Matthew Herbert is an award-winning composer, artist, producer and writer whose range of innovative works extends from more than 30 albums (including the much-celebrated Bodily Functions) to scores for Oscar-winning films (A Fantastic Woman) as well as music for the National Theatre, Broadway, TV series (Noughts and Crosses BBC), games (Lego) and radio. He has performed solo, as a DJ and with various musicians including his own 21 piece big band and 100 piece choir all round the world from the Sydney opera house, to the Hollywood Bowl and created installations, plays and opera.
He has remixed iconic artists such as Quincy Jones, Ennio Morricone, Serge Gainsbourg and Mahler and been a long time collaborator of Bjork’s. He has had work commissioned by the Royal Opera House, the BBC and Deutsche Gramophon amongst many others but he is best known for working with sound, turning ordinary or so-called found sound in to electronic music. His most celebrated work ONE PIG followed the life of a pig from birth to plate and beyond. His debut book The Music published by Unbound in 2018 and he is the creative director of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
In 2016 Matthew began work on his third Big Band album, his most ambitious and collaborative project to date. Made with over 1000 musicians and singers from across the EU, The State Between Us began as a project responding to the triggering of Article 50 and the dramatic shift in the national story that began in June 2016. Over the course of the next two years – against the backdrop of a relentlessly challenging news cycle and via large-scale recording sessions in Rome, Berlin, Leipzig, Madrid and London Matthew has created a work on an epic scale, and entirely independently.
The State Between Us is an album that contemplates what it means to be British in 2019. Its sixteen tracks reflect a journey on foot across Great Britain (and beyond) imagined in melodies carefully woven with site-specific recordings. World War II planes in flight rub against a Ford Fiesta being broken down into its component parts; the loneliness of a cross-channel swimmer follows a single cyclist riding around Chequers (before being held by Special Branch). Here, the evocative sounds of empty harbours, and factories being demolished, of ancient trees and the calls of soon to be extinct animals ebb and flow through music that poses one hugely significant question – Where’s Home? Set against the rise of the far right rhetoric and violence in the UK and abroad The State Between Us is a demonstration, not just in content, but also in how it was put together, of the value of music and the imagination in standing up for tolerance, compassion, difference.
