Emmerald: As far as your live shows in promoting Scale, will you use
live instrumentation? How do you recreate your sound in a live
environment?
Herbert: I think one thing that I'm quite conscious of is not trying
to recreate the sound of the record. In a way I feel like it's a
covers band. I sort of take what we have, let the 2-piece horn
section pick out the sort of most important harmonic lines or melodic
lines. We have a three-piece rhythm section and me. The ambition is
to be an electronic band; that's the act. We want to play acoustic
electronic music live altogether without the use of computers and
things like that. We're only three gigs into it at the moment, so
you'll have to ask me whether it's going to work or not in six months.
Emmerald: Shifting gears a bit, Plat du Jour was your album just
prior to Scale. I'm personally quite interested in the development of
food production methods, food quality and standards, and how food
processing affects our nutrition and all. I wanted to ask you about
the Plat du Jour project and how you approached it.
Herbert: It was quite a long process really. What I wanted to do
was create a sort of academic document. I worked with a researcher
from the British Library for two years in an attempt to legitimize
some of my claims. Not even legitimize really, I was looking for
stories that I would then expand. I didn't want to just regurgitate
things that I'd read. I approached these authors seeking direction
and insight into the information that was out there. Basically, I
was trying to make instrumental protest music using every conceivable
tool at my disposal. For example, there was a track about branded
waters and how I think it's a fad and pretty disgraceful that we have
branded waters. What's wrong with the water coming out of our taps?
That track was five minutes and thirty seconds long because there was
fifty-three percent of sanitation cover in Bangladesh and the BPM was
a hundred and twenty-two because there were a hundred and twenty-two
million people in India without access to a toilet. So there's a
numerical or academic approach to how it was constructed. With the
track about coffee, the most compelling story that emerged from the
coffee research was the fact that Vietnam had become the second
biggest producer of coffee in the world in the last twenty years, and
that was because it was encouraged by the IMF to do so. And one of
the reasons Vietnam grew coffee because it was heavily defoliated
during the Vietnam War by Agent Orange. When the Americans dropped
Agent Orange and various herbicides on their country, that defoliated
it. One of the few things that grows well in that environment is the
hardy and robust coffee bean. And what's happened is the Vietnamese
robust bean has flooded the world coffee markets, lowering the price
of coffee globally. So basically when you're drinking a cup of
coffee, you're drinking a story about the Vietnam War, about slavery,
you know- coffee is a product of slavery. So what for you might be a
disposable, repetitive or familiar experience, is actually buying
into--not to make it too heavy, but you're buying into historic
misery. We used coffee and coffee-related things to make the music.
We took sixty Vietnamese coffee beans into an empty can of Round-Up.
Round-Up is like a domesticated version of Agent Orange; it's the same
thing but it's a little less scary. And I had a drummer using a drum
kit that we built entirely out of Nescafe cans. We tried to use every
possibility you have of telling these stories, through sound.
Emmerald: Wow, yeah, well those are stories that definitely need to
be told. I am constantly astounded at how little people seem to think
about what we eat and what is the real story behind the food we
consume.
Well, one last question for you; I ran across a quote where you said
that a lot of today's house music is lazy. That struck me because I
agree. It's generally gotten quite dull and unimaginative. Are there
other electronic music styles that you find innovative?
Herbert: You know, it's funny that the modern music studio has more
freedoms and more possibilities than musicians have ever had in the
past, and yet it's the most conservative than it's ever been. In
spite of that, there's always good music coming out. Matmos out of
San Francisco, for example, have produced a very compelling and rich
album of sonic portraits of icons of all the people that are important
to them. House music moves incredibly slowly. But there's still
bits of it in France, for example, and Berlin that I think that are
producing some good things. I think the question is to look even
harder.