things for money without thinking about it. Beyonce, for example, quickly became a very interesting and inspiring independent black woman, to the point where she was writing songs about it. Then she used that power to sell McDonalds. I think that was a very, very depressing moment.

LL: Is there a function that you feel your music performs, whether it is dance floor oriented, or a vector for a message?

MH: The first thing my music needs to do is function as music. That’s the most important thing. No matter what I would like it to do or the stories or messages that I wish it to convey, first and foremost it needs to function as music. It needs to be perceived as emotional, and to have some relevance or impact on the world, even if the world hates it, or it’s surprising or difficult. It needs to have some impact musically. The second thing really is that I like to express what it is like to be alive today, and not what it was like to be alive in 1970, or what it would be like to be alive in 2040. Most importantly, I’m trying to find a new way to convey stories that I think are pertinent. I think of musicians as storytellers, and if people are just telling a story about their girlfriend or their new car, I think that’s very limiting and often very trite. Yet, I find a story about water in India, for example, a much more compelling story. One hundred and twenty-two million people in India don’t have access to a toilet, and yet we have branded waters in the west. I think that is absolutely disgusting. The idea that we are importing Italian water is absolutely ridiculous, what’s wrong with British water?

LL: As a musician with an ever-growing audience, do you feel that spreading a message through your music is something you’re obliged to do?

MH: With my tax money the government goes and kills people, and funds a war. Therefore, it’s vital that my music takes a position on that. If I lived somewhere else where my government wasn’t doing that, I would maybe feel less obliged to take such a vicarious position, but it’s really important that people have some understanding of where I position myself. I mean if you don’t care about it you can go and make music however you want, but if you do care about it, as I do, then it’s important that the music attempts to position itself in relation to that stuff.

LL: Can you tell me a bit about your project Country X2, and some of the aims and goals behind it?

MH: Basically, I feel uninspired by existing methods of defining a nation, state or a country. Because I was born in England, that makes me British, and with that comes a certain amount of privilege and history, of which I’m not necessarily proud. There are a couple of things that I am proud of, but why do I get to be proud of the way Brunel built Britain? Why do I have a right just because I was born in the same country? So with a couple of friends we decided to create the beginnings of a new country, which is defined by belief and principle rather than by where you are born. For example, if you believe philosophically in certain things, like we should be as un-polluting as possible, and avoid killing people at all costs, then you are free to join. If you disagree, you are free to leave at any time as well.

LL: So how would it work exactly, is it a virtual community that you are trying to build?

MH: Yeah it will only be online, that’s the point. There’s no passport, so you can immigrate and emigrate as much as you like. It’s a virtual community, and essentially when we reach a critical mass, then I’ll have the possibility of writing to Tony Blair and saying and a million people from around the world and I think the gulf war is an extremely dangerous and immoral act. At the same time we’d also be able to write to Coca-Cola and say that a million of us have decided to stop drinking your product until you stop draining water out of particular agricultural areas of India, or whatever it might be. At the same time, it needs to be something positive as well, so we’re going to start a university, and share ideas and construct an alternative way of how we can go through this rather peculiar thing called life. I mean we don’t really know what it is at the moment because it’s just starting. We want it to start in the most humble way possible and allow it to take its natural course.

LL: What are some interesting projects you have coming up at the moment?

MH: There are two things that I’m doing next. The main thing is putting together a live show for this record. So I’m finishing rehearsals and we’re about to go on tour next week. The other thing is a choral piece for a ballet over here that’s about to go on tour as well, it’s pretty varied as usual. 

LL: Any plans to tour to Australia again in the near future?

MH: Yeah, absolutely, it’s not out of the question, we may be coming at the end of the year.

LL: This issue of Lifelounge has a ‘white’ theme, so what does the idea of white mean to you?

MH: The most obvious perspective for me is that the white notes on a piano have a bland quality. Classical music of the early periods, because of the harmonics series and the way things were organised, was in very major scales and generally very much in the white keys or white notes of the scale, so B, C, F or A keys with just one or two black notes. And then in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when composers starting going into the black notes, music began to get a lot more interesting.

1. For more information on the PCCOM click here
2. For more information on Country X and how to become a citizen click here