We’re looking at a vinyl copy of Matthew Herbert’s remixes, Second Hand Sounds, in Lime Records, a revamped cottage in Melville. Beside me is proprietor Sergio Bothelo, proud owner of this crisp new three-album set. ”Can you get this signed?” he asks. Not possible, because the interview with the world-famous digital maestro is to be conducted by telephone. Herbert is one of modern music’s more versatile cult heroes. He samples anything from household objects to body parts and has recently formed a jazz big band. If you own any of his work you’ve hit base one. If you know that he records under the names Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy and Wishmountain you’ve hit base two. And if you’ve got it on vinyl … well, you’re the man.Herbert’s dad was a sound engineer at the BBC for 30 years. This inspired him to choose a career in music technology and, as his Internet autobiography states, as a kid he landed up entertaining an audience of 1 000 with a bag of crisps.On March 28 he will be entertaining the North Sea Jazz Festival audience with the poignant love songs he released under the title Bodily Functions in 2001.
Do you find that there’s any conflict in the privileged access it takes to make digital music and the down-to-earth working-class values of traditional jazz that you’re returning to?
I think there is conflict there. However, I don’t think jazz is a working-class thing at all. The days of working-class people picking up a trumpet to express the poverty around them have long gone. Jazz itself has become very commodified.
So there wouldn’t be a nostalgia for the working-class roots of jazz creeping in when musicians like you return to jazz.
I think the comparisons are interesting but I don’t see a working-class thread running through any kind of jazz that I’m exposed to over here.
Well, you’re coming to South Africa where we seem to champion working-class jazz.Right.In Bodily Functions, rumour has it, you sampled sounds of human organs. How was this achieved?
What happened, on the track called Foreign Bodies I asked for people to send in sounds of their bodies. Some I know about: some of them are people’s blood pumping through their veins, some of them are the sounds of people cracking their necks.
You’ve recorded under a number of names … Have you intentionally tried to render yourself, as an individual, invisible? Is this invisibility part of the modern music environment where pop stars are names before they’re faces?
I would like to think so, although it doesn’t quite work like that, because in the modern-day world of marketing everyone thinks if you try to do something anti-marketing, somehow it’s a marketing concept. I just like having the freedom to release exactly what I want, whenever I want, in whatever way I see fit. We live in a world where we’re ironically sold everything built on a series of mediocre choices. We can have a petrol station on every corner but there really isn’t a choice between cars that, say, run on compressed air or that sail down the road — so we have a very predetermined, narrow spectrum of choices that we have available to us in the world. So I like giving myself the freedom to actually have and take every minute decision.
Your press says that you have mottos like Samuel Beckett’s quote, ”fail again, fail better” and ”anything goes”.
[Laughs] I don’t remember saying anything goes …
Let’s put it this way: is the terrain of new music really so open to experimentation? Or do you find that you have to deal with compromising commercial constraints that continually creep into your working life? And how do you deal with those?
I don’t at all because I’ve worked very hard in the past 10 years for that not to be an issue. The next album I’m doing is a big-band album, which theoretically should be a very expensive album to make. It’s taken a year to record, but I’ve managed to do it in a way whereby I’ve managed to fund it all myself by pouring in little bits of money from different areas. There’s going to be like 3 000 recordings, mini recordings on the album.And I can say that I have personally been responsible for every single one of those recordings. So I feel I am in a position where the commercial constraints really don’t enter into my world.
One of the great philosophical quotes after the Holocaust was philosopher Adorno asking: ”Can there be poetry after Auschwitz?” Right now it would seem fitting to ask a musician like you whether there can be festivities honouring jazz and parties devoted to house music (or whatever) while the world is in the throes of tragedy?
I think there are two ways of fighting something like this and the one way is by the traditional methods of the critique of it — by engaging in the politics on a local and international level. By writing about it, by protesting, marching, by making changes in your personal life. And then the other thing is providing an alternative, by providing a positive message that people can share in. Certainly, like the big-band album I’ve just finished — that whole record is about war and our position in society, a critique of it, and at the same time a positive experience.
It’s pretty Sixties, writing anti-war songs …
Bodily Functions is a record that came out two years ago, and I was writing two years before that. So it does seem like a slightly backward step to be doing it [at the North Sea Jazz Festival]. It doesn’t fit entirely comfortably at a time like this, but I must say not doing it doesn’t feel like a positive step either. So all I can do is think of ways of incorporating what’s going on in the show somehow in a small way — a simple gesture.
Catch Herbert Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival at the Good Hope Centre in Woodstock on March 28 at 10.30pm.
See www.nsjfcapetown.com