Emmerald: I just think it's fascinating the way you make music. In
creating this musical language that relates specifically to your
subject matter, do you find that it takes you longer to finish a song?
Herbert: No, it's much easier actually. Like imagine trying to tell
a story about the conditions for modern boiler chickens using a
synthesizer and a drum machine. It's much easier just to call up a
chicken farmer and go in with a microphone and record chickens. The
process is limiting, which is one reason why it's quicker. On Scale, I
wanted to do a song about death. I wanted to record twelve coffins.
So we called round to various funeral parlors and coffin manufacturers
and almost all of them said no. Finally, we found someone that said
yes. We went there, recorded the sounds, and then once we had the
sounds, we were up and going with it. It's very quick. Whereas if
you're using a 909 drum machine, like, I don't know, twenty-five
thousand other people in the world, then it's going to be a lot harder
to sound original. I don't sound like anything else. From the very
beginning I sounded like myself and as musicians I think that's what
we strive to be, as artists to be original and, you know, it's just a
much easier way to be original and it's just much quicker as well.
Emmerald: What was your political or social focal point, if any, for Scale?
Herbert: This album is a little more abstract, I'm coming at it
from several different directions, but essentially the main focus for
this album is the distance between us and the things that surround us.
So for example, we don't make our clothes. We don't know where the
cotton's grown or how it's put together. We go in to a restaurant and
don't know where the food's come from. If you're eating an apple now,
well, it's not apple season so those apples would have come from, in
England I mean some apples will come from New Zealand or California or
something. Another example is that we are very distant from foreign
policy. For example, Britain and America were very keen to start an
illegal war in Iraq. The distance between us in Britain and those in
Iraq is very high. There's no consequences for us of that war other
than maybe it allows us access. It provides us more geopolitical
power on the world stage and maybe our arms industry gets a big boost.
But there's a big distance between our actions and our consequences,
and I think this is a very dangerous position for a society to be in.
Another example, in England we don't make anything anymore. With our
car industry, we do make some cars, but we make them for Toyota and
the British car companies are bought by German companies. And that is
just a huge distance between us. What I'm trying to do is close some
of those distances in my own life outside of the music as well as
within the music. At the same time, I want to explore those
distances.
Emmerald: Do you think that when people hear your music, they get
what you are trying to do, and how much does it matter whether or not
they do?
Herbert: Like how does that manifest itself as actual political
change or something like that?
Emmerald: Yes, and if that's even the goal.
Herbert: Yes, it is a goal. My ambition with this record, as it is
with all my other records, is to have a meaningful impact on one
person. I did an album called Mechanics of Destruction where I took
objects of increasingly globalized world and destroyed them. I'm
annoyed that everywhere I go in the world there's McDonalds and
Starbucks and all these identical things. I'm really annoyed by that.
And I know that one person left their job at Disney after seeing a
show from that album. So for me that was like a job well done. I was
pleased with that. Through my last record, Plat du Jour, I hope I
changed somebody's diet without meeting them. There's always a
turning point I find in someone's life when they look at the backs of
their jeans and see where they were made or they pick up their
computer and see where it was made or, look at the bottom on their
sneakers and see they were made in Vietnam. I'm hoping to get people
to question their environments and also to help things, rather than to
add my voice--my sort of chorus of disapproval --about how capitalism
works, how exploitive it is and how the rich are getting very, very,
very rich and the poor are obviously getting poorer at the same time.
