British electronic music whizz Matthew Herbert is hoping to become the first musician ever to use the sound of cancer in a dance track.
“I’ve found a guy, an American, that can record the sound of it,” he said during an interview before a performance in Paris.
The London-based musician is working on the follow-up album to Plat du Jour, released worldwide this year, which was made using sampled recordings of food to raise awareness about the industrialisation of modern farming methods.
“My new record is going to be a disco record. So, people might be out having a good time on a Saturday night, but they might be dancing to a disco record and the beats are made from cancer,” he smiles.
The know-how for this extraordinary feat will be provided by Nasa via a scientist specialised in recording cellular activity.
Herbert (33) estimates he has sold 750 000 records worldwide. His unique blend of music is a collection of recorded sounds, mixed together into thought-provoking music with the help of computer technology.
The Plat du Jour album took him two years of research and six months of recording, included no traditional instruments, and used recordings of a free-range chicken being killed and the noise of more than 3 000 people biting into an apple.
He also recorded an armoured tank driving over a recreation of a meal cooked by British chef Nigella Lawson for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United States President George Bush when the US president came to London to thank Blair for his support in Iraq.
The result is a mixture of the conceptual, the playful and the vitriolic.
“I want the music to stand alone as music. If it doesn’t, then I’ve failed. But I also wish there to be something to engage people’s intellect,” he says.
The live performance of Plat du Jour sees several chefs and jazz musicians on stage, with Herbert supplying the electronic wizardry that turns the sound of whisking eggs and a drummer playing coffee tins into music.
The tour, which will take him to Luxembourg in October and includes two more performances in Manchester and London in Britain, is an exhausting process.
“It takes about five hours to set up and about two hours to take down,” he says. “We have to build a kitchen on stage, then the drummer plays a different set of drums for every song.”
One of the drum kits, used for a protest song about celebrities promoting unhealthy food for children, features a cake box endorsed by boy band Blue.
Herbert explains his unusual creative process using one of the songs on the album, The Truncated Life of a Modern Industrialised Chicken, as an example.
“I accumulated all the chicken sounds I wanted, like an abattoir, some free-range chickens, some broiler [intensively farmed] chickens and some commercially hatched chicks.
“Then I load up the sounds on to the computer and work with a sampler, which for people that don’t know, just takes any sounds and allows you to play them on a piano keyboard,” he says.
Next, he listens to the rhythm of the sounds. To demonstrate the importance of this, he recreates something he recorded at a waste-disposal site “that sounded like a whale”, which contrasts with his rendition of the last cluckings of a dying chicken.
“You start to organise it and think about what story you’re trying to tell,” he says.
When the song was finished, “the bass line was the ‘cheep-cheep’ of a chick pitched down so it’s very low and I ended up doing all the melodies with half-a-dozen free-range organic eggs on a Pyrex [glass] bowl”.
Herbert says the issues around food shifted between the start of the process and the release of the album, reflecting a sea change in British public opinion.
He cites the 2004 documentary about McDonald’s by Morgan Spurlock, Supersize Me, and the work of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, whose prime-time TV programme on school dinners in state-run British schools made the issue a vote-winner during this year’s general election.
“Things have changed since I started doing the record two years ago. We think now of food as a political subject, but it wasn’t two years ago.
“Things like obesity weren’t in the news, things like school dinners weren’t in the news,” he says. “McDonald’s even sells organic milk now.”
Herbert, whose anger at “unfairness” in the world is often framed in the arguments of the anti-globalisation lobby, decided this year to stop flying as a protest against pollution and the “vile” world of “adverts for golf, watches and luxury hotels”.
“In the first half of this year, I took about 100 to 120 flights. Next year my aim in the first six months is not to take any,” he says.
This might complicate his world tour, which starts in April, and could cut his earnings by about 40%. He says a flight to Japan later in 2006, where he has live dates set up, will be one of few indiscretions.
For now, he wants to concentrate on producing other people’s work and his new album “about how there’s an enormous distance between what we consume and where it comes from”.
More dance music you can think about: drums recorded a kilometre underground, coffins, car products and — mind-bogglingly — the sound of “two meteorites being bashed together”. — AFP