Tag Archives: Bjork

Matthew Herbert may not look like the kind of guy you’d wanna encounter walking through the woods or in an alleyway at night. But don’t let that fool you — the music’s the thing, and sonically, the somewhat balding, laid-back sounding music producer comes across as cheerful, benevolent, even blatantly and downright romantic. He’s somewhat of a schizophrenic beast as well, having honed his sound through years of McGuyver-like behavior involving normal household objects and using them as musical instruments. He’s come a long way from his youth, which consisted largely of using aerosol cans and aspirin bottles as beatmakers — only to discover, with the advent of synths and workstations, that there was a whole new way to slather his bevy of world-music sounds onto a sonic canvas. A lot of the magic here is just his plain strange concoction of beats and noises and cranks and grinds, that sound as though they came from anywhere to a factory to a toaster oven to some noisy industrial town somewhere in England. At one moment you’d swear you were in a gondolier being rowed through the canals of Venice, only to be whisked away to a random scene straight out of Boogie Nights. Whatever it may be, it’s working quite well for him: he’s been in charge of recording everyone from Bjork to rising jazz giant Dani Siciliano, and is already a critical darling, having earned several accolades from the likes of Pitchfork and Entertainment Weekly. Widely considered a pioneer of microhouse, Matthew Herbert has paid his dues and then some. All right already — get a listen of the man’s eclectic genius right now on Red Bull Music Academy Radio, where Herbert also provides a great deal of insight as to the sounds and ideas that inspired him.