In The Studio With | Matthew Herbert

Matthew Herbert chats to Danny Turner about his extraordinary new album, The Horse, which uses skeletal bones as source material

Long considered one of the most inventive producers of his generation, Matthew Herbert’s restless fascination with sampling has created some starkly original releases in recent years. Since starting to score for film in the late ’90s, the composer has spent much time creating ingenious rhythms from various body parts, raising complex questions regarding consumerism and our relationship with the animal kingdom.

With his latest album, The Horse, Herbert takes another remarkable leap. Expanding an idea that surfaced while writing a horror film score, he decided to purchase a full-size horse skeleton and use various parts as source material for sonic reanimation. Working with instrument makers, the London Contemporary Orchestra and numerous world-leading soloists, The Horse is perhaps Herbert’s most inexplicable yet compelling experiment to date.

Do you tend to work on projects simultaneously, or does each one require your total attention?

“It’s a combination of wanting to and having to, but I quite like working on projects simultaneously. Part of that is due to the horrific economics of making a living in the music industry as an independent artist and the need to subsidise work by doing other work. Film and TV schedules always go over or move forward, but the third aspect is that I really like how projects inform each other. When I started The Horse it took me a while to realise that it’s about trying to bring a horse back to life through music. Basically, I was talking to a dramaturg called Kirsty Housley and movement director Imogen Knight about how to construct a narrative and imagery around the skeleton of an unknown horse when I got a call from a production company about working on an English horror film about a couple who move back to the countryside when tragedy strikes after a male figure digs up a skeleton of a hare that starts growing muscles and comes back to life. I’d bought some hare bones from Ukraine to make the score and suddenly looked around my studio and found that it was full of skeletons that I was trying to reanimate [laughs].”

Did you see this as the celebration of the horse in particular, or could it have been any animal?

“It could have been any animal because when it started I was looking for a diplodocus or a bison on eBay – whatever was the biggest skeleton I could find. The horse ended up being the largest, but I still bought it without really knowing why. I knew I wanted to make a record out of a skeleton, but hadn’t begun to think about everything else that the album would become. The more I noticed or thought about horses, they seemed to appear absolutely everywhere. After some research I realised that we wouldn’t have had the industrial revolution without them because we relied on horses to dig coal from the ground, haul it to the surface, carry people around and transform our economy. Horse racing is also the second biggest sport after football and subsidised by the government to the tune of £100m per year, so from sport and leisure to industry, the horse is woven through our culture. Ironically, when I was making the record a metal detectorist was interested in finding out what was on our land and dug up a little bronze age offering to the horse gods that’s somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 years old. That’s the image on the cover of the album.”