by RAF KATIGBAK

"If you think about it, all music is the organization of sound," Matthew Herbert says from his London, England, studio. "A drum is only a bit of wood, hitting a bit of skin stretched over a bit of wood. It's just different types of things hitting different types of things, so in my mind, a drawer closing has never had less of a value than a violin."

While "everything is music" may be a familiar mantra in the musique concrète classrooms of avant-garde theorists, for nearly a decade Herbert has taken it to one of the most unlikely of places - the dancefloor. Since 1996, under various monikers including Wishmountain, Dr. Rockit and Radio Boy, he's released top-notch experimental deep house and techno, a lot of which uses everyday objects like pepper grinders and chip bags as rhythm sources.

At the beginning of 2000, however, disillusioned with the global state of affairs, Hebert's light and playful sound became infused with political intent. He was, in a word, pissed - a sentiment that culminated in his unforgettable 2002 Mutek performance as Radio Boy, where his anti-corporate stance ended up in torn-up McDonald's wrappers and Starbucks cups, and an insanely mind-blown dancefloor.

"I made a bit of a breakthrough with Radio Boy because I realized everything I hated made a noise, so instead of having a to write a song going, ‘Oh, doesn't it suck having Starbucks on every corner,' I could actually go into Starbucks, grab a load of that shit stuff, pour it down the sink and make a track out of it.

Now, driven by the politics of food manufacturing and distribution, Herbert's shed his monikers (just call him Matthew Herbert), is finishing a new album (Plat du Jour, due out in the summer) and is ready for a whole new live show.

"There are these massive differences between what we consume and where it originated. If you go into a restaurant, you may think what you ate was a local meal, but the food could have travelled 5,000 miles. One of the tracks is the life of a modern, industrialized chicken. I take sounds from a commercial hatchery to a place with 30,000 chickens to a guy killing a chicken at a farmers' market."

So can Montreal expect some heavy-metal house, complete with onstage chicken-head-biting à la Ozzy Osbourne? "Well, we wanted to have someone on stage plucking and cooking a chicken, but we had a lot of complaints even before we did it. We will, however, have a chef on stage making chicken soup."

With Egg at Le Spectrum on Friday, Feb. 25, 8 p.m., $33.50, and with Ricardo Villalobos and more at Darling Foundry on Saturday, Feb. 26, 9 p.m. to 9 a.m., $30

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