Audio: ‘One Pig’
Followers of Matthew Herbert, a British electronic musician obsessed with the possibilities of using found sounds, knew he would eventually do something like “One Pig.”
Raising an Album, From Pigpen to Studio
By BEN SISARIO
Published: October 17, 2011
Matthew Herbert at a farm in Kent, England,
this summer. Of his album “One Pig,” he said,
“The pig is the soloist,” and his music tries to support it.
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Over a 16-year career, Mr. Herbert has made provocative and sometimes bizarre music using noises he collects himself, often related to food and the body. He has woven rhythms out of rattling teeth and gulping digestive tracts; turned the cheep of a minute-old chicken into a funky bass line; and channeled the percussive crunch of 3,255 people biting into apples at once. So when he decided to make his next album a sonic biography, it was bound to delve, perhaps uncomfortably, into questions about consumption.
But even Mr. Herbert was not prepared for the reaction to the idea behind “One Pig” (Accidental), his album being released on Tuesday. It tracks a single swine’s life from its birth on a farm to its slaughter 25 weeks later, using sounds from the pig’s environment. Before Mr. Herbert had looped his first snorting beat, however, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals accused him of exploiting an animal’s death for “entertainment.”
The war of press-ready statements with PETA — begun a year and a half ago and still not over — has brought new attention to Mr. Herbert and his work. But “One Pig” is only his latest project to push at the boundaries of pop music while also making barbed commentary about industrialized society, an approach that first came to wide notice a decade ago when he destroyed McDonald’s hamburgers onstage.
One of the goals of “One Pig,” he said, is to reveal, through music, a reality of everyday life that people often wish to remain hidden.
“The pig is simply the most divisive of all animals,” Mr. Herbert, 39, said in an interview. “You probably come into contact with a pig product 10 or 20 times in one day, from ink jet paper to a glass of milk. And yet they’re the subject of so much scorn and contempt. I think it’s strange that we’ve built a society that’s so dependent on something, and yet we rarely give it a voice of its own.”
Mr. Herbert began working on the album in August 2009, making regular visits with his microphone to a farm in the English countryside. After capturing the pig’s growth to maturity, oink by oink, he transformed those recordings into a dark kind of dance music punctuated by telling sounds: the moo of a nearby cow, frantic squealing, an idling truck. Each track on the album is named after a month in the pig’s journey, culminating in a banquet full of chomping and lip smacking. (Because of British law, he was not able actually to witness or record the pig’s slaughter.)
The album can make even the most committed carnivore squirm. But Mr. Herbert — who is no vegetarian — says he is not trying to dissuade people from eating meat. “The most important message of a lot of my projects,” he said, “is that I would like us to listen to the world a little more carefully.”
In February 2010, after Mr. Herbert announced the album but well before any music had been released, PETA denounced it in a statement. “No one with any true talent or creativity hurts animals to attract attention,” the statement said in part.
Mr. Herbert retorted that he was witnessing and documenting a death over which he had no control, and he called the animal rights group’s complaints “utterly absurd.” Music bloggers were in hog heaven.
The contretemps surprised many of Mr. Herbert’s longtime fans and colleagues, who know him as a fierce and thoughtful critic of the food industry, as well as one of the most politically engaged musicians working anywhere near pop. His conscientiousness over method extends to an 11-point manifesto on the proper use of sampling and mixing, which he sticks to religiously. (Rule No. 3: “The sampling of other people’s music is strictly forbidden.”)
“Matthew is obsessively ethical,” said Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, who worked with Mr. Herbert after they were introduced by Bjork.
Every detail of Mr. Herbert’s work is thought out to give it a sense of textural integrity. But a newcomer to his music can get lost in the footnotes. On “Plat du Jour,” for example, an album from 2005 about the production and marketing of food, one track features the sounds of coffee beans being dropped into a jar of herbicide; another is made up of noises created with a can of Coke.
(His music is not all weird samples, however. Mr. Herbert has also made two acclaimed big-band jazz albums, reinterpreted a Mahler symphony and worked on “Life in a Day,” a film made from 80,000 YouTube clips shot on July 24, 2010.)
The film director Mike Figgis, who booked Mr. Herbert to perform a live version of “One Pig” at his Deloitte Ignite festival in London last month, said that the quality of Mr. Herbert’s work kept it from being too heavy-handed.
“The problem with a lot of message art,” Mr. Figgis said, “is that usually its heart is being driven by the message. With Matthew, first and foremost, you are listening to a piece of music. The message is coming from an informed place, where it’s quite clear to himself, but it’s his musicianship that actually — thank God — takes us over the bump first.”
Live performances of “One Pig” will be limited. To minimize his carbon footprint, Mr. Herbert flies as little as possible. And the instrumentation required is too delicate to travel much anyway: it includes pig bones, a drum made of pigskin and a StyHarp, a device created by the sound designer Yann Seznec that uses strings — not from a pig — to cue samples from the album. (Another bespoke machine, a “pig’s blood organ,” which sends blood through tuned pipes, was too fragile to bring onstage at all.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Herbert takes the idea of the musicality of nonmusical elements to an extreme with “One Pig,” at least in his own mind.
“I think of this very much as a John Coltrane record, with the pig as John Coltrane,” he said. “The pig is the soloist, and all my music in this project is trying to support that voice.”
He chuckled with a reporter at that comparison, but also made clear that he considered “One Pig” no joke.
“We live in a bubble,” he said, “whereby we are separated from the consequences of our actions, whether it be the pollution that we make or the wars we start in distant territories or where our food comes from. It seems to me that one of the functions of art is to pop those kinds of bubbles.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/arts/music/in-one-pig-matthew-herbert-finds…
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