by SCOTT C

Matthew Herbert has been taking the music-making process to new extremes since 2000, when he instituted his Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (PCCOM), a guide for his own work that, among other things, forbids the use of drum machines and keyboard presets. Sampling the sounds of daily life to construct moving arrangements with depth and feeling have taken his passion right up to his latest release, Scale. The Mirror reached Herbert in Japan.

Mirror: The process of recording the sounds of objects and things in their natural environment before incorporating them into a record seems like an undertaking. Does being a purist take time?

Herbert: It speeds things up. Instead of having to think of traditional musical ways to describe the amazing engineering involved in a U.K.-made tornado shell used in Iraq, I can use the real thing. Instead of writing a piece about Tony Blair, I can use the real thing. It’s less about purism, more about consistency, structural integrity.

M: Where much of the music that we listen to can be boiled down to the chorus, we can always count on you to connect your work to a much bigger thought process and scope. What is the reasoning behind Scale, and what are you trying to communicate with this latest collection of songs?

H: As with most things I do, I’m trying to communicate what it’s like to be alive today, from my perspective of course. I live in an excessive and luxurious world, designed to over-consume, designed to prioritize violence over dialogue, to prioritize profit over people, and to encourage the pursuit of self-fulfillment at the expense of the community. Furthermore, this flawed lifestyle is subsidized by the rest of the world, both in terms of earthly resources and in human life. It’s pretty grim right now. It appears, though, when you switch on the TV, that everything is okay. The album is about this discrepancy and about the distance between our actions and the consequences.

M: I was happy to see that [laptop crooner] Jamie Liddell contributed a remix for “Moving Like a Train”—I always enjoy the work you two do together. How would you describe the connection that you have with him?

H: A friendship, firstly. He inspires me to think about how I can use technology in a more spontaneous way, and hopefully I help him to consider the harmonic aspects of his work in a more detailed way.

M: I’m curious to know what you look for in a vocal that will eventually make up part of a track, and how human voices work into your manifesto, the PCCOM.

H: As with all other sounds, you must listen. There’s no point trying to force a soft vocal to sound rougher in the same way that there’s no point trying to get a chair to sound like a violin. It’s about attempting to accurately amplify the original source and intention. In this way, the rules of PCCOM simply support that.

M: I know you work on multiple projects at once, so what’s the next musical direction?

H: This winter, I’m working on a film, a theatre piece, another album and live shows. It’s hard to say what my next musical direction may be. It’s tempting to do another big band album now that I’ve learned so much from touring.

At Club Soda tonight, Thursday, Aug. 24, 9 p.m., $22.50

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