Certainly these mandates keep Matthew Herbert out of the drag-and- drop production scene, and they may be part of the reason why at a recent NYC club date, there were no less than seven personal video cameras hovering like hawks over the turntables while he spun vinyl into the wee hours for a packed house. These fans may have known him for his work as Rockit or Radio Boy (early DJ monikers), for his remixes of songs by Björk, R.E.M., John Cale, Yoko Ono and Perry Farrell, for his big band album recorded at Abbey Road, or his album (Plat Du Jour) made entirely of samples of food. This is no lazy man, as you will see. Matthew and I got together at Mavericks Studio in NYC and talked about making records.
You've created whole albums with what would be considered non-musical sounds — a Coke can, jumping up and down on Gap products — and yet you bring them into a musical context. I'm curious about how technology and the tools that you use affect that process. What's possible and not possible? What would you like to be possible that isn't possible?
I think a revolution really happened with the sampler. Intellectually there was never a boundary between noise and music. In the history of music and in the history of technology, that boundary has become more and more defined to the point where we think that, say, Placido Domingo or someone like him makes the most beautiful sound that anyone could possibly make, and the sound of a rusty nail on tin is the worst possible sound. Those distinctions have never really existed for me. When the sampler came along, it undermined that boundary in one fell swoop. As I started out sampling, I just went wild with this new freedom and would record the sounds of all the good things in my life. Then I realized that all the bad things made a sound, too. So I wasn't interested in the sound of a cup of tea anymore — I was interested in a cup of tea served to George Bush when he came to stay with Tony Blair. I wanted to know the stories, and I try in the process of recording to allow those stories to breathe. So, again, I don't want to just record a drummer, I want to record a drummer on a particular day, say, his birthday. I want to know how that effects his playing. Or, on one of the tracks on my new record, for example, the drums were recorded at 100 miles per hour in the back of my car. So, we're breaking the law, firstly, and secondly we're in personal danger, because we're in my 1980 BMW that has a steering issue. So, how does a drummer play differently there? It starts to inform the logic of the song. One of the songs is about death, so I recorded the drums in a hot-air balloon at 2000 feet. And again, there's some personal danger, and it's like the soul rising, and suddenly it tells a different story. So, again, the drummer plays differently. We got the most incredibly tight sound up there, too. The biggest problem, of course, were the flames filling up the balloon. But that's the story, so instead of a ride cymbal, we used the sound of the jets, so you have white noise, which is essentially the same thing as a ride cymbal — you're after some sort of high-frequency bed. I don't want to deny that we were in a hot-air balloon, but I also don't want to make it a novelty. It's there for sonic reasons, and philosophical reasons.
So recording the drums is essential to the story.
You know, drums are so boring in a way. We can hit anything in the world, so why would we hit something while ten-thousand other people are hitting something very similar? It seems a bit limiting. I don't really understand this approach where you have a kind of universal environment and you try to get what you want out of this particular environment when you have the potential to go anywhere and record. One of the tracks, again — we recorded drums in the sea, with hydrophones. And, again, you have no idea how it's going to sound, and then you end up getting the amazing wash of the stones as the sea picks them up and brushes them up against the kit.
How did you do that?
I do all my field recordings on a Nagra-V hard drive recorder, so I can just transfer it by Firewire. The A/D converters are still great, and the preamps are really good. So we just have a stereo mic to do ambient stuff. We rented wetsuits and went in the middle of winter, very cold, and walked into the sea and just dunked these hydrophones in. Half of it's completely unusable, and then after an hour and a half of recording you get something incredible. The person who made the hydrophones said he couldn't make out the sound, and as it turns out it was these shrimp with their legs scuttling around. And these are things that you would never experience in a studio, like shrimp legs.
Sampling and recording usually seem like two different things, but with your work I'm not really seeing the boundary between the two.
No. I think a sample is just a very short recording. So consequently, like on Plat Du Jour, the record I made with food, there are three to four thousand individual recordings on that. I've made a decision about each of them, and they were taken at a particular time for a particular reason. It starts to inherit the weight of these stories, and it's so easy to be original in that way. It's so confusing to me why people spend hours EQ'ing a kick drum to try to get it to sound unique or different, when actually if they took a box of corn flakes, put the microphone in the corn flakes and then put a kick pedal on it, you just get the most enormous thud, plus you get the rustle of the corn flakes. And then you get to choose your cereal. Granola is going to sound different than Fruit Loops. That tells a different story, and in the case of the food record, it tells an important story. In the studio you sort of want to give room for those kinds of things. The microphone is for listening, and I go around pointing it at things that interest me or things that I don't know about. There's a tremendous power there as well, because you can make the listener listen to anything — the price of Vietnamese coffee beans, the average lifespan of a broiler chicken in English industrial farming, Jeep Cherokee miles per gallon or whatever it is that I want to point my microphone at. I will sample the track many times in many different ways, and if I'm sampling again, the microphone will be open. If someone's doing the vacuuming next door, then it goes on the sample. I'm not trying to record that person vacuuming, but I'm not denying that story, I'm not denying that process, or denying the fact that the studio's in the house at the moment.
You said somewhere that at some point in your career, you began trying to pull yourself out of the picture more and bring the story and the sounds right to the listener. From a recording and engineering perspective, how does that happen? How do you get your own ego out of the way?
One thing that I should definitely say is that I don't think that I've managed to remove my ego from the process, even though I'd really like to do that. I don't think you can ever do that, and particularly because I'm actually a bit of a control freak. But I think that the fundamental lesson that I've learned in working with sounds is not to try and turn them into something. You've got the recording, so listen to it. It sounds like such a banal thing to say, but in just listening to it, the story comes from there. So for example, on the food record again, I was working with a food researcher, and she was telling me about commercial hatching of chickens. Basically, there are 24,000 in a room about half the size of this, and every 21 days at a certain time on the dot, 24,000 chicks hatch. In my head, I had this as some incredible moment of life. When I got there I was like, "Is that it?" Because all you hear is "bvvvvvvvvv" of these enormous fans. And then, just like that, "eeeeeeeeeeeeee", just this tone of chicks — because 24,000 chicks are all going at the same pitch, basically. And that was the story, and that's what I hadn't had in my mind. That recording process taught me philosophically about the artistic process, which was that in my head I had this very romantic idea of breaking into life, but it shouldn't be romanticized. It was quite humbling and consequently, the piece of music came out being quite sad. You have to submit yourself to the will of the sounds and see what happens. And with recording I really feel like I need to embrace those possibilities, the possibility that it's going to sound like shit. Embrace the possibility that it's not going to work and address that, and try to create a more generous environment in which that can exist.
And studios and technology are going to affect what we end up hearing.
Yeah. For example, I think software is an absolute disgrace at the moment. I think it's incredibly powerful, and I depend on it in so many different ways. But it's disgraceful really, when you think of the possibilities that electronic music and the electronic studio have offered. Software is telling you the story, and it's telling you which stories to retell. So for example, you call up Logic or you call up Reason, and it has a built-in drum machine, has a built-in acid 303 sort of thing, it has a built-in Fender Rhodes, and it's encouraging you to work in blocks in four, and it's encouraging you to record at a tempo that doesn't shift, it's encouraging you to record without distortion — all these different things, leading you down a very particular way. Sampling, for example — it's absurd that in most samplers there's no mic input.
You can't go from the room you're in directly into the sampler.
Right, which is absolute lunacy. That's what the sampler was designed to do.
It should have a great mic pre.
Yeah, exactly. And I think software is responsible for a kind of death of creativity in many ways, even though a program like Logic is incredible in what it allows you to do. And it does allow you to change tempos, and it does allow you to record not in blocks of four, but you have to come to it with those suggestions.
Is your set of rules [the PCCOM] your cure to that? Is that how you get around the limitations of the software in some ways? Is it in response to the technology?
Yeah, it's definitely in response to the technology because I was finding myself just coming into the studio, wanting to write something quickly, and I'd call up a drum machine or the worst thing — a sample CD. For me one of the lowest points in music technology was in the late '90s when Akai made a sampler that could only sample off a CD. That was the lowest point in the development of ideas in the studio and recording. So my rules were like, "Wait a minute, if I were a piano player I wouldn't think, "Okay if I just play a Supertramp intro combined with a Billy Joel chorus and a Thelonious Monk middle eight, then perfect, that's what I've got to do." And the same with guitar — you don't think, "Okay, I'll add Hendrix to Bob Dylan to what have you." So my rules aren't really necessary when you're playing an acoustic instrument, but in the studio with the technology, it's essential to take a position before you turn on any of the equipment, to know why you're there, why you're using the technology — particularly when certain things are still done better by humans. And all my rules are saying is, just don't rip anyone else off. It's not that radical of a concept. By deciding what creatively you intend to achieve with your work, and then turning on the computer, you can retain your original impulse. The premise of much of the software is at odds with the urge of the musician. Why are software samplers primarily designed to process existing files? This is a colossal distraction.
Sure, but it's still really easy to go ahead and take unoriginal sounds without thinking about it. Like, "We'll throw these drum loops up and create a song with them," and it feels original because we're creating a song.
How am I going to be original with a 909 drum machine that maybe 100,000 people are using as well? My god, you're starting a 100,000 places back down the line before you even play a note, whereas if I pick up this chair, drop it and record it, no one will ever have that. It's never existed before and it'll never exist again in that way, because the temperature is different today, there's three of us in the room — so it might change how it's recorded. Maybe this microphone is on demo and it has to go back tomorrow, or you change the cable and it's different — all these tiny little things make a difference.
It seems that in the world of electronic music there's an ongoing challenge to produce original sounds. How has that contributed to your sense of how to go about making a record that maybe isn't for a dance audience?
I think it's tough because it's gone extremely conservative extremely quickly, and I find that very depressing. It's the same affliction as in hip-hop for a while, which was a quest to sound authentic, to express your right to exist in that community by sounding similar to somebody else. And I think that really sums up where we are as a society — people are happy to submit themselves to these various authorities in order to be accepted. There's a kind of sonic fascism out there. We got denied radio play off the last Herbert record on Radio One, the main BBC show, because sonically it wouldn't have fit between Britney Spears and Green Day, or what have you. What they were saying was that there weren't enough high frequencies. The bottom end was okay, but there wasn't enough highs — the mids weren't defined enough. The amount of compression that's put on the radio is particularly disturbing. And in a microcosm, you have that fascism in dance music, so you need to have a reasonable amount of bass; it needs to be in time so the DJ can at least mix the beginning and the end of it. So, despite kind of priding itself as this forward thinking community, so much of it is desperately conservative.
Tell me about working at Abbey Road.
One thing that I did for this new record was going straight to Pro Tools at Abbey Road. Previously we had gone to tape with the big band, and it obviously had the glue and the warmth that we are familiar with, but it just didn't have the punch and it just sounded a bit lifeless, really. And this time we went to Pro Tools, and it sounded so much better, I have to say. But it was for a particular sound.
The horns are very bright and lively.
Right, and yet they're all very old valve mics, Coles ribbons and things like that. But I want to hear those, and in a way tape was a bit too forgiving — well, not forgiving, because there's nothing to forgive — but it sort of glued it all together — and I didn't necessarily need that in a modern studio where you're trying to mix that with a sample that I've turned into a keyboard pad or something like that. I've kind of eliminated synthesizers from my studio in that if I need a synthesizer, I make one. I'll sample maybe twenty times. I'll play a sound, put the mic up by the speaker, play it back, sample it again. Because I'm using Akai 612s, it's eight bit, so gradually you lose more and more definition until you're just left with a lot of overtones, and it gets much more spacey — and eventually you can just play any sound as a keyboard sound.
So it's picking up the room each time.
Yeah, it's picking up the room. It's changing each time. When you actually listen to the big band record, the food record and I'd say ninety-eight percent of the new record, everything was recorded with a microphone. For example, if I do use a soft synth to do a bass line, then I'll often put the microphone up and play through the speakers back in so you begin to get unity. That's what you're after in a song — unity of sound. It's a very easy and quick way to do that. If you're recording everything through a microphone in the same room, it starts to have that unity. The folder for this album was over a hundred gigs, so it's around a hundred and sixty hours worth of recordings. But I had made decisions about each of them at some point. I didn't just call up some preset that some Japanese developer at Korg has worked out, or what have you. And that unity starts to happen naturally because it's there, because you've structured it all from the ground up.
