”The whole would is a keyboard” – Matthew Herbert

Matthew Herbert

Today we were blessed with the presence of Matthew Herbert for a few hours, heres what he had to say.

”I didn’t enjoy music until i started playing with other musicians.”

”When you play in an orchestra if you play 1 wrong note its seen as bad and i never understood that.”

”Things sound amazing when you process them and listen to them differently.”

”Everything bad makes a sound too.”

“I was bored of recording nice things so i related my politics to my music.”

Something he is against is Corporate Globalisation so he made a series of songs destroying the things he did not like for example, starbucks, mcdonalds and gap products.

Another endeavor of his was playing on the media making us health crazy with things such as ‘eat an apple a day’ so he got 365 people in one room to eat an apple and record it. It was not as impressive as he had first imagined as it was not as loud as it was for those eating the apple so every show he played he would record people eating apples so that he ended up with a track featuring 10,000 people eating a apple.

‘We don’t normally step back and listen to sounds from a distance.’

Life in a Day

Life in a Day is a film made up of youtube submissions. The soundtrack which was composed by Matthew Herbert was also made up of sounds submitted by people. He asked people to record their favourite sounds, singing 1 note and a clap. He then put those sounds together. He found that the sounds that make people happy were actually quite full on to listen to all together.

He has just released his latest album ‘One Pig’ which was seen as very controversial. People were even disgusted just by the idea of the album and some said he was ‘turning pigs dying into entertainment.’ However this is not what Herbert was trying to do he was merely documenting this pigs life he did not interfere in the pigs life in anyway or change it from how it would have been had he not been there.

He was not allowed to record the death of the pig however as the law in the UK states that the public are not aloud to witness the slaughtering of an animal in a government run environment. This however still produced an outcome for Herbert as it helped to highlight his political views, that it seems perverse that we are not aloud to see the meat we eat be killed.

”Dont dilute what you believe in for money”

He was offered a 2 million pound contract with a Shampoo company to use one of his songs on their advert however this would have taken away from the meaning of the song itself and not have agreed with Herberts views. And may have meant that in the future his work may not gain the same respect as it does now, or at least not in the same way. Sometimes no matter how much money it is, its just isn’t worth it.

”We need to evolve the way we listen”

I was particularly interested in how Matthew Herbert uses his music as a way to get across his political views. As a rather opinionated person myself i think that this is a great idea. Music can definitely be used as a way to communicate these views and get people to sit up and pay attention.

After the lecture i went up to Herbert and asked him his views on the whole ‘Occupy’ as it is something i am quite interested in myself. He said that he finds it interesting however it needs a way to go which as the moment it doesn’t seem to have. We both agreed that perhaps music and in fact the Arts could be that way forward.

Maybe this is how we can evolve our listening by using music to propel social movements? Rather then viewing music as merely entertainment or pretty wallpaper we could view it as a means of helping a revolution?

“The voice of none is stronger than the voice of one” – Anonymous (Hacker group)

Appropriation & Approximation:

Vectors & Context

Taking ownership

Appropriation – The use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work. Taking a image & changing its meaning.

Approximation – Mimicking a product or artefact using incomplete information which prevents the creation of an exact replica.

Chiptunes – 1980’s

To show people how technically advanced you were and that you were in control of the computer, the computer was not in control of you.

Modernism – 30’s-50’s – Strived for something new. Wanted to change Art and do something different but this annoyed people.

Post Modernism – 50’s-90’s – Being aware of the things going on around you.

Alter – modernism – Now – Emphasis’s its uniqueness. Appeals to a certain age group who will understand certain references.

Manet

Modernist

Young Flautist – 1866

Believed Art looked ‘too’ real, like a billboard.

Piet Mondrian

Based his Art on the roads of New York.

New way of producing imagery.

Dead Kennedys

Punk

• Adopted swastica

• Trying to make a statement

• Contentious

Normative – Regarded as ‘standard’. However this saw the reaction of going against the norm and disrupting the flow. Trying to be different. Much like punk.

Hegemony – Domination of 1 power e.g. religion, class, politics. Again punk was very anti Hegemony.

Vectors and Vectorialists

Steers us to the ‘norm’. Steers us towards a particular way of thinking e.g The media shows us tall skinny tanned people and tell us this is beautiful and the more we see it the more we believe it.

The Situationist International

Coined the term Detournement which is the overturning of order and over throws conventions to create new meanings from old works, ‘remixes’

“there is no Situationist art, only Situationist uses of art.”

By changing 1 or 2 variables of a subject, it changes the meaning of said subject.

This again brings back the topic i discussed in earlier post: Retail and Distribution that as human beings we learn by copying for example language, and that by sharing, copying and remixing things it increase’s our creative juices and the more creative we feel the more creative we will be and the more creative we are the more things we will create and the more thing we create the more things we can remix!

“The brain contributes to consciousness but does not determine it” – Robert Pepperell

The Post Human Condition

Is there a distinction between our mind and body, mental and physical states and body and the environment?

“Everything owes it’s existence to sound”

– Hans Jenny

“We are deeply integrated into our human environment” – Hans Jenny

“There is no fixed state of a living human” – Robert Pepperell

“The brain contributes to consciousness but does not determine it” – Pepperall

There is a blur between us and the objects that surround us.

Gaia – James Lovelock

“We do indeed belong here. The earth is more than just a home, it’s a living system and we are part of it.” – Lovelock

 Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul. As time passed this warm relationship faded and was replaced by the frigidity of the schoolmen. The life sciences, no longer concerned with life, fell to classifying dead things and even to vivisection. Ge was stolen from theology to become no more the root from which the disciplines of geography and geology were named. Now at last there are signs of a change. Science becomes holistic again and rediscovers soul, and theology, moved by ecumenical forces, begins to realise that Gaia is not to be subdivided for academic convenience and that Ge is much more than just a prefix.

– http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock/what_is_Gaia.html

 

Homeostasis –

The tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, esp. as maintained by physiological processes.

Our bodys are constantly responding to the things going on around us. We generate things for our bodies to respond too.

By making music we are rearranging the things around us.

Everything effects everything.

Reflexivity – Katherine Hayles

Cause and Effect.

“It is a mistake to seperate the thing that thinks and the thing that is thought about” – Pepperell P.33

Interrupting the flow –

The more that we have to think about something to understand it the more we engage and therefor the more creative we are.

“Composition functions at the interception between noise and structure”

‎’Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.’ – Steve Jobs

Think what ever you will of the man however the speech he made in 2005 at a graduation ceremony is extremely beautiful and love him or hate him should be read by anyone and everyone as a bit of perspective on life as a whole.

‎’Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.’