Matthew Herbert
Encyclopedia
Matthew Herbert also known as Herbert, Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy, Mr. Vertigo, Transformer, and Wishmountain, is a British electronic musician. He has pioneered the use of so-called 'real', 'ordinary' or 'found' sounds in modern electronic music.

Career

Herbert began experimenting with aleatoric
Aleatory
Aleatoricism is the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially the creation of art or media. The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice...

 processes while studying drama at Exeter University in the early 1990s. He gave his first professional public performance in 1995 as Wishmountain, reportedly using a bag of crisps
Potato chip
Potato chips are thin slices of potato that are deep fried...

 as an instrument. Two years of performing under this name followed before he retired Wishmountain in favor of Radio Boy. In addition to creating rhythmic musique concrete as Radio Boy, however, Herbert worked on more traditional, yet relatively experimental dance music.

In the mid 90s he traveled to San Francisco, where he met jazz singer Dani Siciliano
Dani Siciliano
Dani Siciliano is an American singer. She has worked with Matthew Herbert on several of his projects including the albums Around the House, Bodily Functions and Scale...

. In 1998, Herbert issued Around the House, which successfully mixed dance beats, sounds generated by everyday kitchen objects, and Siciliano's wry vocals. By the late Nineties, Herbert was remixing tracks for dance artists like Moloko
Moloko
Moloko were an Anglo-Irish electronic/pop duo consisting of Róisín Murphy from Wicklow, Ireland and Mark Brydon, from Sunderland, England.- Origin of band name :...

, Motorbass, Alter Ego, and others. (Many of these were later collected on Secondhand Sounds: Herbert Remixes.) He also recorded singles, EPs, and albums under a variety of aliases (Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy, Mr. Vertigo, and Transformer) as well as his own name.

In 2001, Herbert issued Bodily Functions
Bodily Functions
Bodily Functions is a 2001 album released by electronic musician Herbert. It was released by !K7 Records in 2001 to positive critical reception.- Reception :...

. Similar in structure to Around the House, it culled sounds generated by manipulating human hair and skin as well as internal bodily organs. Less severe than Matmos'
Matmos
Matmos is an experimental electronic music duo originally from San Francisco but now residing in Baltimore signed to the Matador Records label. M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel are the core members, but they frequently include other artists on their records and in their performances, including...

 work, its light and sinuous dance sound augured the rise of microhouse
Microhouse
Microhouse, buftech or sometimes just minimal, is a subgenre of house and glitch music.-History:Microhouse has its roots in the minimal techno, glitch , and house genres of music. Its first echoes appeared in a glitch album by German experimental artist Oval, in 1993...

. Bodily Functions benefited from a deal Herbert signed with electronic imprint Studio !K7
Studio !K7
Studio !K7 is an independent record label based in Berlin, Germany that focuses mostly on electronic music. The name is an abbreviation of the company's original Berlin address, Kaiserdamm 7 . !K7 has since opened branch offices in New York City, Hamburg, London, and Tokyo.It has four independent...

, making it his first full-length to receive worldwide distribution.

Goodbye Swingtime, a 2003 album issued as the Matthew Herbert Big Band, combined the political commentary of Radio Boy with the song structure of his Herbert albums. Recorded with sixteen musicians from the British jazz world, including saxophonists Dave O'Higgins
Dave O'Higgins
Dave O'Higgins is a British jazz saxophonist.Born in Birmingham, O'Higgins first emerged on the British jazz scene in the 1980s. After playing in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra for three years O'Higgins joined the band of Jim Mullen before moving on to Martin Taylor's band.O'Higgins performs as...

 and Nigel Hitchcock
Nigel Hitchcock
Nigel Hitchcock is an English jazz saxophonist.-Biography:Hichcock began to play alto sax at age 8. In 1982 he and his elder brother Clive joined the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. After one year Nigel took the lead alto chair for the next 5 years...

, pianist Phil Parnell, and bassist Dave Green, the band is complemented on stage by Siciliano, Arto Lindsay
Arto Lindsay
Arthur Morgan Lindsay is an American guitarist, singer, record producer and experimental composer. He is a 1974 graduate of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida....

, Warp
Warp Records
Warp, commonly referred to as Warp Records, is a pioneering independent British record label, founded in Sheffield in 1989, notable for discovering some of the more enduring artists in electronic music....

 recording artist Jamie Lidell
Jamie Lidell
Jamie Lidell is an English musician and soul singer living in Nashville, United States...

, and Mara Carlyle.

In 2005, he released a record entitled Plat Du Jour, a record made entirely from objects and situations in the food chain. He recorded beneath the sewers of fleet street, with Vietnamese coffee beans, inside industrial chicken farms, drove a tank over a recreation of the dinner that Nigella Lawson cooked for George Bush and Tony Blair, and recorded 3500 people biting an apple at the same time. The track entitled The Final Meal of Stacey Lawton was made in collaboration renowned chef Heston Blumenthal

On May 30, 2006, Herbert issued Scale
Scale (album)
Scale is an album by Matthew Herbert, released May 29, 2006. According to the liner notes 613 objects were used to create the album. These include traditional instruments such as violins and guitars and other objects such as breakfast cereal, gas pumps and coffins.On MSNBC's website Year In Review,...

, his most successful album to date. In the U.S., it reached number 20 on Billboard
Billboard (magazine)
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...

s electronic music album chart. Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...

 remarked, "Herbert sneakily subverts Scale's apocalyptic thematic thread into something warm and danceable." Online magazine Pitchfork Media
Pitchfork Media
Pitchfork Media, usually known simply as Pitchfork or P4k, is a Chicago-based daily Internet publication established in 1995 that is devoted to music criticism and commentary, music news, and artist interviews. Its focus is on underground and independent music, especially indie rock...

 noted, "Sophisticated and whimsical, joyful and yet tinged with sadness, Scale is one of this year's great albums."

In October 2008 Matthew Herbert released the second album by his Matthew Herbert Big Band project, entitled 'There's Me And There's You', fronted by vocalist Eska. On the record he recorded inside the houses of parliament, at a landfill site, and in the lobby of the British Museum with 70 volunteers.

In 2010 Matthew Herbert released two of a three part trilogy of albums. The first: One One, was entirely written and performed by Herbert alone, the seconds : One Club was made exclusively out of sounds recorded at the Robert Johnson nightclub in Offenbach in Germany on one night.

That same year he also released a reworking of Mahler's tenth symphony for the Deutsche Grammophon's Recomposed series. Much of the recording was made inside Mahler's composing hut in Toblach, by his graveside and in a crematorium.

In late 2011, the final part of the trilogy "One Pig" was be released. Herbert recorded the life cycle of a farmed pig from birth to the dinner plate. The animal rights organisation PETA
Peta
Peta can refer to:* peta-, an SI prefix denoting a factor of 1015* Peta, Greece, a town in Greece* Peta, the Pāli word for a Preta, or hungry ghost in Buddhism* Peta Wilson, an Australian actress and model* Peta Todd, English glamour model...

 condemned the album when it was announced without hearing it. Herbert, who is not a vegetarian, responded that their complaints were "utterly asburd" and that he wanted his music to encourage people to "listen to the world a little more carefully."

Theories and politics

In 2000, Herbert wrote a manifesto titled "Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (Incorporating the Manifest of Mistakes)", which served as a theoretical guide for much of his ensuing work. Often referred to as PCCOM, some of its eleven goals includes a personal ban on using drum machines and pre-existing samples, and ensuring that anything created in the studio can be replicated in live performance.

Many of his less dance-oriented projects (chiefly those not recorded under the name Herbert) take on sundry political concerns, using specific objects to create a conceptual piece. His 2001 project as Radio Boy, The Mechanics of Destruction sampled objects from McDonald's
McDonald's
McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...

 & The Gap merchandise as a protest against corporate globalism. It was made available as a free MP3 download, via concerts and could be acquired by sending an addressed envelope to accidental records. It is still available to download for free.

In 2005 Herbert released the album
Plat du Jour under his proper name, Matthew Herbert. The disc addresses commercial food production and marketing.

In February 2006, Herbert helped form the virtual community Country X. In an introduction posted on the website, he writes, "Why not start a country? only this time, a virtual one. free from the necessity to defend its borders physically, we can reduce the violence of exclusion. a new description of resistance."

Herbert shared some of his thoughts on the future in an article for UK music magazine, 'Clash', writing "we are facing a perfect storm of shit: global financial meltdown, massive climatic shifts and the end of oil."

Accidental Records

By 2000 Herbert assembled several microlabels he initiated, including Soundslike (for his Herbert alias) and Lifelike (originally called Lowlife, begun in 1998 for his Doctor Rockit alias), under the umbrella Accidental Records. In addition to documenting Herbert's sundry projects, these imprints issued works from The Soft Pink Truth
The Soft Pink Truth
The Soft Pink Truth is an experimental house music side-project from Drew Daniel, one-half of experimental electronica duo Matmos. Daniel started the project on a dare from Matthew Herbert that he couldn't produce a house record...

, Mara Carlyle
Mara Carlyle
Mara Carlyle is an English singer-songwriter and arranger who also plays the musical saw and the ukulele. She was raised in Shropshire, England and now lives in London.-Career:...

, Mugison
Mugison
Mugison is an Icelandic musician and singer who originally performed as a one-man band using a guitar and computer, but now often performs with a band. He studied in London to become a record producer....

 and Beckett & Taylor among others. Between 2008 and 2009, the label released 'Butterflies' by Finn Peters
Finn Peters
Finn Peters is a flautist and saxophonist. He studied music at Durham University and took the postgraduate jazz course at Guildhall School of Music...

, the sophomore record of Matthew Herbert Big Band named 'There's Me And There's You', The Invisible
The Invisible (band)
The Invisible are an indie rock/post-rock band based in and originating from London, and fronted by the singer and guitarist Dave Okumu, a long-time member of the London jazz scene. The band formed as Dave Okumu's solo project but quickly developed into a full fledged band with friends Tom Herbert ...

's debut album, Setsubun Bean Unit, and Micachu
Micachu
Mica Levi, known by her stage name Micachu , is an English singer, songwriter, composer, and producer. She is classically trained and is best known for experimental music in a variety of genres.-Biography:...

's debut named 'Jewellery
Jewellery (album)
Jewellery is an album by Micachu that was released on March 9, 2009, on a joint venture between Rough Trade Records and Accidental Records...

'.

2010/2011 sees the release of a trilogy concept album by Herbert, beginning with 'One One', followed by 'One Club' and 'One Pig'.

Additional projects

Matthew Herbert has produced remixes for numerous artists, including Moloko
Moloko
Moloko were an Anglo-Irish electronic/pop duo consisting of Róisín Murphy from Wicklow, Ireland and Mark Brydon, from Sunderland, England.- Origin of band name :...

, Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone, Grand Officer OMRI, , is an Italian composer and conductor, who wrote music to more than 500 motion pictures and television series, in a career lasting over 50 years. His scores have been included in over 20 award-winning films as well as several symphonic and choral pieces...

, Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones
Quincy Delightt Jones, Jr. is an American record producer and musician. A conductor, musical arranger, film composer, television producer, and trumpeter. His career spans five decades in the entertainment industry and a record 79 Grammy Award nominations, 27 Grammys, including a Grammy Legend...

, Björk
Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir , known as Björk , is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres, such as rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical and folk...

, R.E.M., Perry Farrell
Perry Farrell
Perry Farrell is the frontman for the alternative rock band Jane's Addiction. Farrell created the touring festival Lollapalooza as a farewell tour for Jane's Addiction in 1991; it has since evolved into an annual destination festival. Farrell continues to produce Lollapalooza with partners William...

, Serge Gainsbourg
Serge Gainsbourg
Serge Gainsbourg, born Lucien Ginsburg was a French singer-songwriter, actor and director. Gainsbourg's extremely varied musical style and individuality make him difficult to categorize...

, Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

, John Cale
John Cale
John Davies Cale, OBE is a Welsh musician, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground....

, The Avalanches
The Avalanches
The Avalanches are an Australian electronic music group formed in 1997 with mainstays Robbie Chater on keyboards, Tony Diblasi on keyboards, bass and backing vocals, and Darren Seltmann on vocals and keyboards. They are known for their live DJ sets and their debut album Since I Left You , which was...

 and Cornelius
Cornelius (musician)
Cornelius is a Japanese recording artist and producer.-Career:Oyamada's first claim to fame was as a member of the pop duo Flipper's Guitar, one of the key groups of the Tokyo Shibuya-kei scene...

. He programmed three tracks on Björk
Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir , known as Björk , is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres, such as rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical and folk...

's Vespertine
Vespertine
Vespertine, is the fifth studio album by the Icelandic recording artist Björk, released on 27 August 2001. On this album, Björk creates a quiet, introverted world of microbeats and personal lyrics...

, and produced The Invisible
The Invisible (band)
The Invisible are an indie rock/post-rock band based in and originating from London, and fronted by the singer and guitarist Dave Okumu, a long-time member of the London jazz scene. The band formed as Dave Okumu's solo project but quickly developed into a full fledged band with friends Tom Herbert ...

's debut album, along with Moloko singer Róisín Murphy
Róisín Murphy
Róisín Marie Murphy is an Irish singer-songwriter and record producer, known for her electronic style.Murphy first came to note as part of the electronic music duo Moloko. Her partner in the band was then-boyfriend Mark Brydon. After the two ended their romantic relationship, Murphy released her...

's album
Ruby Blue'. He has also produced albums for Micachu
Micachu
Mica Levi, known by her stage name Micachu , is an English singer, songwriter, composer, and producer. She is classically trained and is best known for experimental music in a variety of genres.-Biography:...

, Merz
Merz
Merz is a German surname and may refer to:* Aaron Merz , American football player* Alfred Merz , Austrian-German oceanologist* Charles Hesterman Merz , Pioneer of the National Grid UK...

 and Finn Peters
Finn Peters
Finn Peters is a flautist and saxophonist. He studied music at Durham University and took the postgraduate jazz course at Guildhall School of Music...



He has contributed music to several films, including Human Traffic
Human Traffic
Human Traffic is a British independent film written and directed by Welsh filmmaker Justin Kerrigan. The film explores themes of coming of age, drug and club cultures, as well as relationships. It includes scenes provoking social commentary and the use of archive footage to provide political...

and Dogme 95
Dogme 95
Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vow of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and...

 director Kristian Levring
Kristian Levring
Kristian Levring is a Danish director born in 1957. He was the fourth signatory of Dogme95 movement in cinema.-Biography:He lived eight years in France. He graduated in editing at the National Film School of Denmark and has edited a large number of documentaries and feature films besides directing...

's The Intended, Agathe Clery, Le Defi, HBO's A Number, as well as UK television, theatrical and concert dance
Concert dance
Concert dance is dance performed for an audience. It is frequently performed in a theatre setting, though this is not a requirement, and it is usually choreographed and performed to set music.By contrast, social dance and participation dance may be performed without an audience and, typically, these...

 productions.

Herbert also wrote music for the YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 documentary film Life in a Day
Life in a Day (YouTube)
Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010.The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds...

along with prominent composer Harry Gregson-Williams
Harry Gregson-Williams
Harry Gregson-Williams is a prolific British composer, orchestrator, conductor, and music producer. He is best known for his film scores, of which he has composed over sixty using electronic music and orchestral pieces...

.

In 2011 he is relaunching the museum of sound at www.museumofsound.com

As Herbert

  • 100 lbs (1996)
  • Parts One Two and Three (1996)
  • Parts Remixed (1996)
  • Around the House
    Around the House
    Around the House is a 1998 album by electronica musician Herbert. It was named the 96th greatest album of the 1990s by Pitchfork Media.-Track listing:...

    (1998)
  • Bodily Functions
    Bodily Functions
    Bodily Functions is a 2001 album released by electronic musician Herbert. It was released by !K7 Records in 2001 to positive critical reception.- Reception :...

    (2001)
  • Secondhand Sounds: Herbert Remixes (2002)
  • Scale
    Scale (album)
    Scale is an album by Matthew Herbert, released May 29, 2006. According to the liner notes 613 objects were used to create the album. These include traditional instruments such as violins and guitars and other objects such as breakfast cereal, gas pumps and coffins.On MSNBC's website Year In Review,...

    (2006)

As Matthew Herbert

  • Letsallmakemistakes (Globus Mix Vol. 5) (1995)
  • Plat du Jour (2005)
  • Score (2006)
  • Recomposed: Mahler symphony X (2010)
  • One One (2010)
  • One Club (2009)
  • One Pig (2011)

As Doctor Rockit

  • The Music of Sound (1996)
  • Indoor Fireworks (2000)
  • Veselka
    Veselka
    Veselka is a 24-hour restaurant in New York City’s East Village. It was established in 1954 by post-World War II Ukrainian refugees Wolodymyr and Olha Darmochawal and is one of the last of the many Slavic restaurants that once proliferated the neighborhood. A cookbook, published in October, 2009 by...

    's Diner
    (2003)
  • The Unnecessary History of Doctor Rockit (2004)

As The Matthew Herbert Big Band

  • Goodbye Swingtime
    Goodbye Swingtime
    Goodbye Swingtime is the first album by The Matthew Herbert Big Band, released in May 2003. The whole album deals with the media in general. The albums consinsts of three instrumental tracks which introduce into the album, divides the album into to parts and end the album...

     (2003)
  • There's Me and There's You
    There's Me and There's You
    There's Me And There's You is the second album by The Matthew Herbert Big Band, released in October 2008. The whole album deals with the abuse of power...

     (2008)

As Radio Boy

  • Wishmountain Is Dead, Long Live Radio Boy (1997)
  • The Mechanics of Destruction (2001)

External links

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