Matthew Herbert The End of Silence

Electronic music master Matthew Herbert isn’t letting time simply pass by him. Despite reissuing one of his best album, Bodily Functions, late last year, and releasing a boxset compiling his work, he’s still on the creative warpath. And the use of the word “warpath” is more fitting than you might think; Herbert’s new album is a three-part album devised, created, and performed using a single ten second clip recorded by war photographer Sebastian Meyer during the battle of Ras Lanuf in Libya on 11th March 2011. The album will be called The End of Silence, and was recorded over three days in a hillside barn near Hay-on-Wye in June last year where Herbert also used a series of “witness mics” so as to capture the sounds outside the barn as well as those being recorded inside by the band. Together they combine to create music that truly existed in real time. Speaking about the record, Herbert said,

“I wanted to freeze history, press pause, wander around inside the sound – trying to understand its component parts, wondering why it was so scary when I had never actually heard any bomb first hand. In stark contrast to the written reports of the atrocities committed by dictators in the Arab word during the Arab Spring, here was something that rendered it real. It turned the virtual word back in to the visceral. Despite immediate and disparate access to news of world events, it’s rare to find something that punctures the safe veneer of distance that computers create. By hearing this sound, one is compelled to live inside the moment.”

The album will be released via Herbert’s own label, Accidental on June 24th, and below you can check out the tracklisting and listen to twenty-four minute “Part One.”

1. Part One
2. Part Two
3. Part Three