Pigs, production and pianos - an interview with Matthew Herbert
Matthew Herbert is one of the most brilliant minds in modern music, a man who has sampled a pig from birth to plate; formed a Brexit Big Band; and headed up the BBC’s legendary Radiophonic Workshop.
All that and he has still found time to create some of the most dazzlingy beautiful records in house music, including the classic Bodily Functions and Clay, with Momoko Gill, which was a highlight of last year.
I got the chance to speak to him this week, ahead of a Barcelona DJ gig I was sadly unable to attend. And he was fascinating: we talked about everything from making a record from the sun to the idea of beauty in music, plus he gave a surprisingly in-depth answer to which of his songs he would play to my mum.
The interview went out on the Line Noise podcast. But I know a lot of people prefer text, so here you have the interview, lightly edited.
I’ve produced a short version for this Wednesday email - not sure how many of you want 6k words in your inbox - and subscribers will get the full thing on Friday.
Ben Cardew: I wanted to start with Clay which is a beautiful album released last year. Obviously, a lot of your music is very conceptual - One Pig, for example - but Clay isn't, right? How did Clay come about?
Matthew Herbert: I think what tends to be the pattern of the way I write music is that I tend to do quite big production songs that take a lot of time, effort, research, funds and brainpower, and then I make a smaller one afterwards.
So, I just made a record called The Horse, which was made out of a horse skeleton and it was a sort of attempt to bring a horse back to life through music. And it was the big show. And it was a lot of puzzling things about what to do with horse pelvises and what it was like to be the very first musicians and what melody would have sounded like 55,000 years ago and things like that. And then I need to breathe out after making a project like that, you know? So I just go into the studio and just make music for pleasure and for fun.
While making The Horse record, I met Momoko [Gill], and she played drums on the live show. I liked what she did; she did an incredible remix of The Horse record for me, quite spontaneously, that I really love. So, I asked her to sing on some tracks - I was starting a new house record just for fun. And again, she did something kind of brilliant. And so, instead of it being her singing on my records, it became 50/50 and she ended up co-producing with me. Everything is a joint project. I love making records about odd things in unusual ways. But it's really nice to just go back and just write for pleasure sometimes.
Ben Cardew: When you look back at everything you've done, is there a very different place in your brain for the more conceptual things and the, I guess, "less conceptual" things - if that's a way of putting it - or do you just see them all as part of your work?
Matthew Herbert: No one's asked me that before. I'll make up an answer on the spot, I think.
30 years ago, pretty much today, I released three records at the same time. It's like the beginning of my - I don't like the word "career," but you know - that way of thinking about things. So, I released three records: one as Herbert, which was like a house record called Part One; then I released a Doctor Rockit record; and I released a Wish Mountain record.
Wish Mountain was made with a broken radio and some broken bits of objects and things like that. Doctor Rockit was like an electro record, and then the Herbert was a house thing. And so, from the very beginning, I've always done different things. They're under different names and different record labels and things. And I kind of began like I always wanted to: to have the freedom to do whatever I wanted musically and say whatever I wanted. So, I guess all that's happened is that each of those things has kind of expanded outwards.
Wish Mountain was made with these objects and then The Horse skeleton is just a very big collection of objects. My next record is made with the sun, so that's a giant star. So it’s getting bigger. The objects are getting bigger and bigger. And then the song stuff, the house stuff, ends up in places like Clay. It's trying to give myself freedom to do whatever I want, really. And hope people want to listen to some of it.
Ben Cardew: Your next record is made with the sun?
Matthew Herbert: Yeah, it's kind of a collaboration with the sun. I'm trying to turn the whole planet into an instrument, basically, and create collaborations that go right across the world. It will start at sunrise. But of course, you're like, "Well, which sunrise?" And you know, Greenwich Mean Time is quite colonial - to think that time starts in Greenwich, in London. So you think, well, it should just follow the sunrise. The sun's always rising.
So then it will go to Chile and then it will go to New Zealand and then it will go to Italy or wherever - obviously not in that order. I was just thinking about all the sounds where the sun seems to be in silence but actually it's creating all sorts of noises on the Earth. It's melting glaciers, it's creating wildfires, it's creating skin cancers, it's melting ice creams and it's helping plants grow. So actually, the planet is a piece of music in that respect; it's creaking and rolling and struggling and all the rest of it. And the sun is the driver of that - the composer or the musician or the conductor or what have you.
Ben Cardew: Is this anyway related to - I was looking at an interview you did a few years ago - where you said you were trying to make a record out of a billion audio events?
Matthew Herbert: I'm still struggling with that. Again, it's not related, but I guess I've become increasingly interested in science as I've got older, trying to understand how the world is put together and the ridiculousness of the scale of things, just the amount of atoms and subatomic particles. The scale of things is so vast. And of course, billionaires and wealth - trying to think about these huge numbers.
So, I was trying to find a way to represent a billion in sound in an hour. So you can listen to what a billion would sound like. But you can't go fast enough; you have to have multiple streams and things. And then I was like, "Well, what would it be made out of?" And then this is a question that I would ask to you, and then to anybody listening: If you could multiply the sound of something by a billion, what would it be?
That's the question I haven't been able to answer for four years. Is it a baby being born? Is it Donald Trump speaking? Is it a car accident? Is it a nuclear explosion? Is it Middle C on a piano? If you're going to take something and multiply it by a billion, that's an extraordinary kind of adventure. It's an extraordinary kind of challenge and it's going to take a year or two years to try and do that. So the thing that's being multiplied has to be completely extraordinary somehow, or completely normal, or whatever it is. That's what I've been trying to work out.
Ben Cardew: Can I just say, having been present when a baby was born - beautiful though it is - multiplied by a billion...
Matthew Herbert: A bit extreme! I've got my kid’s first noise I recorded when he was born but then it's like, "Why him? What's so special about him just because he's my kid?" You know what I mean? There are plenty of other people being born.
Ben Cardew: Going back to Clay, it's very beautiful in many ways. And you've made a lot of beautiful music. How important for you is beauty in music? You've got lots of theoretically very interesting songs, you've got lots of songs that are about making people dance, you've got all kinds of different songs. But how important is it to make something beautiful?
Matthew Herbert: I think music is a lot of things and I think it's probably important to try and define the word a little bit, or try and create some separation in it. In the sense that, you know, I was in Manhattan on September 11th for a gig and thought I was going to die, like everybody else there. I recorded all the sounds that happened that day, including - I was on the roof of a building a few blocks down when one of the towers collapsed. And I've got that recorded: that tower collapsing.
So, making a piece of music out of that - turning that into music - is very, very different from making a piece of music at the piano, you know? It's a form of documentary and it comes with all sorts of ethical considerations. And so, to answer your question about the 9/11 piece: do you make that extremely violent? Or do you make it extremely beautiful? Or should you not be making it at all, because it's not appropriate to be listening to the deaths of thousands of people, and that's something horrific that shouldn't be turned into music?
That's very different from if you sat at the piano and played a beautiful piece of music. And I think for me, there's a question of: "Well, what's the effect of that music and how is it supposed to be heard?" For example, there's an awful lot of very, very bland, beautiful piano music out there that, in a way, is a kind of pacifying experience. And the world is going very wrong; it's turning towards fascism and an ecocide. We're in this existential place as a species; we're shopping ourselves to death, basically.
And so the idea of a beautiful piece of music where the status quo doesn't change is actually quite damaging, I think, to us. You know, it's like, "Don't worry, everything's going to be okay, everything's going to be okay," where actually we need radical action.
There's that thing. But there's also a political side of beauty as well. Which is when you can imagine, for example, living in somewhere like Iran or Gaza or Sudan - that actually to create a beautiful piece of music would mean something very different there. You're maybe creating a world that's safe, that's free from horrific violence and free from danger and genocide. This kind of sense that music can offer a sanctuary and can offer something transcendent, something spiritual and transcendent.
So, there are lots of ways to answer that question, I think. But I definitely feel like one has to be always interrogating, at a time of crisis like this, what the effect of this piece of music is and where it sits. Particularly when 150,000 pieces of music are going up on Spotify today. How do you listen to all of that? You're never going to; it would take you two years to listen to all of that if you listened continuously, and then tomorrow there'll be another 150,000. So we're just churning out music in vast quantities. It's not even clear that we need any more music at all. So we need to think why we're doing it and where it fits.
Ben Cardew: As I say, ultimately it's your music, so you have the right to do what you want with it. Going back to these things... if you had to explain to my mother - if you met her at a party and explained you were a musician - is there one song of your own stuff you'd point to and say, "Look, this is what I do"?
Matthew Herbert: What kind of party are we at?
Ben Cardew: Do you know what? My mum likes ceilidhs. She’s a big fan of ceilidhs. So she’s in a ceilidh swinging the Highland Fling, or whatever they're called. My mum likes to dance.
Matthew Herbert: Okay. It depends. If we've had a drink and it's late at night and you're in the middle of the dance floor, then I think maybe a track like The Audience from Bodily Functions. That is probably the closest I’ve written to a sort of "party" song.
But if we're shouting over the music and I'm talking about pigs and horses and things like that, there's a track called The Horse Has a Voice, which is a sort of demented, folky dance track. The horse has come back to life and it starts to get a bit demonic. It’s really quite got a bit of a ceilidh thing, but it's just made with horse bones and a tuba.
The pig record (One Pig) is quite helpful, I think, because everybody knows what a pig is. You don't have to do any conceptual explaining. It's just like: these are the noises it made. These are the noises it made when it was being eaten, after having been killed, and all the noises it made in between. So it's a very unique frame. Even though the music is challenging for people, you're going to get a sense of how music has changed - or changed for me, at least - which is that it’s now closer to documentary and not just nice noises.
Some listening
Do you ever feel the need to go and sit under a tree and feel the sun on your face? Well tough because you probably live in a city and a dog’s going to come and pee on you. But at least we have A Future Untold, the first fruits of Shabaka’s new LP Of The Earth, and a song that feels as refreshing, as genuinely cleansing to the mind, as a proper time out in nature.
A Future Untold is quite a confusing song - but very satisfying in its uncertainty. It’s not really jazz, not really ambient but has elements of both; the saxophone line - yes Shabaka is back on the saxophone - is relaxed and sparse but the backing is like Ultra New Age, eight different New Age record crammed into one dense and earthy production. And it is really very lovely.
Yu’s debut album Fragile was a work of cinematic intensity and beautiful song design; BloodyMuddy, a new stand-alone single, sees the South Korean producer go even further into the twisted, tangled and unsettling, an angrily mangled breakbeat combining with robotic squeals and a surprisingly tender melody. Shook!
Having lived through the Morcheeba wars, the trip hop revival isn’t something that appeals to me, so I was initially suspicious of Ultra Villain, the new album from Montreal-Berlin producer, DJ and vocalist Maara.
But the album is made with more than enough emotional honesty and dramatic heft - it was, apparently made during and after a period of personal rupture - to transcend worries about genre markers. The title track pairs an intimate, semi-spoken-word vocal that seems to speak from the centre of our tormented hearts with a heavy duty breakbeat and elevated melodic touches, creating the kind of song that felt like it had to be made.
A$AP Rocky (feat. Doechii) - Robbery
Don’t Be Dumb, A$AP Rocky’s new album, is delightfully all over the shop, from the cardigan indie pop rap of Punk Rocky to the folksily apocalyptic The End, possibly the only song in recorded music that will ever unite Jessica Pratt and will.i.am.
Best of all, though, is Robbery, with Doechii, a kind of cocktail jazz shuffle with lilting piano, finger snaps and a lone clarinet over which Rocky and Doechii make out like an enamoured swing duo. It’s not exactly a revelation that hip hop is an incredibly flexible beast but it’s a pleasure to be reminded of the fact in an album this joyously enjoyable.
Does it make any sense to extract one song from Maya Shenfeld’s endearingly creepy soundtrack to the Netflix documentary, Cover-Up? Perhaps not.
But Origins feels just about perfect nonetheless, one of those tiny pieces of music that wafts around like gas, drawing you into its beautiful chord change by a fascinatingly nebulous musical texture that appears to be made up out of nitrogen atoms, breath and violin traces. I can’t stop listening.
Oh and Maya will be a guest in the Line Noise podcast soon (ish.) Or as soon as we pull the collective finger out, anyway.
I mean, if someone asked you to soundtrack Charli xcx’s new A24 film, wouldn’t you immerse the chorus from Icona Pop’s eternal I Love It in orchestral and rather menacing synths that bring to mind the less melodic parts of Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange? I certainly would.
Things I’ve done
VISIONARIOS 1X07 - AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAN BALL
It’s not exactly music but I recently interviewed Alan Ball, the man behind possibly my favourite ever series: Six Feet Under, when he was in Barcelona for the Serielizados festival. I spoke to him about Six Feet Under and our difficult relationship with death, the perfect ending and binge streaming.
Facetime with an INDIE ICON: TANYA DONELLY (BELLY)
Holy hell, I spoke to an icon! Tanya Donelly! We spoke about commercial disappointment, major label pressure, the band’s split, recording at Compass Point, songwriting, touring with Pavement and so much more, including Belly’s forthcoming fourth album.
The playlists
It’s 2026 and that means A NEW PLAYLIST, cataloguing the best new music of this year: you can follow that on Apple Music here: The newest and bestest 2026.
And on Spotify here: the newest and bestest 2026.
The old classics remain in place, too:
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest.
Paid subscribers get bonus podcasts, you know.
