Send "Matthew Herbert " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The last volume in Matthew Herbert's "One" trilogy contains the same sonic ruminations on consumerism and mechanization as the previous installments, as well as their mood and tenor. Like One One, a heady singer-songwriter record, there's a hushed creeping intimacy to the thing, and a Zen-like acceptance of overbearing forces, even if it intends to keep on kicking against them. Like One Club, which twisted field recordings from the Frankfurt nightclub Robert Johnson into splayed-apart dance music, thereby ingesting corporatized club culture on its own terms, One Pig is an overwhelming, inscrutably political electronic record culled from an unlikely source. In this case, it consists of manipulated recordings Herbert made of a pig's life, "from birth to plate."This certainly isn't the exploitation record PETA assumed it was gonna be, and it's not a slab of musical vegan didacticism that presumably, many more, who prefer their music to be good first, and message-oriented second, feared either. No matter how visceral Herbert's mix of animal grunts and menacing electronics feel, the message is never something simple like, "it sure is sad that we kill animals." Rather, it moves listeners to be more mindful of consumption and waste (the pig's parts were even turned into instruments), while acknowledging just how strangely disconnected we are from the animals killed to put food on our table, or say, shoes on our feet. But the lingering feeling on One Pig, the first half in particular, is still one of abject horror. "September" (each song is named after the time of year when the sounds contained therein were recorded) begins with stabs of noise that could be from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre score, and then shifts into a slowly molting rhythm, punctuated by horrifying retches from the pig. As the track perversely bounces along, the animal wails become harsher, and Herbert pulls the growl in and out of the mix and you begin to expect, even anticipate them. Its appearance in the mix becomes as viscerally rewarding as a typical pop-song hook....full text |
| Independent |
| Matthew Herbert is at the mercy of fate. He’s a chancer, a risk taker and a man who sees creative potential in the everyday, the banal and the fundamentally brutal. Taking the world around us and immortalising it in song, he strongly maintains the need for accidental occurrences within the realm of music making – often likened to the theory of aleatoricism – largely as a riposte to the repetitious nature of capitalism and the damning perfection of the modern studio which seeks to disassociate sounds from their physical origin. The primary concern of this avant-garde conceptualist is with the ‘real’; acquiring found sounds from a disparate array of sources and bringing them to the forefront of our collective consciousness in an intelligent way that has deservedly earned him his status as a pioneering electronic musician. The ideological bases of his work vary from political and social commentary to self-reflective contemplation – from Herbert’s 2001 ‘Bodily Functions’ LP, which features audio snippets of laser eye surgery, brushing hair and chattering teeth – to The Matthew Herbert Big Band’s 2008 ‘There’s Me and There’s You’ – a hypermodern incarnation of the protest album which uses the sound of Palestinians being shot by the Israeli defence force in Ramallah to articulate a vehement point about the bloody consequences of war. And it is the idea of consequence which resonates throughout Herbert’s latest work, the ‘One Pig’ project, a concept album about the life-cycle of a pig, from birth to death, and beyond. Naturally, the record has courted a fair deal of controversy from the outset (PETA tried to have the whole thing shut down), but Herbert fervently dismisses any claims of cruelty, instead defending his long-held belief that we should treat animals with the utmost respect. Using this project to convey a profound political message about the way we perceive and consume meat, he blames supermarkets for feeding us a constant barrage of misinformation when it comes to food labelling but also berates our own shirking of responsibility and the cowardly way in which many of us eat meat but fail to question where it came from. For, as the age old adage goes, ‘ignorance is bliss’ and we are often guilty of hiding behind the unknown. “We don’t see the immigrants picking our fruit, we don’t see the conditions that animals are kept in and we don’t get to see how they’re killed,” says Herbert. “We’re just kept entirely separate from the consequences of our actions and that’s an incredibly dangerous position for us to be in.” Herbert praises The Meat License Proposal, an organisation working towards developing a new kind of law which requires restaurant customers to have experienced killing an animal in order to purchase anything meat-related from the menu and this desire for illumination pervades the ‘One Pig’ record....full text |
| Xlr8r |
| As the final installment of musique concrète auteur Matthew Herbert's One Trilogy (which previously included the One One and One Club albums), the artist will release One Pig, a nine-song LP "made entirely from recordings of a modern pig's life cycle from birth to plate," via his own Accidental label. Not surprisingly, Herbert's forthcoming album has already been singled out by PETA, who is trying to stop the release of the record, claiming that it's trying to turn animal cruelty into entertainment. The organization's statement reads, "No one with any true talent or creativity hurts animals to attract attention, but we are sorry Matthew Herbert couldn't include the screams of pigs being made into bacon on his record, as they would have instantly turned some people into vegetarians... Pigs are inquisitive, highly intelligent, sentient animals who become frightened when they are sent to slaughterhouses, where they kick and scream and try to escape the knife. They are far more worthy of respect than Matthew Herbert or anyone else who thinks cruelty is entertainment." Herbert was reportedly "puzzled and dissapointed" by the response, as it seems its authors did little to no research of the intents and methods behind his album. If PETA doesn't have its way, we can expect One Pig to arrive on October 10, the tracklist of which is below....full text |
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