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.