Essay: Matthew Herbert's Musical Shell

Next essay for Dummy is up, a discussion of Matthew Herbert's music and processes in the context of his forthcoming album, with a bit of critique in there, feat. Russolo, Marinetti, Wilfred Owen, Arcimboldo (click here to read).

In June, UK composer Matthew Herbert will release an album called The End of Silence, which is constructed almost entirely out of a ten second sample of modern warfare recorded in Libya in 2011: distant gunfire, fighters whistling a heads-up, a pro-Gaddafi jet approaching, and a bomb landing close by. It might be what Russolo would have wanted, but what is the significance – and consequence – of doing such a thing today?

His last album, One Pig, is made from samples of the life and afterlife of a farmed pig, from its birth to its death and to a meal attended by Herbert and friends at which the pig was finally eaten... The project prompted controversy and reached the news, eliciting censure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a vicious Facebook campaign. Herbert responded articulately and persuasively – the work was not making gruesome, amoral “art” from the butchery of a living being, but rather was a disquieting and arguably necessary look behind the veil of a system in which living beings are industrially created and slaughtered for our consumption...

This time I'm not really so sure... Not because such brutally raw empirical evidence of warfare is automatically too serious a material for art or music – artist Jeremy Deller brought a bomb-mangled car from Baghdad to museum visitors very effectively. Not because it disrespects troops or even victims (it’s left unsaid as to whether Meyer’s impact had any), since the shocking truth is often what is needed to change minds and force action to help such people. It’s because The End of Silence is such a passive, distanced, and ultimately banal response to an intensely active situation...

Bit by bit since Around the House, Herbert’s concepts have been increasingly outweighing the music in gravity, the sonic causes have been outshining the musical effects. Were it not for the crushing, visceral intensity of its having sampled a real-life aerial bombardment, the music on The End of Silence would be interesting and sufficient, rather than what it feels like – as if it’s missing something, not living up to something...

It's not that there's anything wrong or artless about [Herbert's] technique, it's just that when faced with a subject such as modern warfare, it feels so hollow... If the comparison between Arcimboldo and Rembrandt shows us that art can be so much more intense than the reconfiguration of pre-given forms, that sculpture is not merely made out of stones, that poetry is not merely made out of ink, Herbert’s music shows us that no matter where they might come from, music is not just made out of sounds: music is made out of changes, patterns, gestures, sympathies, the warp and weft of difference and repetition...