Just finished a write up about the album (not a review per-se):
http://www.ezrpm.com/article/67/ in which I quote Herbert from this
article. Links to buy it online for (5 GBP) near the end.
-xenlab
On 7/26/05, Mitch Stargrove <Mitch@dancingdna.com> wrote:
quoted 175 lines > http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1530688,00.html
>
> Crunch time
>
> Does the sound of 3,255 people biting into apples
> count as music? And will it make the food
> industry change its ways? Matthew Herbert
> explains all to Pascal Wyse
>
> Monday July 18, 2005
> The Guardian
>
> 'Music sounds so wrong at the moment," says
> Matthew Herbert, sitting outside a pub near his
> London studio. People who hear his new album,
> Plat du Jour, may well agree with him. One of the
> tracks features the sound of Herbert driving a
> Chieftain tank over a re-creation of the meal
> Nigella Lawson prepared for Bush and Blair, when
> the US president came over to thank Tony for his
> support over Iraq. Plat du Jour also features
> 80,000 chicks, 3,255 people biting into apples,
> and a track made from "one crystal of beet sugar
> and a coke can".
>
> What's eating Herbert is the things music has
> stopped representing. "There would be no sense,
> if you were to look back in 100 years' time, that
> there is a war going on, or that we had one of
> the most incompetent and disgusting people
> running the world. I mean, what would punk have
> done?"
>
> Since he started composing, producing and
> remixing music in the mid-1990s, Herbert has
> recorded his politics. Early on, as Dr Rockit, he
> attacked corporate excess by sampling the sounds
> of McDonald's and Gap products - literally
> stamping angrily all over them.
>
> "I guess it started with Naomi Klein," he says.
> "Then I discovered John Pilger and Noam Chomsky,
> people that weren't afraid to talk in terms of
> morality, and had passion. It's not about free
> market economics or choices, things are how they
> are because someone has decided they should be
> like that.
>
> "After being involved with music for about five
> years, I realised I had power. What I pointed my
> microphone at I was drawing people's attention
> to. Like a war photographer. I wanted to listen
> to Ikea flat-packed tables collapsing." He looks
> up dreamily: "Or the sound of Tony Blair
> resigning."
>
> A combination of touring and an encounter with
> Joanna Blythman's book The Food We Eat got
> Herbert obsessed with what he calls "the
> international language of food". Plat du Jour is
> a document of that - a musical take on the
> politics of pleasure. For Herbert, those politics
> are constantly cloaked. "This is crucial to why I
> wanted to do food on the album. Not only is it
> life and death, but within it is total deception.
> The British Farm Standard, for instance [a
> sticker featuring a tractor made up of red, white
> and blue letters] enrages me. It doesn't mean the
> food is made in Britain. It can come from any
> farm in the world, but meets a standard that
> would be required from a British farm. I bet
> 80-90% of people would expect that to mean it
> comes from a British farm."
>
> Herbert has hardly touched his drink. No wonder -
> a minute later he has deconstructed it as a glass
> of sheer misery: oranges from a poor country;
> lemonade from a questionable corporation; ice
> cubes possibly housing flouride and chlorine.
> "There are consequences to all these things we
> feel we have a right to."
>
> Herbert is confident that even if the music gets
> slated, there is a strong backbone to the
> project. "I tried to align myself with meaningful
> authorities. The coffee track was constructed -
> philosophically and physically - with an author
> called Anthony Wild, who's written an incredible
> book called Black Gold: the Dark History of
> Coffee. Before he wrote it he worked in the
> coffee trade. He's lost friends through this
> book."
>
> Herbert's research for the album also included a
> trip down the London sewers with his microphone.
> "It was like Ghostbusters. Late one night I got a
> call on my mobile. 'We're on,' said a man." He
> gave Herbert a location, turned up there in a
> van, gave Herbert a special suit and snuck him
> down a manhole in the early hours of the morning.
> "All to record the sound of your shit, you see?"
> I am stuck, just for a second, with the image of
> a singing poo.
>
> Other subjects on the album include diet hype and
> the last meals of death row prisoners. And for
> two tracks - The Final Meal of Stacey Lawton and
> Hidden Sugars - Herbert collaborated with Heston
> Blumenthal, chef and proprietor of the Fat Duck
> in Bray. On a website set up for the CD
> (www.platdujour.co.uk), all the "ingredients" and
> details of research are listed, along with notes
> such as: "All the melodies, basslines and chords
> are made from a can of coke", and "Ricetec patent
> no. 5663484: this is the patent number in which
> Ricetec, a Texas agribusiness firm, attempts to
> patent basmati rice, a plant neither created by
> Ricetec nor indigenous to America". The
> ingredient list for the track Celebrity comes to
> nearly 1,300 words.
>
> Was anyone wary of him nosing around with a
> microphone? "This underlines the impotence of the
> record, and its power. If I had gone in with a
> camera I would be in trouble, but no one is
> suspicious of sound. It has not been used in a
> politically motivated way - at least, not on a
> scale that's going to have any impact on a
> chicken farmer in Wiltshire."
>
> Herbert wants to intrigue people enough to find
> out what lies beneath both the music and our
> diets, but he is also adamant the album is
> "music, not documentary". This should reassure
> people who think they are in for an austere
> lecture in sound, because Plat du Jour celebrates
> food as much as it scrutinises its roots, and is
> constantly playful. Herbert is witty without
> resorting to slapstick, and arranges what some
> would call "non-musical" sounds in a musical way.
>
> He also exercises serious discipline in the
> treatment of sounds. His list of Dogma-style
> rules for his productions begins: "1. The use of
> sounds that exist already is not allowed (subject
> to article 2). In particular: No drum machines.
> All keyboard sounds must be edited in some way:
> no factory presets.
>
> "2. Only sounds that are generated at the start
> of the compositional process or taken from the
> artist's own previously unused archive are
> available for sampling."
>
> The list goes on. It calls to mind the questions
> a shopper would ask of a good butcher. Herbert
> wants to know where everything comes from, how it
> is treated and what it gets fed - no mad cow
> disease in his musical food chain. "I'm
> definitely chopping it up," he laughs.
>
> Herbert tours around the world - which implies an
> environmental hypocrisy. I'm gearing up to
> challenge him on this when he spookily pre-empts
> me: "I'm stopping flying on environmental
> grounds, which is going to cut 40% of my income.
> It is incredibly empowering to take a decision
> like that. We shouldn't be allowed to freely fly
> to Australia, we should struggle to get there,
> because it has real consequences. My point in
> Plat du Jour is that things don't exist in
> isolation."
>
> · Plat du Jour is out today on Accidental Records.
>
--
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