Experimental innovator Matthew Herbert's new album, The End of Silence, features a fascinating concept, with the entire thing based on a five-second sound sample recorded by photographer Sebastian Meyer during a bombing in Libya in 2011. It's out on June 24 through Accidental, and you can get a taste of it by streaming an excerpt from "Part Two."
The sounds from the recording provide the foundation for the piece's harmony, percussion and more, with Herbert and his band performing without programming and metronomes. It was recorded over three days in a barn near Hay-on-Wye, Wales, with the players improvising and then stitching together the parts. This clip from "Part Two" is just part of the 50-minutes-plus composition.
Herbert said in a statement, "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."
Hear the extract from "Part Two" below.
The sounds from the recording provide the foundation for the piece's harmony, percussion and more, with Herbert and his band performing without programming and metronomes. It was recorded over three days in a barn near Hay-on-Wye, Wales, with the players improvising and then stitching together the parts. This clip from "Part Two" is just part of the 50-minutes-plus composition.
Herbert said in a statement, "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."
Hear the extract from "Part Two" below.
